It's overused, and it can be used in almost every movie that writes about people. That's right, life is all-encompassing, positive, negative, hopeless, absurd, utilitarian, cruel, gentle, crazy, depressing. . . It's all part of life. In the end, it is inseparable from emotions and desires. For thousands of years, what the movie (story) is doing here is the same thing. To sum it up in one sentence, "This is life" has become the answer to everything.
This film is even more obvious. Fifty characters are sketched, and they are all ordinary people; they are concerned about their daily life, and they do not need to be grandstanding with too many eccentricities. They maintain a calm distance and bring the audience to the scene of life.
But so what? Looking back on the people and things that have appeared in it, which one is beyond our imagination? The man still "remembers" the bank's investment during sex, the hairdresser vents on the client's hair when he is in a bad mood, the homeless drags the dead dog, and even the woman tells her boyfriend to leave her and turns around but says she will go back to the other party soon. . . It can be regarded as a paradox of neuroticism, but can it be said to be provocative?
No. We are used to hearing these jokes, and any one of them alone will only be criticized as a cliché. However, is it effective to broadcast them together?
Not quite. Roy Andersson's sensitivity (or even fascination) for the details of life is unquestionable, but the key is how it "expresses", not the "content" of his obsession.
The pink-grey tone of the film, the melancholy wind music and the stalemate distance combine into a unified tone, which is full of vicissitudes and helplessness, depression and even more indifference. It can be seen that the concentration of emotions has been carefully controlled, and the more intense adjectives are useless, they are all profound, ambiguous and abstract. The audience is not involved from beginning to end, maintaining a very personal observation distance, which is a kind of contemplative withdrawal.
Beyond that, there are other hints to this brooding withdrawal from the film. The director placed various "bystanders" in each short story, and most of them were the protagonists in another short story. On the scene of being "bystanders", their wait-and-see behavior was emphasized, and many scenes were switched by one after another, either near or far, and the director was establishing a line of "extraction-observation- The hotline of "Contemplation" not only allows the audience to immerse themselves in this habit when watching the show, and naturally meditate, but also expresses the interchange of the roles of "seeing and being watched" in life at any time.
It is this kind of contemplative tone, which was not originally a gimmick, and became the right place to laugh. It was a kind of self-soothing after a loss, a wry smile, a gray humor.
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