(Thanks to the submission of the weekly screening report, please do not reprint
it commercially) In all respects, Emir Kusturica's new film "On the Milky Road" is called "On the Milky Road". People gasped in surprise. Not because this film is the winner of the Little Golden Lion Award at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, not because it is a feature film that won the two-time Palme d'Or winner for 9 years, but because: This is the 38 years that Kusdulika has been in film. For the first time, a film with a bride but no wedding reception was made.
The wedding reception was never absent in Kusdulika's films. Each of his films must have a wedding scene that lasts for a long time, and often serves as the key image of the whole film. why? Because the wedding banquet is not only a symbol of marriage for Ku’s films, but also an aesthetic export for him as a Serbian (former Yugoslav) director to convey the unique culture of the Balkans to a global audience. The wedding banquet not only allows the guests to celebrate the couple's marriage without any taboos, but also makes the rhythm of the story fall into a frenetic atmosphere, and it is also a way to faintly vent the true feelings that cannot be vented in some cruel reality. Borrowing a more academic explanation from film critic Goran Gocic, the wedding banquet scene is the embodiment of the Historiographic metafiction in Coo's films, which is his representation of the changing and different folk customs of the Balkans. The water chestnut is the cultural anchor found with the national beings who are "like a schizophrenic split between the Western and Eastern civilizations".
Looking at Ku’s films, these wedding receptions are sometimes national in nature. For example, “When Father Was Away on Business” features a family wedding reception at the son’s home, where father, mistress and state agent meet and remember each other. Persecuted past, Gypsies in "The Time of the Gypsies" (The Time of the Gypsies) can never have a successful wedding banquet is a painful metaphor for the group's difficulty in achieving a successful relationship with modern society, "Underground" (Underground Society) ) even pointed out how the Dito regime fooled the citizens of the Yugoslav Federation with a pair of cellar residents who had never seen the sun getting married beside a tank; sometimes it was purely aesthetic, such as "Black Cat, White Cat" The wedding reception of White Cat and "Promise Me This" is that the audiovisual form takes precedence over the meaning of the script, rubbing the existing folklore and the magic created by Ku's own, making all the wine, dance, and mischief that happen at the wedding reception. , music and laughter riots to carnival-like Dionysian madness; although more often, national allegory and aesthetic style are two sides and inseparable.
However, in "The Magical Life of the Milk Delivery Man", the marriage remains, but the wedding banquet is silent.
The story of "The Magical Life of a Milk Delivery Man" takes place on a contemporary Balkan border, where wars are frequent between military camps, but animals are full of life. A milk delivery worker (played by Kusdulika himself) rides a donkey every day to deliver milk in houses all over the country. His life is simple, and he is about to marry a local fiancée, until a beautiful woman from Italy and a woman who wants to grab the beauty A foreign warlord descended from the sky, his wedding was interrupted, and his life was thrown into chaos and wandering. According to Kusdulika and the opening word card, this story is a magical and realistic way of splicing three real events into the past (milk delivery), present (wedding) and future (walker) of the dairy worker. .
The original meaning of Balkan in Turkish is honey (Bal) and blood (Kan), and there are wild geese stained with blood from artillery fire outside the house where dairy workers store milk products, as if there is a slight metaphorical atmosphere. However, if we continue to deconstruct the “symbolic routines” of Koch’s films—ethnic films, folklore signs, ideology, and the common context of Srpskohrvatski jezik—to continue the analysis, it will surely be frustrating. , because at the moment when the wedding is about to start but is interrupted, the story turns into a single chasing journey. The men of the warlord who grabbed the marriage chased the milk workers and the Italian beauties, and they shuttled back and forth between the swamps, the river, the woods, the mountains and the shepherds, never ending.
The milkman and his bride are destined to fall into tragedy, but it is not because of the intervention of any nation and outsiders, but because their emotions themselves started from infidelity and finally separated forever. When the milkman was finally able to reunite with her lover after many years, she had become a dead soul. The two of them were wearing suits and wedding dresses, but they were invisible in their minds and in the cave. It was a wedding banquet only for spooks. The film has a more Hollywood process than Arizona Dream, its closest Hollywood-style, yet more Hollywood than Coke's escapism, Black Cat and White Cat, made out of boredom with politicians' pen. The end of escape. The spooky wedding banquet has replaced the lost nation. This banquet does not have any foreign guests to wish for, so there is no reality that needs to be vented and cannot be vented. Any political, ethnic, and cultural accusations in the Balkans are difficult to find a strong force in the play. Counterpoint. This is a too simple ronin story, and it's not very well told.
Is this Kusdulika's miss? Not shooting for nine years, being involved in foreign affairs (concurrently serving as a musician of an orchestra, film festival planner, village director, writer, etc.), and the foreign media often teased "taking advantage of beautiful actresses by directing and acting", which led to Ku's criticism of the film. The acuity is no longer?
Or, considering that he was naturalized in Serbia and the Orthodox Church, he was exiled by Sarajevo’s hometown and changed to live in seclusion in Drvengrad, which made the director choose to escape and abandon everything related to his hometown? Just like the "Underground Society" controversy that year, and as he said in an interview in 2012: "If you want to live, you must learn to forget.... Every civilized person should practice forgetting this thing"?
Not quite.
As we all know, in 2012, Kusdulika began to rebuild a new city on the ruins in 2012 under the attention of the whole country in Serbia, as a tourist attraction and preservation of historical relics. This place is exactly the ruins next to the Rena River Bridge. Kusdulika's unfulfilled dream for more than 18 years is to write the first Serbian-Croatian novel that won the Nobel Prize for Literature "The Rena River Bridge". ” onto the screen. The city is about to take shape, and Ku's suddenly led a new studio team to develop a production scale, and the visual intentions are more ambitious than the "Magic Life of a Milk Delivery Man" of the past.
coincide? I'm afraid not. A bold guess is: if Kusdulika has a heart to realize his dream, he is bound to find an artistic language equivalent to this national treasure. However, "The Magical Life of a Milk Delivery Man" is the product he made for this purpose. It is an experimental work of "self-imitation" by integrating all the video language he has used in the past 38 years.
Many people's impressions of Kusdulika's image elements—the phantom atmosphere, high-decibel singing, and Italian comic-style characters—are actually the style formed after the filming of "Song of the Wanderer" in 1988. . And senior audiences can undoubtedly doubt it. Just as Kusdulika's speech by "Mad Men" has been suspected for many years to be a public relations image he deliberately created, his image style is by no means without a conscious change, but deliberately. developed.
The library-style imitation of a specific style to achieve a script can be traced back to school days. His graduation short "Guernica" (Guernica) is an extension of the old theme of Picasso and Resnais, and returned to China to shoot "The Brides" (The Brides), which is between TV and film. Are Coming) selected the frame, slide rails and sharp furniture of like-minded German director Ou Fuss as the main theme, the feature film "Do you remember Dolibel?" "(Do You Remember Dolly Bell?") and "When Dad Was on a Business Trip" were both quiet, steady, and high-contrast color blocks, and won the international maiden reputation; together with several documentaries and several advertisements during their stay in Europe, 38 years It has been proved again and again that he is not some old master who can rule the world with one trick and a half, but a chameleon whose foundation is his profound skills.
From this point of view, "The Magical Life of the Milk Delivery Man" is actually Kusdulica's own cutting experiment. The script deliberately returned to the same origin after he directed "The Bride is Coming": the bride and marriage, but cut out the wedding banquet, in other words, cut out the political mission of the national fable, and let the script in turn cooperate with the formal experiment. The form he wants is to try to integrate the tranquility of the early stage, the madness of the later stage and the resources of the new studio, and to use all his heart and energy to create his own most skilled visual trick-visual spectacle.
The Magical Life of the Milk Delivery Man brings together every spectacle of Cuisine's films. There are not only his consistent circus spectacles: flying eagles fighting with helicopters, wild geese lining up with blood, donkeys running at high speed, and giant snakes repaying their gratitude through human nature; but also seeing the magic tricks he once used, "The Wanderer" The house that collapsed and flew away in Song of Songs, the human body falling into the well in "Black Cat and White Cat", and the Son of Man hanging the clock tower with ropes in "Promise Me" are all repeated in this film.
Kusdulica is already very good at creating strange visual effects. His special effects are neither the poor imagination that Hollywood is inferior to video games behind the sophistication of technology (how many times have the Avengers series used smoke and fringe lights?), nor is it that some art directors rely on dialogue and postplots The image that can be established is greater than the imagination, but the most specific props are used to design a way to meet the audience's expectations but exceed the audience's expectations (for example, "Song of the Wanderer" is a must for the gypsies to burn the church paper house to show their disdain. on earth), and lively.
The self-imitation of these visual spectacles has been further sublimated with the help of the new studio and new team whose production level has improved, making "The Magical Life of the Milk Delivery Man" surpass the well-balanced "Life Is a Miracle" (Life Is a Miracle) Miracle), became the most exquisite production in Kusdulika's personal history. In the middle of the story, the journey of you chasing me and fleeing is endless. The people in the play are as tired as the audience, echoing the breath of the milkman who has been escaping all his life; however, on top of the tiredness of reincarnation, there are constantly stacking visuals. pleasure. The most obvious is the use of color. For the first time, Kusdulika's film has restrained the excessive and eye-sore brown and red (this also includes the co-production "All the Invisible Children" (All the Invisible Children). )), it is also the first time that the lighting can not be affected by rough props from beginning to end, and the photography will not be affected by the landscape that is only half-built, but it is a work that has a strong sense of film. As for the mountains and the sea, over the hills and the plains, as well as the superb Shihai-kong at the end, there is no doubt that they are super spectacles; looking at the whole year of 2016, there are few films that can surpass the visual spectacle. The height of The Magical Life of the Milk Delivery Man.
These exquisite visual experiments make Kusdulica's new work, even though the story seems conservative, but it is difficult to conceal its excellence and ability; at least as a pre-experiment for "The Bridge over the Rena", it is enough.
A friend once said that my view is a typical over-interpretation of the mentality of a fanboy. The intuitive reaction of normal people should be that they are dissatisfied with the old craftsman being so conservative this time. A fanboy? Maybe. But don't forget, if Kusdulika was ridiculed for "Black Cat and White Cat" back then, but returned beautifully with "Life is a Miracle" 6 years later, what reason do movie fans have not to escort such a director once in a while? Looking forward to the next miracle? This active director who claims to have more than a dozen ideas on hand to shoot, just like the milkman he plays, still carries the love and sweetness of life behind his back, and perseveres to continue his journey of exploration.
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