Billy Wilder's work is always smooth, fluid, and delicate, and Sunset Boulevard, a classic of the postwar Hollywood era, is undoubtedly one of the best.
The change from the silent film to the sound era has meant many cruel and powerless tragedies, and the heroine Norma is such a person who is always immersed in the memory of good old days and the hallucination of "I'm still big" The out-of-date actress in . She is fragile and lonely, but she always maintains a superficial pride and self-esteem. In the castle where Norma lives, remnants of his former glory can be seen everywhere - the colorful photos on the table and the wall are proof of his narcissism.
At the beginning of the film, the audience saw a dead body in a swimming pool. The whole film was narrated from the perspective of the dead body (it was revealed at the end that it was actually the film's leading actor, Hollywood new screenwriter Joe Gillis), and Joe was often seen as full of world-weariness and irony. the inner monologue of the Coen brothers, and this technique was later seen in films such as the Coen Brothers' Button Funk and Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (coincidentally, the male protagonists of these three films/ The monologue narrators are all Hollywood/Broadway screenwriters/writers); in Sam Mendes' "American Beauty" and even the recent American drama "Deadly Woman", you can see the same "presenting dead bodies - the dead narrate why they died (and all deaths are Directly related to the main female character) - Killed" plot structure.
As a typical noir film, the whole film has a strong expressionist color. The passage of Joe entering the ancient house where Norma lives is like a poor scholar entering the world of fox demons written by Pu Songling, or Victor's mistake under the lens of Tim Burton. Enter the subterranean kingdom of skeletons in Zombie Bride. Norma lives in a near-isolated, Nosferatu/Dracula/Poe-esque castle, and lives her life thanks to her butler (and former co-creator and first husband) of care and resembling a Truman-style foam. Apart from Norma and the housekeeper, the only living thing in the ancient house is Norma's pet orangutan, and Joe just happened to catch up with the death of the orangutan when he accidentally broke in (mistaken for a role like an undertaker), and thus began to replace it. The process of an orangutan becoming a Norma male pet/pet.
A very tragic scene in the film is that after Norma sent the script, he received a call from the studio, thinking that he was favored by the company and went to the filming site to find his former partner DeMille. In Studio No. 18, where he once enjoyed the infinite scenery, hog-eye, an old acquaintance lighting engineer, recognized the big star, so a beam of lights hit Norma after a long absence, and all the people working on the set suddenly stopped their hands. work, set his sights on Norma, and she finally became the focus of the stage again, bathed in stares and affection; at the same time, DeMille called Gordon in the corner to ask his intention to contact Norma, and the audience learned that It turned out that the company just took a fancy to Norma's antique car ("funny car") and hoped to use it as a shooting prop - on the 18th set, different time and space meet here, and the passing glory of the past and the cruel reality are going on. The confrontation was not evenly matched, and this was undoubtedly the saddest sigh of the fate of those "wax figures".
When Joe and Betty were discussing the plot of the script together, the idea of a man and a woman sharing a bedroom at different times directly pointed to the "Peachy Apartment" that was filmed a few years later; in this film, the heroine Norma tried to commit suicide. It's the same as "Peachy Apartment". Joe and Betty discussing the design of the script late at night can actually be seen as an unmistakable reference to cheating - the script is the crystallization of the two people's co-creation, and the creative process is almost a spiritual copulation.
When Betty storms into Norma's villa, the whole film should be a moment of the biggest confrontation/confession/revelation: all Joe's inner thoughts that can only be presented by narration and can't be expressed in words are poured out. The emptiness and decadence that he tried to cover up with gold and jade was displayed in front of the enemy by his loved ones. Joe seemed to show off her wounds to Betty, and at the same time completely burst Norma's emotional bubble and told her the relationship between the two. Everything is just business & calculation rather than any sincere effort.
If you look at it from the perspective of women's rights, you can also see that Norma's fate is a tragedy in a typical patriarchal society. Most of the female characters in the film (mainly Norma) are emotionally unstable, turbulent, fragile and prone to collapse at any time; The male characters (whether it's Joe, Max, DeMille or Betty's boyfriend) are composed, decisive, rational and even cold.
The painful plastic surgery Norma went through in order to return to the screen contains reflections and accusations of the plastic surgery and health industry and Hollywood's harsh discipline on actor images; and the end of the film history can clearly tell the audience how the Hollywood star system makes people Falling into a schizophrenic delirium and confusion - "hunger for cameras", this is the beginning of all tragedies, and it is Norma's last curtain call in front of the "cameras".
Sunset Boulevard can undoubtedly be considered a metafilm. The most interesting design in the film is that the real experience of the heroine actor Gloria Swanson happens to form a certain symmetry with Norma: As a star of the silent film era, Sunset Boulevard is her return to the big screen, and this film. The great success of the work also makes Gloria have the opposite fate of Norma in real life. In the film, Gloria Swanson maintains the slightly exaggerated and contrived performance style of the silent film era, while other actors, especially the male protagonist, adopt the relatively natural performance mode of the talkie film period. The contrast between the two also adds dramatic tension between the characters in the film. . And yet another actor, Erich von Stroheim, who plays the butler Max, is also self-referential in his performance: despite being a talented director of the silent era (creating works like Greed), he is not as good as his own. Contemporaneous Griffiths and other giants who have made a name for themselves in film history, Erich is naturally more hidden in the torrent of history. Erich even directed the ill-fated Queen Kelly starring Gloria Swanson, which happened to be permanently etched into film history as the silent film Norma showed Gillis in her mansion. In addition, the film masters of the silent film era who appeared as "wax figures", and the film director who played DeMille, also have identities consistent with their roles in their lives.
Regardless of different countries and historical periods, it is not uncommon for the frictions caused by such historical changes to cast shadows on every individual. As far as the film industry itself is concerned, the impact of today's new media and live broadcasts on the TV and film industries is also constantly creating structural abandonment in the field of literature and art, and the author believes that there may be many of them that can be used. story prototype.
PS Meryl Streep's performance in "Out of Tune" proves that if there is a film like Sunset Boulevard today, then she may be the perfect choice for Norma; the male protagonist is with Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey both in appearance and temperament are quite similar.
View more about Sunset Blvd. reviews
