The neon lights are all illusions
——Interpretation of "Ferris Wheel"
tyger tyger
(The original edition of the "Iris" online magazine with graphic and text version, March 15, 2018, the title was changed by the editor https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/d6w55tZuGGNVT_aUHFkocw )
"He left me, and I just started to understand what love is," she said, with sadness in her voice, the golden-red flame-like light and shadow on her face gradually dimmed, and the cold moonlight shone on her, and she had an affair with her. lifeguard. Just as the first marriage made her understand what love is, from the second she understood what love is not...
Ginny (Kate Winslet), a female clerk in a restaurant on Coney Island, confided her past to her lover Mickey (Justin Timberlake), and the film "Wonder Wheel" was just 1/4 of the way. Obviously, Woody Allen and director of photography Vittorio Storaro hope to use the changes of light and shadow here to reflect the ups and downs of the characters' inner emotions, and even construct some kind of visual metaphor related to the whole film.
"Ferris Wheel" opens with a hot summer beach on Coney Island (next to Brooklyn, New York), and the lifeguard in the lookout seat at Station 7—Mickey starts his story facing the camera, as a graduate student in European theater at NYU , he is ambitious, trying to create a world-shattering work, and the summer job at Coney Island is a small adjustment in life. We learned that Mickey, like Prince Hamlet in Shakespeare's classics, encountered the dilemma of choice in his life, but here TO BE OR NOT TO BE was replaced by Ginny OR Carolina, the former Ginny, the restaurant waitress, has already followed He had an affair, and Carolina was born by Ginny's husband and his ex-wife. Now she was chased by her gangster husband for leaking secrets and fled to her father's house.
Undoubtedly, "Ferris Wheel" is very closely related to drama. In the love triangle relationship on the surface of the film, Mickey's major is drama and wants to be a playwright, while Ginny used to be a small actor. Ginny and Mickey discuss the tragic protagonist and seem to be pursuing their own destiny. Mickey seduces Carolina. It is a work of drama psychology; and in the inner structure of the plot, we can also see the traces of the stage everywhere, Mickey is the worldly version of Hamlet, and the lust and betrayal in the film are similar to Eugene O'Neill (who is mentioned in the film). and), Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and other American drama masters of the classic plays are taken care of from time to time; a series of dramatic propositions such as imitation, performance, etc. have also been quietly moved into the "Ferris Wheel". in the plot.
We may wish to review the scene mentioned at the beginning again. When Ginny confided her love history with Mickey for the first time, the flame-like golden red should be regarded as Ginny's inner display in Mickey's eyes, but the paradox is also in the middle. Before this scene, Ginny was staring at herself in front of the mirror on the dressing table in the bedroom, repeating the words she wanted to tell Mickey, "To tell you the truth, Mickey, I'm married", as if the actors were rehearsing over and over again. Upcoming repertoire. As a result, the "authenticity" of the seaside passage becomes doubtful. Is this woman shrouded in flames Mickey's wishful phantom, or Ginny's own self, or is she just willing to be accepted by Mickey and carefully created an image?
In any case, Storaro's mastery of color and tone here is top-notch, and he even reminds us of a passage from Madame Bovary, which is also an affair story: "...for a time The fire that shone through the gray sky in her heart, was covered by shadows, and gradually dimmed.... The enthusiasm had been burned to ashes, no one came to help, and no sun was shining. She felt the dark night in all directions, and she was lost to the bones. In the cold." In Coney Island in the 1950s, it was not the fire in Emma's living room that illuminated the people, but the neon lights of the Ferris wheel and the surrounding playground, where Storaro used gold, red and The orange-red light sets off Ginny, while the cool-toned blue accents Carolina. "Ginny's world is opposed to Carolina's world because they both fall in love with Mickey," says Storaro, "which brings me to the theory of color physiology, ... the visual potential of stories motivates me to build a symbolic structure , a cinematic concept about two opposing worlds: fantasy and reality. Ginny's world is the warm tones of an orange-red sunset, while Carolina's is a dull blue cool." Carolina's first appearance goes to a restaurant to find Ginny , Through the dark front hall, I saw Ginny who was cleaning up by the counter. She was illuminated by a lamp, like a stage chasing light covering the protagonist. Mickey's dilemma between Ginny Red and Carolina Blue shows the inherent uncertainty of love.
As the heroine, rather than saying that Ginny is in a tangle between her husband Humpty (note the special connotation of the word Humpty in the English genealogy) and her lover Mickey, it is better to say that she is trapped in her own illusion of love. The discussion of tragedy foreshadows the theme: is it fate or the protagonist's own flaws that cause the tragedy. Her son Richie, a boy with unreasonable eccentricities, likes to set fires in every place for no reason - seaside walks, schools and psychiatric clinics, and his only hobby is to hide in movie theaters, hiding in the dark Only the movie theater can give him a moment of peace. The beatings of his stepfather and the diagnosis and treatment of the psychiatrist have no effect on him. Ginny herself indulges in fantasy and hates reality, driven by lust (fire is its symbol), unable to be analyzed, accepted and cured by ordinary life feeling (represented by Humpty) and reason (psychological clinic), in my opinion, this The strange child who was closely related to her and gave her a headache was almost a personification of her inner world.
The self-illusion of eroticism and its disintegration is a fairly common theme for Woody Allen, as in recent works, Blue Jasmine is, of course, the heroine from that coveted Once the class has fallen, it has become grassroots. This time, "Ferris Wheel" portrays a humble and down-to-earth woman in the nostalgic scene of Coney Island. The phrase "each has its own misfortune" may be an old tune, but it's also a pretty powerful argument.
In the whole film, there is an obvious time-staggered scene, which is the mysterious garden where Mickey and Ginny have two trysts. The garden was built in the late 1990s and opened to the public in 1999. Come to think of it, Woody Allen intends to present his subject with such a borrowed/grafted scene:
All tragedies stem from the misplacement of the self.
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