If you want to sum up the creative style of Romanian director Corneliu Bolan Boyu, you will definitely not be able to jump out of the labels of low budget, live-action shooting, fixed long shots, and life-like themes. The combination of these words happens to lay a solid foundation for people A general impression of the Romanian New Wave. Compared with Mengji, Puyou and others in the same trenches, Bo Lanboyu can always focus on local social contradictions, and integrate his criticism and thinking of propositions in a playful and humorous way. In the works, the integration of this personalized appeal with the realist route has won him an outstanding reputation in the international film circle, and has also made him well-known by many domestic fans.
It is quite surprising that in its latest work "Isle de la La Gomera", which was nominated for the first time in the main competition unit of Cannes, the calm narrative tone has been greatly reduced or even hidden. The eccentric and fancy, experimental features are rendered in the spotlight and become the core temperament of the film. After the premiere, many media, including IndieWire, juxtaposed "Island de la La Gomera" with "Eleven Arhats" and other old crime films. From this, we can also see that this film combines police and gangsters, espionage, love, and scenery. Stories with various elements such as the ambition to broaden the audience.
The film kicks off with Iggy Pop's hilarious "The Passenger," in which the protagonist Christie works for the Bucharest police station investigating a €3 million drug-money laundering case. Before that, he had to board La La Gomera in the Canary Islands of Spain and learn the whistle called "El Silbo" by the islanders, in order to join forces with the gang to avoid being stalked by the police and rescue those who escaped with stolen money. The arrested member Jolt - yes, Christie is an inner ghost who was secretly bribed and wandered between the two forces.
As Bo Lan Boyu's first work going abroad, the biggest highlight of "Island of La Gomera" is undoubtedly the exotic "whistle language". This language invented by local indigenous people has a history of hundreds of years. It is derived from the pronunciation of Spanish. It was included in the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations in 2009 to save its fate from being lost. The film spends a lot of ink to describe the whole process of Christie from being a novice to mastering the whistle. Such impromptu passages are interspersed in the film, making it present a cold humor unique to the Romanian nation.
In fact, this is not the first time that Bo Lambo Yu has conceived a script around "language". Starting from his debut film "Bucharest East 12:8" (2006), which helped him win the Golden Camera Award, it starts with the various traps and traps in interpersonal communication. Misunderstanding is an incision, and a glimpse of the changes in the external political landscape has become a major symbol of his creation. In "Isle of La La Gomera", language has replaced the high-tech means that traditional police and gangster films are keen on, and has risen to become the most effective plot driving force. Only with the help of the crisp whistle like birdsong can people get rid of the carpet monitoring and establish a stable anti-reconnaissance system.
Attentive audiences can easily see that, apart from the ingenious use of language, this new film is inextricably linked with the director's previous works, especially the "Police, Adjective" (2009 ) For comparison, not only the male protagonist's name and occupation are the same, but the starring Vlad Ivanov also appeared. What is intriguing is that Ivanov's role has undergone a rather subtle twist and adjustment, from a department chief who submits to stereotypes and rigid ideas to a little police officer who is caught in a dilemma. Here, the source of external pressure is tilted from the huge political system of the country to the hidden conflict of interests, pushing the characters to the deep moat left by the squeeze of different identities.
This kind of dramatic conflict is very easy to associate with the popular noir film in the middle of the last century, especially the dark night scenes scattered in the process of confrontation between the two sides, and the protagonist is constantly threatened and threatened. Betrayal setting. The director has always followed the "anti-hero standard", portraying the character as a manipulative, less shrewd and nimble pawn. Therefore, Christie rarely shows the energy to break through the shackles, and can only walk obediently like a puppet wound up, caught in the center of the whirlpool of the case, unable to escape.
In stark contrast, there are two important female characters around him: Magda, his scheming boss, and Hilda (Jolt's lover) played by top Romanian supermodel Catrinell Malone. As representatives inside and outside the system, they all exude a dangerous and powerful atmosphere, and have an unusually full subjectivity. By distinguishing the colors of clothing and makeup, the characters' personalities are outlined in several strokes. The complex network of relationships built around money, lust, and power in the three-person room further highlights the passive and marginalized status of males.
As for other supporting roles, such as Ruoerte, Christie's mother, gangster Paco and others also appeared on stage in just 90 minutes. The film uses the color cards marked with the names of these characters or key props as section breaks, dismantles the order of time and space, and then reassembles them, and then hands the baton of viewpoints to each person in turn. The choice of color hints to a certain extent the camp and faction they belong to: fiery red is for the sexy and glamorous Hilda, dark blue is for the cunning Paco, pure white is for the dull Christie... This kind of segmentation The style transition structure is like paying tribute to Wes Anderson in the air, painting the originally boring spy game into a magnificent psychedelic video hall full of children's innocent eyes, a fairy tale for middle-aged people.
In the appropriation of classic cultural symbols, La La Gomera also spared no effort. In addition to the punk rock at the beginning, there are also many classical symphonies such as arias in "Waltz of Spring" and "The Marriage of Figaro". Not to mention the shadow stalks that can be seen everywhere, represented by the rehearsal of the bathroom killing scene in "Psycho". In the second half, the place where the police lured the enemy to go deep and exchanged fire with each other was an abandoned movie studio. In the splicing of these bizarre fragments, the film reaches the climax after the convergence of multiple lines. Perhaps the director did not intend to extend their potential meaning, but let them randomly scattered in the time and space where the story took place, colliding with vivid chemical effects.
It is undeniable that although the film made a trick on the subject of double spy, it did not fully handle the addition and subtraction between literature, art and commerce. Playing with a variety of inspirational materials enhances the superficial pleasure, fun, and enjoyment, but also detracts from the dramatic coherence that a genre comedy should have. Numerous character sidelines and several transitions that lack the necessary foreshadowing make the sense of urgency of the plot diluted, and the rhythm is slightly jumpy and out of control. Perhaps this is a challenge that every director faces in the creative transition period, not to mention the stride from the rough and dull life-streaming images to the mainstream commercial field. Therefore, many voices after the screening believed that Bo LanBoyu announced his break with his previous creative attitude with this film, but is this really the case?
La La Gomera - Decoupled from modern civilization, an incubator of primitive customs. When we connect it with the pervasive surveillance equipment, we will find the real social implication of this geographic coordinate projection: under the omni-directional penetration and surveillance of media technology, the trust between people is getting thinner and thinner, and returning to nature is only a matter of Some retreats. On the other hand, the main characters in the film are all directly or indirectly dominated by this alienated environment: Christie is deeply involved in a series of gambling games, with no privacy at all, his mother accidentally leaked his secret out of religious consciousness; Hilda was betrayed by her lover , surrounded by layers of thorns; Magda will do anything to capture the prisoners, but they are also unable to resist the power of corrupt money... They are like every daring idealist who has broken into the lens of Bo Lan Boyu, wandering at the fork in the road between light and dark, Find focus and balance in your life. The film thus reveals the ruthless core under the packaging of innocent fairy tales, and continues and rewrites the insight into human nature and the irony of moral conflict, as if a fable of individual isolation that shines into the contemporary era, filled with a vague sentimental atmosphere. .
Just like the romantic ending that was criticized by many as "weak" and "crude": after the gang was taken down, Christie was admitted to the ward under the supervision of the police, and was silent except whistling all day long. He made an agreement with Hilda in whistle, and the two reunited at the light show at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, but the author thinks this is a design worth exploring. Just like Gonzalez's "Birdman" at the end, Reagan flew into the clouds with his greed for Vanity Fair, the sky tree wrapped in colorful lights glowed dreamily, or it was just a Don Quixote in the end. imagine.
I am afraid that the one that best fits the reality is the scene in the middle of Christie's practice of sending information with a whistle. Several long whistles fell in the valley filled with clouds and mist, and a long while later, a reply came from the other side. It vaguely points to the anxious and helpless psychological state of every lost person: standing alone on the top of the mountain, like a bird circling the forest sending out a signal, waiting to be heard and understood, waiting for the beam that saves people in the dry rut and pierces The gentle light of chaos.
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