It is also a story about violence and horror. Some European directors especially test the patience and concentration of the audience. They will not pay attention to sensory stimulation like Hollywood movies. French director Xavier Legrand's first feature-length feature, Custody, tells a story in a style that's not afraid to bore the audience. Why do these singing and dancing scenes take so long? The characters are walking around the screen, what is the point? The audience has to endure this kind of film language, pay attention to the details of the sound and picture, and recall after the ending, they will realize that there has been a story happening in the clips that have been watched five miles before, but they don't know which details to pay attention to at that time.
The plot of the story is not complicated. After the couple separated, the ex-husband first fought for the right to see his son every other week, and then tried to find his ex-wife who escaped him. The director has not clearly explained the reasons for the divorce between the two parties, who is more credible, etc., focusing on the process of "the male protagonist wants to find his ex-wife to clarify". The suspenseful effect seems to be only effective for particularly patient audiences, because the director often makes the audience and the characters in the play gradually immerse themselves in the uneasy state of "something seems to happen, but I don't know what it is", there is an inexplicable anxiety, another On the one hand, I am also curious about the reasons for this anxiety. It's just that the accumulation of these long paragraphs and subsections may cause the audience to lose energy, feel confused and dull, and make it more difficult to pay attention to the details of the story and the introverted progress.
Wait until about the final quarter of the film to take a nosedive to let the audience know where the fear and violence are coming from. It was as if the plumb that had been hanging statically until then suddenly turned into a fierce fight with a harpoon by jumping into the water at the end. The pressure that the director had previously delayed in the narrative was detonated again and again in the ending, and the psychological tension caused by anxiety and suspense was unraveled. Only then can the audience understand the emotions and reactions of the various characters in the previous text - if they hadn't dozed off before.
View more about Custody reviews
