"American Beauty" "American Beauty" is the winner of the 72nd American Academy Award film. The film uses the suburbs of the middle class in the United States as the background, showing the final tragic fate of the middle-aged American named after Lester Burnham, who is also a representative of the middle class. It incorporates a black comedy style into the paradigm of modern melodrama, vividly depicting the greedy wives and the husbands struggling in crisis in the divided family and the disintegrated society, rebellious daughters and cynical and deviant girls, neighbors The abusive father and surly son, during the period, they have mixed all kinds of normal and non-discriminatory desires, various tasks to save themselves and resist mediocrity, as well as the protagonists' blind obsession or reflection on their own lives.
With such a heavy theme, the film's art design, although it may seem unremarkable, is actually very accurate and worthy of scrutiny. It’s neither the Jayoke’s style of life with almost no design, nor the bizarre and surreal scenes of Peter Greenaway. The art design of the film "American Beauty" is in the process of reappearing the reality. In, there are more finishing touches beyond real life. This allows the film to smear a little bit of bright color in the thick black shadow, giving the audience and the characters in the play a little breathing space.
The repressive spatial tone
film shows the depressive and dull process of the middle-class family until the explosion. The film uses contrasting and contrasting tones to set off such a depressed, dull, selfish and indifferent space atmosphere. The main tone of gray and white runs through this depressive environment, and finally under the impact of the bright blood red, the gray tones and the depressive atmosphere fall apart together.
At the beginning of the film, an overview of the entire community, a blue-gray highway spreads from the reinforced concrete city to the suburbs. The roads are lined with yellow-green trees. The withered yellow-green does not appear to be full of vitality. On both sides of the road is bare ocher-colored mud. The combination of ochre, withered green, and blue-grey makes the whole picture dark and gray. The road extends to a middle-class villa area. The buildings with their own separate courtyards have uniform white walls and brick red roofs. The white fences separate their respective areas-seemingly elegant and civilized residences, but in reality they are monotonous and repetitive. Each villa is far apart, as if it is a metaphor for the relationship between the residents. They are independent and do not interfere with each other. In fact, they are also very selfish and indifferent.
The protagonist’s home is a typical middle-class home. Nostalgic style interior decoration, expensive furniture, elegant and emotional decorations, but the old style makes the atmosphere dull and depressing, and the main white color makes the house look cold and bleak.
The color of the room of the only child is the only bright color in this bleak family environment. The bright orange-red color makes the room feel bright, but it also brings out the teenage manic mentality of her daughter.
The protagonist’s work place is a newspaper, a modern office environment, and a neat grid, where busy employees rarely communicate and care about each other. Still the main color of white, the pale fluorescent lamp illuminates a group of busy people like ants, highlighting a kind of indifferent interpersonal relationship. In the supervisor's room, an almost all white empty room, the hypocritical supervisor circumscribed the protagonist. The gray-white room seemed to herald the bleak fate of the 14-year-old employee who was eventually fired.
The father of the neighbor next door is a violent retired military officer. His private room is dark and white walls, and the shadows cast by the square frames make the room look like an interrogation room. This is where he beats and abuses his son. The repressive space is like his repressive violence, and the blood on his forehead is like It is an extreme vent that impacts the life like bars. His son Rich’s room was monotonous like a prison cell, with large exposed white walls. The empty room was seldom decorated, with only one wall of video tapes and a set of cold silver-gray camera equipment. Such an environment is a metaphor for his father's suffocating coercive policy.
Of course, the white depressive environment is another world in the hero's fantasy. In his sexual fantasy, in the well-lit bathroom, the white glazed material shines under the full sunlight through the floor-to-ceiling windows. The white color seems to be a symbol of holiness. He leaned over the bathtub and looked at the white bathtub. The carcass of the beautiful girl in the middle, with bright red rose petals scattered all over the bathtub. This white bright field of vision is different from the previous white, but this beautiful fantasy is finally disillusioned in despair. Faced with his wife’s disdain in his bedroom space.
Gray tones, depressing space. It seems that the life of the most ordinary middle class, in such a scene, shows an unusual sense of ridicule and irony.
Red image throughout
The title of the film "AMERICAN BEAUTY" actually refers to a red rose native to America. It is brightly colored, gorgeous and dazzling. In the film, the director and artist give it a new meaning-it represents the impulse of desire, the fatal temptation, the bloody violence and the beautiful life. At the beginning of the film, these red roses appeared inadvertently in the protagonist's garden. Later, in the male protagonist's sexual fantasy, rose petals sprayed out from the girl's open neckline, and filled the girl's bath. In the end, after the protagonist was shot, the blood sprayed was as red as a rose flower. Red is like the hue of the protagonist's destiny, and it also symbolizes the various thrilling scenes that I have concealed under the surface of our daily ordinary and trivial life.
The appearance of youth in the
film shows the rebellion and depravity of middle-aged teenagers, which is mainly manifested in the image of costumes in terms of art.
Under the suppression of his father, Richie, the boy who suffered from domestic violence, always wears uniform-style clothing, school uniforms, shirts, sweater vests, and conforms to the rules. But in fact, he is a businessman who addicts drugs and traffickers. In the society and adults, he has inherited selfish indifference and slick sophistication, and he has inherited his integrity.
Jenny hates her parents and family, is self-closed and has a tendency to hate the world. Her clothes are always black or dark blue, and her hair is a black ponytail tied behind her head. Her eyeliner is very heavy, and her crimson lip gloss makes her look depressed and dull.
And Angela, who is unwilling to be ordinary, is a beautiful blonde girl. She is unwilling to be ordinary and has her own set of ideas. It is fashionable to dress up, and like to wear slightly mature clothing and own a car. But in the end she was still a child, she always boasted about sex history but she was still a virgin. She seduce the male protagonist to try to have a relationship with him, but the male protagonist finally deterred in the face of morality. At this time, Angela wore a white shirt, which showed that she was still a childish little girl, and also showed that she was still innocent despite the appearance of slutty, not as sophisticated and sophisticated as she has always been.
After the male protagonist has a sexual fantasy about Angela, he evokes a sense of youth. The old life makes him need to find something beautiful with youthful vitality and warmth. He began to have a crush on Angela, secretly exercising, as if back to the state of youth. His clothes also changed at this time. At the beginning, he wore an old-fashioned suit at work, and a shirt or a fat gray T-shirt at home to cover his blessed body. When he was rejuvenated, he exercised his muscles and began to wear a beige tight T-shirt, running like a young man. The red sports car he bought is also a very ideographic prop. The red sports car symbolizes the feeling of youth, just like the red BMW sports car driven by the handsome cousin that the hero once envied. It represents the hero's reminiscence of youth. But after he gave up the idea of an unfavorable love with Angela, he put on the fat gray T-shirt again, as if it heralded his return to the traditional family morals, but the neighbor’s father’s top leader The gun, forever blocked his return.
The precise details of the
film have precise designs in the art processing of many details. For example, the wife and the other person are having an affair in a cheap motel, and the decoration of the hotel room is cheap and vulgar, as if it heralds a nasty relationship between them.
The wife's underwear is dark red, and she wears meticulously gray professional women's clothing, which seems to be a metaphor for her sullen character and paves the way for her derailment. She went out with her lover, wearing a red dress, but met her lover proposed to break up. The original red joy turned into red mania, and her hysteria was externalized through a red dress.
When Rich's violent father mistakenly believed that his son was providing sexual services to the hero, and thought the hero was gay, he exposed his homosexuality to the hero but was rejected. At this time, his eyes were intertwined with the humiliation of being exposed and the regret of misunderstanding his son. The red garage light behind him reflected his face, which made people more accurately see the hatred and heartache in his eyes.
The film ends with the death of the male protagonist. His blood is sprayed on the gray glazed tiles. The bright red color opposes the paleness and gloom of life. The male protagonist is like an alternative hero, and finally escapes this depressive and dull with death. environment.
The last scene is still back to the gray and monotonous panorama of the community, the green and gray streets, the ocher soil, and the withered trees. So dull, but so inevitable.
View more about American Beauty reviews
