At the beginning of the film, the director used a narrative method that reversed time and space. In terms of structure, we first describe the arrangement of Brian's funeral after his death, and explain his friend Jerry before his death. The next shot is when Jerry attends the funeral. After that, the director revealed the cause of Brian's death, and finally the camera went back to Andry to find Jerry and returned to the normal timeline. The director puts the audience in a strong and solemn tragic atmosphere at the beginning, and uses the interlacing of time to explain the background of the whole story.
On the montage, the director has two beautiful cuts. One time, when introducing Brian was shot, the gun rang, and the next scene followed Brian's daughter smashing the milk bottle, and the milky white liquid flowed all over the place. Then came Andry's sad eyes. On the one hand, this set of shots edited with sound explains the development of the background, and on the other hand, it sets off the shock brought by Brian's death to the whole family. The other is at the end of the film, when Jerry tells about his recent detox at the club. His voice is used as the overall background sound, but the picture is constantly switching between Andry and Jerry. In the end, Andry saw the note that read "Accept the good", and Jerry also completed his story. The two were redeemed together. The film ended with a reunion in such a quiet story.
In the first half of the film, there are several strong rhythm music. They all appeared when Jerry appeared on the stage. The director took Jerry as the main point of view and let the audience experience the surging and restless soul of a drug addict with his headphones. Every time he took off his headphones, he was faced with the reality of his friend's death. a sharp contrast. Another contrast is that when Brian died, there was no sound at all in the noisy live environment. On the contrary, there was complete silence. With the shot of Andry strongly suppressing his emotions in the bathroom, the huge sense of oppression penetrated through the silence. best conveyed.
The film's leading actress is the Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, who interprets a housewife like Andry who has been hit by a sudden shock in her life. Especially the use of many details and props, such as the toy box she knocked over when she was helping her children put away toys, the hand that was punctured by a screw when repairing the socket, and the box dumped after shopping in the supermarket. The trivial things in life add up to prove that her state is far from being as strong as she has shown, and finally met the last straw, which also became the direct reason to find Jerry.
It is worth mentioning that there are a lot of close-ups of the protagonist's eyes in the film. Most of them are Andry's sad and red eyes and Jerry's pained and confused eyes because of the drug withdrawal. It takes a lot of courage to shoot close-ups of the eyes, but fortunately, the two actors performed their heartfelt performances, expressing the emotions of the characters vividly and vividly through their eyes.
In fact, this article is about the eternal theme - love and redemption. After losing the most important person in their lives, Andry and Jerry supported and encouraged each other. Although there was constant friction between them, both of them thought of giving up. But they finally got out of the sadness with love and completed the redemption for each other.
PS: I still think the most important thing in a movie is the story, nothing else. But the way a director tells a story often also determines how well he can express a story. Starting from this holiday, when facing the images on the screen, I tried to stop being hypocritical, and no longer just express my thoughts with the story of the film as the theme, and make the film review a piece of prose. No longer obsessed with interpreting the market performance of a movie. Try to interpret light and shadow from the perspective of the camera, and look at the story with another eye!
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