account in February) A person who cannot get out of a sad past, such a story is difficult to tell in a movie. Sadness has no substance and no color flavor. How to make the audience feel the sadness of the characters? "Manchester by the Sea" presents us with a good template for grief.
How does the movie express the emotions of the characters? This problem is far from being as easy as it seems. For example, if you want to show a sad person, the worst way to play may be to let him drink and cry. But movies always need to tell a story, so visualizing the sad state of a character directly is very ineffective and tedious. The ideal way is to place grief in a plot structure that turns invisible grief into an infectious emotion.
A man who was destroyed by his sad past to the point of despair, he could not face life, he lived like a walking dead, and he did not have the courage to start a new life. "Manchester by the Sea" externalizes this piercingly cold inner sadness. The creators use various forms and techniques to build up an almost airtight net. We outside the screen are without exception. Grief hits, trapped like the hero, with no escape.
This web of form is achieved by careful design at several levels of narrative structure, flashbacks, music and empty mirrors. It's a bit close to those low-level everyday tragedies of Raymond Carver - writing ordinary things in ordinary but accurate language and giving them vast and amazing power. A good movie should not express emotions indulgently, but needs restraint. Of course, the premise of restraint is to construct a sufficient emotional core through narrative.
The film's narrative structure, quietly brings a powerful emotional force.
The film adopts a narrative structure in which two story lines of the past and the present are interspersed and paralleled. The past event (the death of his son in a fire) serves as the painful memory of the protagonist Lee Chandler, which influences and determines the way Lee now handles his brother's funeral. action. This structure may not seem complicated, but if you think this is a natural choice, you are wrong.
In an interview, the director mentioned that such a two-line narrative structure was the most powerful structure that was finally chosen after repeated entanglement. The first draft of the script written by the director develops in linear time, from the hero's past to the present. But this chronological structure makes the director feel very dull and boring. He almost completely overturned the story mode of the first draft.
It's not until the director cuts into the story from his favorite snow shoveling scene and begins to restructure the narrative that the story has the emotional power of form. The director cuts off the character's story line in the middle and turns it into a dual juxtaposition of past and present. The past is not presented directly, but buried deep in the characters' memories.
The final narrative structure does make the audience curious as to why this character behaves so strangely and withdrawn, and what kind of painful past lies behind his indifference, violence, and inaccessibility.
The double-line structure of the flashback reveals little by little the sad past lurking under the calm sea of the characters' daily life. It seems to invite the audience to slowly enter the abyss of the character's heart from the outside. Once the memory is summoned, the grief of the characters has nowhere to hide, and it also hits us off-screen.
The combination of the two lines seems to be loose, but it is not. The interspersed memory and the present rely on rigorous narrative logic to form a corresponding structure in which the past and the present mirror each other. Both lines have a logic of starting and turning. The current timeline moving forward is the process of Lee handling his brother's funeral and being the guardian of his nephew, and the past timeline is the process of the destruction of a happy family.
Memory is based on human perception and conscious activities, so it is not physical, linear and one-way. A person's real memories must be scattered fragments that disrupt the timing. However, in order to form the symmetry of the structure, the film also adopts a linear chronological one-way structure for the past timeline, and the memory unfolds chronologically according to the emotional logic of the characters.
Another benefit of the two-line structure is that this is a character incapacitated, which is a big problem for mainstream narrative films. When the characters face everything, they just endure rather than take action, and the behavior of the characters cannot drive the plot direction and build the story flow, and the mainstream narrative construction principles will lose their effect, making it difficult to advance the narrative. But the use of flashbacks solves the problem that the narrative is difficult to advance to a certain extent. Because memories are always unpredictable, when driving, when one is alone, like a beast devouring happiness, invading the character's moment, the character is unable to resist, and is pushed forward by the memory.
The structured use of flashbacks also summons the audience to feel the sadness of the characters to the greatest extent.
The film controls the rhythm of flashbacks very precisely, and every editing point is light and soft like snowflakes. However, in the slow and slow progress of the plot, it has formed an emotional force as powerful as an avalanche in our hearts. The result of the slow accumulation of soft things.
Flashbacks are often used conservatively in mainstream narrative films. This is because most mainstream films tend to construct an illusion of immersing people in the virtual world. Therefore, such flashbacks that interrupt the current narrative flow may It may make us wander and wander, thus breaking the illusion of the present moment.
Therefore, the audience may feel that the first few flashbacks of "Manchester by the Sea" are rather abrupt at first. Li is driving the car, and it seems that there is not much emotional foreshadowing, and he jumps back to the past directly from the present of the characters. However, when the audience gradually constructs the character's life in their minds, flashbacks become a particularly powerful technique, as if a person shares his sad and painful past with you. A secret emotional complicity is established between the characters.
The fire is the heaviest note in the whole film and the source of all the pain of the characters. Therefore, this flashback adopts a nuanced editing method based on emotion and thinking logic. This scene, with very short, clipped and extremely fragmented flashbacks, is closer to an on-and-off stream of consciousness, showing how difficult the memory of this past event is for the characters to touch.
In the lawyer's office, Li recalled the time when he unintentionally started a fire that killed his three children. This scene is only 12 to 13 minutes long, but it switches between the past and the present 14 times. The speed of flashbacks and jumps is from fast to slow, and the length of shots and scenes is getting longer and longer. Especially in the first three or four minutes of memory, it took more than a dozen flashbacks, and some scenes were only one or two seconds long, and they flashed by in a flash. This shows the precise control of the flashback rhythm.
This is because Li has always buried this memory in the deepest corner of his heart, daring not to touch it, nor to enter it. When he starts to recall this passage, it is resistant and painful, so the flashbacks are constantly interrupted, jumping back to the present.
The elaborate setting of the narrative structure and the systematic use of flashbacks are highly rational designs at the technical level. The formation of the film's huge emotional power also relies on some more abstract and poetic techniques, such as the use of empty shots, which is also the part that impresses me the most.
The film rarely uses close-ups, and rarely stares at the protagonist's face for long periods of time. The lens is very much like a way of viewing the characters by the audience, and the close-up is closer to a kind of gaze, which is an approximation of the face. The director is very calm and restrained in the use of camera scenes, trying his best to avoid excessive emotional exposition.
On the big screen, close-ups of faces are very visually striking, but the director always looks at the characters from a safe, non-aggressive distance. For example, when Li went to tell his nephew and brother's death, he used a large panoramic shot, as if the scene was too sad, and people couldn't bear to get too close.
Even in the two most heartbreaking scenes in the film - Lee's conversation with his ex-wife and Lee's saying "I can't beat it" to his nephew, the camera doesn't give Lee a close-up, always using medium and close shots to represent the characters. Usually, many directors often set up some body movements and postures to express the psychology of the characters when preserving the close-up shots. But the director of this film gave up the external action, and did not push the camera to the sad face of the characters. This kind of distance is more like a kind of compassion.
The camera is carefully distanced from the characters, but the grief is so great that it seems to overflow the screen. So, after the desperate scenes, the camera seems to be unable to bear to look directly at the sadness of the characters, and turns its eyes to the scenery, to the houses on the shore in the snow, the dock, the flying seagulls, and the cold sea in winter.
Few films use empty shots so systematically, instead of using scenery as the background, they use the scenery in the empty shots to express people's emotions. All scenery words are love words, and the scenery must be intrinsically related to the characters to be meaningful. Pedestrian Karatani believes that the landscape is closely connected with the inner state of loneliness. Only those who are lonely in their hearts can discover the thousand words of scenery. All the scenery in the film, like Li's emotional externalization, assumes a narrative role rather than a simple representation of natural scenery.
In the film, the scenery of the small town of Manchester on the east coast of the United States has the power to speak. The lens is always in cool tones, the sea and sky in winter are light gray and blue, the churches and houses bathed in white in the winter sun, and the boats moored quietly in the snow, showing the silent scenery in a kind of silence. strength.
Back to music.
A narrative film should use plot and action to show the emotions of the characters, and the abuse of music is a manifestation of insufficient narrative ability. As such, film music is often the object of cultural bias, and film theorists liken it to wallpaper to emphasize its stylized, decorative, and redundant nature. So, it's not hard to see why some people think that "Manchester by the Sea" uses music too often and is sensational.
I don't agree with this point of view, I think the use of music in the film is just right. In Manchester by the Sea, music is an important part of the audio-visual structure, which has both a plot function and an aesthetic function. Ultimately, music becomes a part of the emotional structure of the characters.
This is because this character is essentially powerless. Apart from finding faults and beating people, there are almost no other external actions in the film to express Li's inner feelings, and his sadness is powerless to vent. Therefore, music becomes a substitute for the inner voice of the characters to express the emotions of the characters, which is the plot function of music.
In addition, music can form a continuity between past and present through the continuity of the sound axis, so that the continuity of narrative and emotion is not interrupted by recollection. Li's flashbacks while driving are interspersed with music to form an audio-visual montage. The gentle and solemn orchestral music and the bright and solemn vocal chorus brought the audience into Li's painful past.
In the fire flashbacks, how to keep the emotional intensity from being diluted by the highly fragmented and complex jumping clips requires the use of hearing to establish a kind of stability and balance the visual clutter. In the baroque-style Adagio in G minor, Li's beautiful world collapsed before his eyes. The organ, cello and violin seemed to be sobbing soothingly soothing the crushed heartbreaker.
Depicting such a desperate person, and carefully weaving it into an invisible net with various forms and techniques, drags the audience into the abyss of the characters, and feels this grief from which there is nowhere to escape. Of course, a good movie should have this kind of appeal.
But what's even better is that it allows the audience to get in and out of it, so there is room for speculation and observation. In the story, the creator's grief isn't always neat and overwhelming, there's always some flashes of humorous details (nephew pals discussing Star Wars, nephew's always unsuccessful sex, difficult communication at lunch after funerals) dialogues), these humors with the texture of everyday life, like a light force, trying to pull Li out of the heaviness of everyday life.
At the same time, we see that redemption is not impossible. Religion, new family, work and life—there are more than one path to redemption. The older brother's ex-wife broke free from alcoholism and became a devout Christian; Lee's ex-wife Randy formed a new family to conceive and have a child, resisting death with the new birth; the nephew continued to play in the band and fell in love; the uncle found a new job in another city.
Everyone has a way of fighting grief, and we can't blame them for their forgetfulness. After all, ordinary people have no strength to resist redemption. But Li chose not to forget, he was unwilling to be redeemed, he condensed the mourning into an incomparably strong crystal, and carried it with him.
Suddenly I felt that the reason why this character was so heart-wrenching was not just because of fate's malicious push against him, but because he chose to bear it alone in the face of this enormous power. This originally cheerful and optimistic man chose to give up all his happiness and threw himself into an abyss of eternal doom. This commitment may be greater than the power of fate.
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