As soon as the premiere of "Franz" in Venice ended, some director friends madly praised it, saying it was the best of the year. The reaction of the film critics was rather calm, but the overall attitude was positive. Come to think of it, the French genius Ou Jong has always been hailed as the bad boy in the European film industry. The key lies in his aversion to grand topics and pretending to be difficult, and his disdain to follow the academic model of French film. His genius lies in taking pictures of seemingly trivial or personal things that are fascinating, and the final message to be conveyed is more effective than grand preaching. Not relying on the story itself, relying on the perfect control of the film language to win, naturally win the admiration of the director's colleagues. The film is adapted from the famous work "The Man I Killed" (Broken Lullaby, 1932) by Ernst Lubitsch, a German director exiled in the United States. It tells a story of atonement and love between the two wars. Franz (Anton von Lucke), a young German who loves art and French culture, died on the battlefield in World War I. His fiancée Anna (played by Paula Beer) is an orphan, who lived in his house for a long time before the war, and after Franz's death, she treated the two old people as daughters. But a mysterious Frenchman Adrian (Pierre Nine Pierre Niney's visit broke the peace of the town. He claimed to be a good friend Franz met in Paris before the war, but no one can confirm it. The "truth" gradually emerged. Adrian was the French soldier who killed Franz in the war. However, Adrian, who was as gentle and elegant as Franz and loves art, has captured Anna's heart. The original work in the 1930s is dominated by a male perspective, but Ou Rong, who has always been a friend of women, wants to retell the story from the perspective of the heroine, and has also adjusted the plot. For example, in the flashback shots depicting the fictitious relationship between Adrian and Franz, the relationship between the two is very ambiguous, and it also implies Adrian's resistance to the female body. So the film has an extra interpretation than the original, and after Adrian was Franz's lover in Paris before the war, but had to face each other on the battlefield. As for their love, it is unspeakable and can only be covered by death. Most of the film was shot in black and white, which is very inconsistent with Ou Rong's style of playing with colors. He explained that when shooting the scene, he found that the local summer scene looked very gaudy under the lens, and it did not reflect the kind of post-war melancholy that the film needed. However, several scenes in the film still use color, and they are not at all vulgar. The two most important scenes were that Adrian used the violin left by the deceased to play for the elderly at the request of Franz's parents. The music rang, and the cold black and white was replaced by warm colors, as if the music was given to the bereaved. The couple and Anna, who lost their fiancé, regained meaning and hope in life. The other is the male and female protagonists playing in the wild. Anna gradually developed a good impression of this gloomy French artist. Love was born in an idyllic background, re-staining life and expelling the gloom of the post-war depression.
Although the film heavily portrays the pain and hatred left over from war, belief in love and art is the director’s ultimate message, especially art. Franz and Adrian both love music and poetry. As a German, Franz is still a fan of French culture. He loves the French poet Paul Verlaine the most. The love between the latter and Rimbaud is also a famous forbidden love story in the history of literature. . Verlaine's most famous work "Chanson d'automne" (Chanson d'automne) appears repeatedly in the film. Like music, it has become the ultimate means of communication and emotional expression of characters at the end of language. Perhaps language can cause misunderstandings, but artistic language can help people from different countries and different cultures to come together, heal the wounds of war, and avoid the recurrence of tragedies. Another piece of art throughout Franz is a little-known Manet painting "Le Suicidé", whose direct function is to imply that Adrian committed suicide under unbearable trauma. Wish. "Suicide" is one of Manet's works that cannot be categorized, which makes art critics and art historians brains awkward. In the end, everyone said that this might be Manet's total betrayal of any painting techniques and genres that existed at the time, including his own style. This painting is now in Zurich and is rarely exhibited with Manet's other works. Ou Jong placed a copy of it in the Louvre for plot needs. Because putting down the gun and picking up the violin is a kind of suicide, abandoning debate and choosing poetry is also a kind of suicide. In this world full of conflicts and threats, abandoning self-defense and choosing to open up is often a suicidal behavior. So few people give up hostility and choose love and art, so we often harbor hatred and regret. But this kind of "suicide" is true Nirvana, and the only way for mankind to escape suffering. Among the innumerable collections of the Louvre, only by choosing "Suicide" can you get the happiness of eternal life. This is the cry in "Franz" and the grandest proposition in Ou Jong's work. The director tells us in his own playful way to give up violence and hatred, and let love and art return color to life and the world. . [The revised version of this article was first published on the Sanlian WeChat public account on September 5, 2016. Reprinting without permission is strictly prohibited. The picture comes from the Internet. 】
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