The film is based on Graham Greene's novel of the same name, which is based on a doomed extramarital affair between the author himself (Maurice Bendrix) and Lady Catherine Walston (Sarah), and reveals through the personal perspectives of different characters involved in the same scene. It explores the blind spots of personal cognition, examines the elements of jealousy and infatuation in relationships, and the lack of insight and understanding of people's own feelings. The novel explores the existence or not of God through the occurrence of miracles, and also injects the color of religious belief into it. In order to increase the drama and tension of the film, Jordan made a bold adaptation of the novel. He did not take the heroine's life until the end of the story rather than in the middle of the story, and it turned out that his gamble was successful.
The movie begins on a rainy night in London in 1946. The writer Maurice and his friend Henry met unexpectedly in the park in the middle of the street. They saw a man he had been deeply envious of walking in the rain. Memory lock. He took him home, and on the stairs up the stairs, the sultry memory fragments began to flash back constantly, interlacing with the real scenes. As an audience, at the beginning of the film, you have to be very careful to distinguish what is true and what is true. magical.
The relationship between the characters in the story is actually a love triangle common in clichéd melodrama: in 1939 in London, a handsome and enthusiastic novelist meets a beautiful and elegant lady who is trapped in a mediocre and boring marriage. tidy. The novelist is romantic, passionate, but jealous, longing for his lover's whole heart, but unable to fully believe in her love for him because her lover is always unwilling or unable to leave her boring husband. In the years of cheating, jealousy and suspicion alternately tormented this pair of lovers, until one day in 1944, a bomb dropped by the German Blitz hit their "Garden of Eden", severely damaged Bendrix, and separated a moment ago. Sweet lovers, an extramarital affair came to an abrupt end with a question that Bendrix couldn't solve.
After meeting two years later, the slow-witted husband in the past seems to have finally noticed, and begins to suspect that his wife is not in love. He admits to his friends that he is struggling with the lurking desire to investigate his wife, but he does not know that the Pandora Demon in Bendrix's heart The box was opened in this way, and under the guise of Henry, he commissioned a private detective to investigate the traces of his former lover Sarah, intending to dig out the invisible rival and solve his own confusion. It was not until he stole Sarah's diary that Bendrix finally understood from Sarah's self-narration that the "third party" was God, a mysterious transaction that Sarah made to save his life and God at the price of love.
Neither the author nor the director intends to discuss the morality of marriage, but instead focus on the excavation of human nature, the conflict between belief and love. The most successful thing about the film and what I like the most is the way it tells the story, that is, through the two protagonists from their own standpoints and different perspectives to repeatedly observe and narrate the same scene and the same scene, complement each other, present the complete truth of the incident, and overcome the problem. The limitation of human cognitive ability at any one "point in time" provides a similar "omniscient" ability. So you can see that the same scene keeps appearing, but with different narration, the truth is changing.
Some of the details of the film are handled so well that I am extremely impressed:
One of them is that Bendrix is hit by a bomb, wakes up, goes upstairs, only to see Sarah lying on the back. He was puzzled and asked her in confusion, wouldn't it be more practical to go downstairs to investigate? She was surprised at first, then calm and cold, and replied, "I'm praying, pray to anything might exist." The traces of tears on her hands revealed the suppressed grief beneath her suddenly estranged face. He begged her not to leave, and she just kept saying, "Love does not end just because we don't see each other. People go on loving god, don't they? All their lives, without seeing him." He didn't believe in God, and he said angrily: "That's not my kind of love." She answered sadly: "Maybe there is no other kind." Between questions and answers, his suspicion and jealousy, his possession, she His love, his hatred, his shattered dreams, all presented.
The other is when Bendrix listened to the detective's report at home, and placed the ashtray given by the detective on the table. The camera turned to a book, and stayed long enough to see that the title of the book was "The vicarious lover", by Maurice Bendrix. The juxtaposition of the two means infinity. "Stupid Lover": This is his perception of his position in her heart.
As for the monologue of the film, it is quite wonderful, and even when I watched it, I couldn't help but record it:
I measure my love by the extent of jealousy, and as my jealousy is infinite, my love should be infinity too.
She only makes love to me, but she has shop, cook and fall sleep with you.
I will give up on him forever, please, let him live, I promise I will never see him again. But if he is alive, then I am dead. There is nothing in the world that makes sense to me anymore. I can't take responsibility for that kind of commitment, but something tells me that I have to. I challenged fate, fate accepted, and I am now, in the desert without him.
God, you emptied my love and filled it with emptiness.
Is this coincidence, I wonder, or why life happened, and if this is life, am I stuck with it? Whatever it is, I can't defy it anymore, it did win, and we lost.
Tell Him I'm sorry . I'm too human. Too weak. Tell Him I can't keep my promises. I'm tired of being without you.
Pain is easy to write about, we are very separate individuals in suffering; but what is happiness to write about Woolen cloth?
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