The two things that concern me the most are the director's reverse handling of the story, and the second layer of "fake audience" to adjust the mutual position and relationship between the main body of the story and our audience.
The film tells the story of a stand-up comedian and an opera actor falling in love, getting married, having children, and parting. It seems ordinary and uninspired. Many people also say that the story of the film is weak. But I think the director also deliberately weakened the turning point of the two people's stories, and presented them in a seemingly playful form - a stop-motion animated version of Hong Kong and Taiwan entertainment tabloids.
This form of entertainment tabloid recurs throughout the film to inform audiences about the progress of the two well-known actors and their daughter Annette. In the form of consumerist fragmented information, they are inserted into the peaceful and ordinary life of the family, and the irony is self-evident. When private life enters the public plane, the weakened conflict is magnified, and what is truly meaningful is ignored. They were made into a stop-motion animation, but this animation tells a dynamic process: the love of two people, the birth of a child, the growth of Annette...
What the film has been emphasizing is that this "foreign body feeling" is further enhanced by Annette's puppet image; the added grotesqueness of such a marionette image adds to the increasingly morbid relationship between the husband and wife. In order to make our audience feel a more obvious sense of separation and this kind of "foreign body", the director added a layer of "fake audience" between our audience and the couple to separate the interaction. The husband and wife are always on the stage, and the fake audience off the stage constantly interacts with the two people on the stage, questioning and questioning their lives. The pressure of "Why you become a comedian?", more and more boos and increasingly high cheers eventually led to the breakdown of the relationship between the husband and wife. At this moment, the two people on the stage have become marionettes without realizing it, and their every move has changed from catering to the fake audience to a blunt dance completely under their control.
And our audience is watching the fake audience watching the family drama of the husband and wife, there is no doubt that it cannot be brought into the story. This is also an important point. But we are not simply disconnected from the content of this film, but rely on the "fake audience" in it to form a new connection. At the beginning of the film, the "director" looked directly at the camera and asked "may we start?", leading the audience into this morbid and weird world with an absolute authority, that is, the world of two actors. When the middle layer of medium disappears, it is the moment of coexistence with the world, and when this layer of medium appears, it is the moment when we become a marionette under the medium, looking at the world from afar while in a state of powerlessness. The medium in the middle is the fake audience in the movie, the entertainment tabloid, the stage on the screen and the distance between us outside the screen that we cannot reach.
Such a seemingly intertextual relationship only fully reflects the corresponding relationship between the main body of the story and the audience through the mutual penetration and complementation inside and outside the screen. Only when they are free from one-sided information and have the courage to pursue themselves can they break the second layer of media like Annette finally rejected the "exploitation of love" and got rid of the image of the puppet.
I think that's why Henry keeps singing "don't cast your eyes down to the abyss".
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