When the term desire was invented, it was followed by two verbs, one is to suppress and the other is to release. From then on, modern civilization began. So artists like to make a big fuss about people's desires. For example, Fassbender's "The Desire of Veronica Firth" (hereinafter referred to as "Desire") is a strange film. There are women in it, but there are no sluts. ; desire, but no thirst; nakedness, but no eroticism. So what is the meaning of desire? This is not surprising, because perhaps you have never read the legendary "Women's Trilogy" in full and consecutively, namely the famous "Maria Braun's Marriage", the lesser known "Laura" and "desire". In all fairness, as a melodrama, "Desire" isn't great in terms of how the storyline works together. But it is "Desire" that puts a stop to these three film suites with "desire, woman, Germany" as the basic tonality.
It is said that the "Women's Trilogy" is also known as the "Trilogy of the German Republic". In fact, although Fassbender's eyes on the reality of postwar Germany are as sharp as a sword, he is by no means the kind of philosopher who is good at grand narratives and is willing to marry history. He just wanted to tell the tortuous stories of some women, and also wanted to use their fate to endorse his short and ups and downs life.
There are two types of people in the world who have the most bleak deaths
, one is the emperor who abdicated, and the other is the star who has passed away. The former is like Empress Li, and the latter is like Gao Qingkui, a famous Peking Opera star who died of illness after his throat fell. It's because they were all like flowers and beautiful family members, and they were like water, but they turned out to be blooming and blooming, and they were finally paid to the broken well and the ruins. There is no exception to this matter at all times.
For example, in post-war Germany, Robert, a sports reporter who can write poetry, met a woman at the station on a rainy night in late autumn, and happily held an umbrella for her. Then it was discovered that the woman was a former movie star named Veronica Firth. Through the gossip of Robert's female colleague, we know that this Firth was once a smash hit, but her peak era was during the Nazi Germany period. In the words of a female colleague, "She is a female disciple of Goebbels, and she has acted in many films." From this, we can imagine that Firth had flowers and brocades and cooking oil at that time. Several flashbacks to the film give us a glimpse into the brilliance of her early years, in Firth's own words "when an actress plays a woman who wants to satisfy a man, she wants to play all the women in the world as one. She needs music, lights and wine." This sentence translated into an ancient poem is "Three thousand doted on one body". But after the change of dynasties, sometimes it is not the scholar-officials who are most affected, but the actors on the stage. In this regard, Firth has the same fate as Shangguan Yunzhu, the Chinese actress, and Jin Yan, etc., while Robert met Firth, who was already out of breath.
The poet has met an out-of-date actress. At this point in the film, the audience will probably think that this is another Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard" movie, not to mention the black and white of this film is also full of a film noir taste. But the plot continues surreal. Robert made the last mistake a good reporter should make—falling in love with his interviewee. At the same time, Firth, who was unwilling to be lonely, was extremely aggrieved and finally got a small role in a movie, but she suffered a drug addiction at a critical moment and lost this precious opportunity. Interestingly, Robert met Firth's ex-husband on the set. Compared with Firth's love, one of the two men was unearned and the other was lost. So they drank happily and got drunk. The ex-husband told Robert that Firth's drug addiction was deliberately picked up by his personal doctor, Katz, in order to control Firth and extort her fortune. And kindly admonished Robert: "That woman is a disaster star, it will destroy you, and you can do nothing." This sentence translated into ancient text is "beauty and disaster". But Robert was determined to make the disaster more violent, so he rushed into Dr. Katz's clinic and questioned the truth of the crime, but Robert never thought that Firth would speak good words for Dr. Katz, saying that the doctor was her friend.
How can you trust the doctor's words? After two of Dr. Katz's other patients, a wealthy elderly Jewish couple, left their estate to the doctor after their death, Robert and his girlfriend, convinced that Firth was in captivity, were determined to gather evidence of the doctor's prohibited drug use. When the film sees this, the audience will probably think that this is a crime film, and they must expect an ending in which justice will bring sins to justice. Unexpectedly, the doctor colluded with the officials managing illegal drugs. Robert's girlfriend dressed up as an empty and boring lady to go to the clinic to collect evidence. Robert lost his girlfriend who loved him and had no evidence to hand the doctor over to the police. He had to leave again in despair.
Robert's lust brings hope to Firth, but makes Dr. Katz smell of danger. In order not to find out, she told Firth that she would send her to Hollywood in the future, and hoped that she would hold a public farewell party. Full of desire, Firth happily sang a song at the farewell party, which was truly extraordinary. But the farewell party was not for Firth. The doctor actually locked Firth in a windowless room, left her a bottle of sleeping pills, and went on vacation. Firth knew that his fate was imminent. While saying goodbye to all the people in the film in his imagination, he took sleeping pills when he was addicted to drugs and passed away quietly.
Robert, who held the front page of the newspaper "Expired Actress Suicide by Drugs", refused to continue writing this report. He quietly came to the clinic and saw the doctors and officials gathered together and happily said, "Everything is fine now." He understood everything, but this time he just got into a taxi on the side of the road and said "Go to the 1860 Munich Stadium". Like the other two endings in the "Women's Trilogy," the movie ends in the masculine event of sports.
Desire black and white
If you ask what color is desire? People may say "colorful". The poet Mu Dan once pushed open the window of the garden and said, "See how beautiful the desire is when the garden is full." However, in the "Women's Trilogy", only this film with the title "Desire" is a black and white film, which is very cool and beautiful. How is desire rendered in black and white? This is very troublesome.
It seems to me that Firth's desires are precisely black and white, as when she and Robert had their first dinner date, when she asked, "Am I a pretty woman?" Robert replied, "Yes, you are one. A very beautiful woman." She laughed wildly and said, "I am a woman with two sides of light and darkness." The black and white of desire reminds us of the contradictory nature of Firth's desire. It has both light and dark sides. Looking at the other works of the "Women's Trilogy", one can also find different levels of light and darkness. They all fulfilled their own destiny by suppressing a desire and releasing a desire.
Just looking at Firth, she has several different personalities at the same time. She is sometimes a red and purple artist, awe-inspiring and inviolable, so she is noble; sometimes she is an embarrassed and outdated actress who deceives Robert for three hundred marks, so she is humble; she is a drug addict who has been insulted and deceived and cannot Not subject to Dr. Katz's lewd power, so she's a tragedy; she's the only woman in the trilogy who truly expresses a strong love for a man and gets echoed, so she's a comedy. But all kinds of personalities, all in one, fall into the two desires of black and white.
White Desire is Light Desire, Firth's love for Robert. She used to be loved by thousands of people, but now there is only a lonely light and the afterglow of the moon. Therefore, even Firth, who appeared in public, showed a kind of hunger in his gestures. But the event that revealed her desire the most was when she invited Robert to spend the spring night in her cold and desolate mansion. This is the most bleak mandarin duck dream I've ever seen on the screen. On the surface, she wants to relive the gorgeousness she once had, but the flashback of the movie tells us that what she wants to relive is a husband and love. Robert didn't intervene in her love by sleeping with her, but by breaking an old vase, which led to Firth's painful hysteria accompanied by a drug addiction attack, and only then did he have spiritual communication with Firth. You know, Firth's identity is precisely that of an actor, and her profession is acting, and sometimes she can't distinguish between reality and drama, so she acted as a prophecy. Firth was in a playful disorientation until Robert smashed the vase. The broken vase knocks her back into shape, and she finally falls in love with Robert. Therefore, love is Firth's positive, positive and warm desire. Who can slander a woman's desire for love?
And the desire for black is Firth's dependence on Dr. Katz. When I first watched this movie, I would naturally put Dr. Katz on the absolute opposite of Firth, so I demonized Dr. Katz. . However, savouring the dialogue between Kaz and Firth, especially when they both said the phrase "You are my best friend" on different occasions, shows that Firth is also full of desire for Kaz. On the surface, Firth was indeed under the control of Dr. Katz because of her drug addiction, and she often admitted to being Katz's friend when her addiction was on. However, it is necessary to ask, how did Firth become addicted to drugs? Fassbender did not explain, and we cannot take it for granted that it was Dr. Katz's conspiracy. This can be seen from what Robert's girlfriend said when she came to see Dr. Katz dressed as a rich woman, she said to the doctor: "I am rich, but I am empty and lonely." This reveals the original desire of Firth, and Katz Dr. Ze was simply taking advantage of her emptiness and loneliness to make her addicted to drugs. Therefore, Firth's black desire is precisely the desire to fill her emptiness and loneliness. Only drugs can satisfy her who has been out of breath. Looking at Dr. Katz from this angle, she is not only a criminal, but also a woman who can give Firth pleasure. What Robert couldn't understand for Firth was that she was always claiming that "Kaz was helping me" because she was enjoying the thrill of same-sex brutal love while being raped by Dr. purchased.
Therefore, black desire can be regarded as a kind of unequal love, in other words, the relationship between Firth and Kaz is like a couple, the former always giving, and the latter just to get her money. This is complementary to, yet diametrically opposed to, the desire for white. Firth releases black, but suppresses white, and desire is displayed in the black and white of this film, and constitutes the unifying style of the trilogy.
In "Maria Braun's Marriage", the heroine's consistent fidelity and love for her husband is a desire towards the light, but, under the harsh material conditions after the war, in the hard times of her husband's arrest and imprisonment In , Maria cannot survive on the desire for light alone. This aroused her black desire: to live, but not to waste the fresh flesh. So, she used her body and two lovers to deduce a dark tragedy. She suppressed her soul's lust for her husband and released her body's desire. The pair of desires of spiritual loyalty and betrayal of the body collided violently. With a loud bang, they both perished, and the white land was really clean.
In "Lola", Lola is of course happier than the other two heroines. But what is behind Lola's happiness? In the film, Lola is "pure" on the one hand, not only in her appearance in front of Bohm in a German fairy tale way, but also in the way she treats wealthy, normal, high-class, public ladies desire to live. That's why she has to marry Bohm, and she has to marry Bohm to bleach herself and become the mayor's wife. This can be seen as her bright desire. But on the other hand, Lola is slutty, which is not only reflected in her career as a prostitute and singer, but also in the fact that she has always kept a slut's heart in her heart, and she is still with Shun until the day of her wedding. Kevin hangs out. Or as Laura herself said: "I'd rather be a noble mistress". Both a lady and a mistress. She wants to be a bitch and build a torii, but this contradictory desire is so dialectically unified in her.
As the saying goes, "The bitch is ruthless, and the actor has no justice", but in the trilogy, Lola happens to be a prostitute, and Firth happens to be an actor. Compared with the dead Maria and Firth, Lola's fate is not over yet, but it is completely conceivable that she will continue to be a mistress in her marriage life in the future, which is so-called ruthless. At the last moment when Firth could save himself, he was still subject to his black desires and chose to lie to the police and keep silent to his lover, which is meaningless. Come to think of it, this Chinese saying really applies everywhere. The double-sided desire under Fassbender's lens also metaphors that emotions are always interpreted by a pair of lovers who are unequal to each other, which is also the inner portrayal of bisexual Fassbender. Veronica Firth's desire is rather Fassbender's despair.
Robert's Secret
As a leading man, Robert has a secret: writing poetry.
In this film, Robert writes poetry twice. Once he came across Firth and wrote this sentence: "I heard something never heard at night \The Hundredth Name of Allah\When Mozart died the drum was not recorded\The dialogue was understood in the birthplace. "But he crossed out the poem when he was done. The second time was while investigating Firth, when his girlfriend happened to see a verse on the typewriter and read it out: "The memory is exhausted\I am five glass balls\The future is bleak\Yesterday was a good day\Today The devil followed." But the hymn he read made him furious. Thus, Robert did not like the second person to read these raving lines, which means that the poems reflect his heart and even Fassbender's heart and desires.
In my opinion, the secrets revealed by these two poems are the secrets of fate. For example, in the first poem, Mozart's death is a metaphor for Firth's death in the future, because they all died silently after being out of breath. Mozart's cause of death is still unknown. "Origin" suggests that the story of the film stems from his chance encounter with Firth. In the second poem, "the future is slim" alludes to the general mentality of postwar Germans. "The Devil Follows" is proved by the death of Firth and Robert's girlfriend. The verses are like prophecy, and the two poems remind of a tragedy that has not yet happened, that is, the tragedy of fate.
What is a tragedy of fate? The typical representative is the tragedy of ancient Greece. For example, King Oedipus still could not get rid of the fate of killing his father and marrying his mother, until the dominoes of fate overthrew him. Therefore, the tragedy of fate lies in the fact that individual people cannot escape the fate woven by God, but can achieve sublime in the confrontation with fate. In other words, tragedy is the eternal imprisonment of a person by fate, which cannot be escaped no matter what.
In Desire, Dr. Katz, who represents the dark side, always wears a white uniform, while Robert, who represents the light side, always wears a black jacket. On the surface, this strong tonal contrast is enough to create an eerie and creepy atmosphere. But not only that, on the one hand, the black Robert entered the white clinic three times before and after, and the color clearly revealed that he was an intruder of Firth's fate and a virus that endangered the security of the system, so this virus will inevitably be removed; on the other hand, As can be seen from Fassbender's early films such as "Love is Colder than Death", the director loves the black and white contrast of the secret room setting for ten minutes, because the suffocation brought by the fully enclosed space of the secret room can be fully mobilized. The tension and fear of the characters and the audience. In this film, the clinic is a prison that imprisons Fosse's body, but also a cell that imprisons her desires and even her soul. Of course, it is also a reference to a forbidding fate.
Not only Firth, but also the old Jewish man murdered by Dr. Katz in the film. The old man once rolled up his sleeves to show Robert's girlfriend, the number 7927 was engraved on it, and he spit out one word: Treblinka. This tells us that he was a numbered prisoner who escaped from the Treblinka concentration camp, which was as horrific as Auschwitz. But did he escape? Didn't he still die under Katz's drug? Many characters in the trilogy sway left and right in the desires of black and white, and collide with pain, but they can't get rid of the shackles of fate. In "Lola", after Bohm and his wife Yan Er, the director arranged for the little girl Mary to ask him a question inadvertently: "Are you happy? Sir". He answered "happy" in a very vicissitudes of voice. Obviously, he is very aware of his situation, like a man in a trap who is trapped in fate. There is also the heroine of "Lili Marlene", the whole film is about her obsession with love during the war, but at the last moment of the film because of her lover's betrayal, everything she has is subverted in an instant.
Let's go back to Firth again. At the beginning of the movie, she was still a popular movie star watching herself on the screen, and she was playing a role who was held hostage by a doctor with drugs. In just a few shots, she was repeating the tragedy on the stage. The performer, the viewer, and the experiencer are all one person. Such a delicate myth of fate has already revealed her tragedy in its entirety.
As a Fassbender
, desire determines destiny, which is not too much of a truth.
In 1955, German actress Siebel Smits committed suicide at the age of forty-six, suffering from divorce, illness and narcotics. It is well known that her suicide stemmed from the abandonment of the once-powerful brunette by audiences in post-war Germany. Smith was once a popular celebrity in Nazi Germany, and was especially appreciated by Goebbels, who starred in "Titanic", which Goebbels personally asked about. But unlike the German female director Riefenstahl, the audience abandoned her not just for ideology, but because after the war, the female image she played was always out of tune with post-war Germany. This year Fassbender was ten years old. More than 20 years later, he adapted the story of this senior actress into "Desire", and won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982; this year Fassbender De was thirty-eight years old and died at the age of thirty-eight.
Smith, Firth and Fassbender, the three drew a strange curve. It's a bit like "you look at the scenery on the bridge, and the people who look at the scenery look at you upstairs". Firth played Smits, and Fassbender also copied Firth to a certain extent.
Fassbender once told reporters: "Men are far less autonomous in society than women are in their role-playing. Women certainly have their roles, but it is much easier to break the role or derail. If it is a male , you will immediately be charged with desertion and other crimes." Therefore, the men under his camera are rough and boring, from the ruins that collapsed after Braun committed suicide, to Laura's home in Shukwen, to Robert Bengal. Xiang's stadiums all point to the same tedious event: football. Sports have fallen, and sports, which were originally a feature of the gods of the ancient Greeks, have been reduced to entertainment to kill male hormones in modern society. Fassbender loves football, but it does not prevent him from taking football as a symbol of the monotonous life of men, and it appears in the trilogy in an ironic sense.
But Fassbender is an exception. As bisexual, Fassbender takes women to the extreme. In addition to the women's trilogy and other completed works, there is also a "Rosa Luxembourg" that was not filmed because of the death of actress Romy Schneider. Different from the fictional Braun, Laura and the insinuation of Firth, Romy Schneider, who played Princess Sissi, and Luxembourg, the revolutionary known as "Bloodthirsty Mary" in the history of European revolutions, are all real in the German nation. Outstanding women who exist. Their excellence is not in how they overturned the world men built with politics and theory, but more like a tragedy than men, with the exception of Fassbender, of course.
It was published in the 23rd issue of "Watching Movies" in 2010, this is the original manuscript
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