The Lost Soul Family, which was filmed in 1998, belongs to Ao Zong's earlier feature-length film, but it is a work with a very Ao Zong style. During the meeting in this feature film, you can also see many Aozong-style views on things and people.
The film presents a classic Hitchcock-style suspenseful design at the prelude. The camera directly incorporates the front of a house. The closed door sings "Happy Birthday", followed by a series of eager The gunshots, three or two, put the shell of a "homicide" movie on this film. The filming method of asynchronous sound and picture, although the camera is still facing the empty scene with no one, it outlines a murderous plot lightly, and arouses the infinite curiosity of the audience, wanting to see the truth.
In an instant, the narrative returns to a few months ago, which is a typical middle-class family, parents, a pair of children, and a new maid. One day, my father brought back a lab rat, and the peaceful family immediately caused a huge wave because of the rat. For this uninvited guest, family members showed different attitudes. The always strict and conservative mother naturally became the backbone to resist this foreign object, and other members had close contact with this mouse. This architectural design is very similar to Pasolini's "Theorem", except that in Pasolini's film, a young man acts as an outsider, and in this film is replaced by a white mouse. Furthermore, Ozon's Hitchcock influence is evident in this typically suspenseful opening.
In fact, suspense and murder are Ozong's always-loved themes. From works such as "Looking at the Sea", "Provocative Murder" and "Swimming Pool Love Murder", murders are obvious plots, but the three plays The theme is not a simple narrative of murder. It is very interesting that Ozong's works can always see similarities between works, such as "Bliss of Death" and "The Dying Days", and also "Looking at the Sea" and "Swimming Pool Love Murder" are also very similar. However, the similarity of the plots cannot prevent the themes from going their separate ways. Ao Zong is often willing to hide completely different themes in similar stories, which may also be a trace of the director's own growth. "Looking at the Sea" tells the story of a married woman on a small French island who was taking care of her daughter, and suddenly met a strange female backpacker. Within a few days of getting to know each other, they got to know each other, but they were finally caught by the female backpacker. murder. Ao Zong has given different positions to the two heroines. The identity and background of the invaders are very clear at the beginning of the film, while the identity and background of the invaders are revealed in the narrative of the plot. The layout makes the rhythm of the film itself very tight, and the audience is also brought into the shocking plot. In the end, the director forcibly displayed the corpse in front of the audience with abrupt shots, and exaggerated the breath of death with bright colors. , so that the audience can feel the blood of the killing even if they do not see the murder scene. At the end, the intruder is wearing the intruder's clothes and holding the baby. Although it is calm and full of beauty, the audience is not difficult to understand because of the aforementioned plot. , which is a story of neurotic identity substitution.
Similarly, "Murder in the Swimming Pool" also has two identities of women. The female writer and the publisher's daughter are placed in a closed villa, affecting each other and infiltrating each other. The young publisher's daughter is a female writer. It is also an intruder, stirring up the life and lust of the female writer. Of course, although the plot is so similar, the theme is completely different. This movie is more about lust and Freud's psychoanalysis, but it is by no means a simple murder. . The same is true of "Eight Beautiful Pictures". This film all starts with murder as the prelude. In the narrative of the plot, Zhang Xian's intention is to let the audience see something other than murder.
The plot after that can be described as the wind and water. Overnight, the son came out of the closet, the daughter jumped off the building, and the conservative mother was obviously haggard in the strange changes at home, so she had to seek help from a psychiatrist. However, things did not improve, and the temperament of the son and daughter intensified: the original, rigid and conservative son was dressed brightly and held a promiscuous party at home; the daughter was dressed in black, accompanied by gothic and punk costumes. What's even more outrageous is that the foreign maid seduced her daughter's boyfriend and played titty sex in the toilet. All of this made the mother completely frustrated, and finally had to make a desperate attempt. After asking the mouse for help, she was inspired to soothe her son with the flesh, intending to lead him back to normal sexual orientation. Diversified sexual orientation has always been an element that Ao Zong is eager to present, and also includes other keywords with queer properties such as transvestite, sexual inversion, etc., which appear frequently in Ao Zong's films. From "Family of Lost Souls" to "Provocative Murder", "The Days of Dying", "Firewood and Fire", most of his novels involve homosexuality, and his short works such as "Summer's Suspender Skirt", "69" ", "Bliss Death" and so on are all related to gays, so it is no wonder that Ozong will be evaluated as a new gay film director. But even when it comes to gay movies, the themes of concern are not the same, but they focus on two points. One is the change of thinking and cognition under the sexual maturity of adolescents; the other is bisexuality. Changes, such as "Family Lost", "The Last Days", "Bliss Death", etc., discuss family relationships, not purely homosexual subjects.
The homosexual characters in Ao Zong's works are basically teenagers. It seems that for Ao Zong, the research and analysis of sexual orientation has long been a problem. Perhaps it has something to do with the director's own experience. The homosexual characters in Ao Zong's works, from There is no confusion about sexual orientation, and more epistemology focuses on sexual knowledge, and mostly homosexuals who can accept bisexual behavior. For Ozon, perhaps the first sexual experience of homosexuality has to distinguish between men and women, a proposition that can be seen in "Summer's Suspender Skirt" and "Bed Scenes".
We can also clearly learn that through Ozon's such heterochromatic films, we can learn that comrade is only a part of the heterochromatic elements of these films, or more precisely, only an element in the story, not the drama. the center of the work. And more, from these gay elements and the different colors that bloom in these films, we are more aware of the protagonist's complex personality characteristics and complex id characteristics. For example, in Ozong's short film "Death of Bliss", the young gay photographer faces the story of his estranged and seriously ill father. The family and patriarchy's repression and resistance to the individual id become In order to discuss the subject of the film, it is not simply the comrade itself, especially when the photographer used the camera to photograph the body of the father, which was exhausted and exhausted, and the psychoanalytic theme of killing the father and replacing the patriarchal power was even more obvious. At the same time, this further confirms the reason why the photographer was keen to capture the facial expressions of male orgasm before the film, and realized the transformation of the photographer from a teenager to a male identity. And all of this, in Ozong's film, is expressed in a forbidding and obscure way. In the days of "The Dying Days", the two sides of life and death changed positions, and comradeship is only one of the elements of the story.
The plot has developed so far, and the father in the film has always kept his calm, even when his daughter deliberately provoked her father to have sex, he still maintained this stability. And when the family members left the house and went to the countryside, after the father had intimate contact with the mouse one night, he changed to trigger a dream-like bloody murder, which is the murder shown in the title. But then, it is not difficult for us to find out that all this was actually an absurd nightmare that my father had done. When he woke up from the ringing of the phone, the mother on the other end reminded him to turn on the mouse, and told the family members that all the changes were due to the strange wavelengths emitted by the mouse. When the audience woke up from the murderous nightmare in relief, they were faced with a more absurd reality: the father did not feel the mother's warning, kept his usual calm, and put the mouse in the microwave oven. After a "bang" sound, the mouse is familiar. The father sat at the dining table, held up the knife and fork gracefully, and swallowed the mouse. Don't think this is the end of the story. The plot after that is even more absurd. The mother brought the children home and found a giant mouse that was transformed from the father lying on the bed. After a desperate struggle, he finally killed it. mouse. Later, on a sunny day, three pairs of lovers: mother and maid, sister and boyfriend, brother and maid's husband, went to "mourning" the dead father together, and the film came to an end.
This absurd and ironic ending fully illustrates Ozong's diverse views on sexuality. In his opinion, only homosexuality and heterosexuality, and love of different races can build such a harmonious society of "world harmony". Such a utopia can only be realized when the ethical and moral rule represented by patriarchy is eliminated.
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