" A young man's desire for a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old virgin's body is more direct and less "hazy"! So what does Buñuel's "Hazy Desires" mean? It may be said that the rich man's desire is always at a nebulous distance from the result of his desire because he has never been satisfied and always encounters an insurmountable wall at the last moment. This is the most straightforward explanation. It provides insight into one of the most important characteristics of desire: desire is always most strongly motivated by something infinite that is always out of reach. Besides, does Conchita, who is the object of man's desire, have desire in itself? The intention of Conchita in the movie is ambiguous. She is sometimes a female liar who plays with men's feelings and cheats money, and sometimes she has her own unique understanding of love, so she repeatedly tests her man and pursues some kind of pure love. woman. Conchita's inner psychological authenticity is even more ambiguous because the story is told through the mouth of a rich man. If she also has some kind of desire, obviously this desire is also quite hazy.
Furthermore, does the film express some desire for its creator, Buñuel?
If kitsch is defined as the belief that the present state of the world is the inevitable consequence of some kind of rationale. Buñuel is a master of anti-kitsch. His films always try to debunk the illusions of reality, subverting the once commonplace vision of safety to the audience. In the first scene of "Beauty by Daylight", a horse-drawn carriage drives a young couple slowly along a quiet forest path. The picture is tranquil and beautiful, with a pleasant scenery. This is a typical picture in nineteenth-century romantic literature. Just as the audience follows this line of thinking to establish an imaginative identity, suddenly, without any foreshadowing, the husband pulls the wife off the carriage and ties her to the road. On the tree next to him, he tore off his clothes and began to beat him with a leather whip. Just as his wife's cry and wailing shocked the audience, she suddenly woke up from the bed. It turned out like a dream. Buñuel is full of this trick to deceive the audience with the alternation of reality and dream, as if to remind the audience all the time: what you see is only an illusion, everything is a deception. The most famous example is in "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," where six bourgeois people come to a room for a meal. They chatted happily, glad they could finally find a place to eat quietly. Suddenly, the curtain on one wall of the room opened, and there was a welcome applause. It turned out that they were on the stage in full view.
Dramatic effect is achieved through the "unconventional" use of convention, which is present in early films. In Chaplin's Immigrant, Charlie, who was abandoned by his wife due to alcoholism, stands with his back to the camera at a table with a picture of his wife. His shoulders shrugged, and the audience naturally thought he was sobbing sadly, but suddenly he turned around and turned out to be mixing a cocktail.
What novelty was given to Bunuel in the hands of this common expression of cinema?
In "Hazy Desires", Buñuel no longer completely dissolves the reality of the moment through abrupt changes, but leaves various discordant stains in the routine scene. They are distributed throughout the film. Here are a few examples: After a big quarrel with Conchita, the rich man came out of his home angrily, intending to leave here and go to Paris. Suddenly, a car on the side of the road exploded for no reason. The frame was completely filled with explosions of flame and smoke for several seconds - a bizarre event that suddenly interrupted the normal sequence of reality. The rich man in the study is making a deal with Conchita's mother, and he wants to use the money to buy Conchita. The servant pushed the door and came in, signaling the rich man to pay attention to something under the table. The audience followed the rich man's eyes and saw a mouse caught by a mousetrap and struggling desperately; the rich man and his cousin were dining in the restaurant, talking about With Conchita.. The rich man stopped the conversation and brought the waiter to complain to him that we saw a large fly in his cocktail glass.
What was the intention of the mice and flies in that accidental explosion? A metaphor of reality or some random event? Buñuel is a staunch atheist. He does not believe that everything in reality is arranged by God, or that there is a divine basis behind everything in reality. He remained cynical in his later years, venting his despair and dissatisfaction with movies. (The suggestion of political persecution and terrorist activities in "Hazy Desires") In his opinion, everything that is taken for granted may contain some logic, but this logic is fragile and unreliable, and it can simply operate at will through accidental events ( In "Hazy", when the rich bought a house for Conchita and Conchita humiliated the rich man, we seem to be able to conclude that Conchita is a liar, but she came to the rich man the next day to explain Later, things included some kind of turnaround. This turnaround was finally realized on the train). As such, Boo's films contain almost imperceptible contingencies. They are the stains of reality, in Lacan's words, the remnants of reality that cannot be brought into the symbolic order by the Big Other, which will eventually subvert the normal order of reality.
The unconventional use of conventions developed in Buñuel into a unique artistic style guided by a specific philosophical worldview. This style effectively distances the work of art from reality, and also prevents the work of art from becoming a tool of the audience's conventional psychological expectations. In Buñuel's eyes, the world is forever hazy because it always contains incomprehensible elements that cannot be incorporated into the established order, and only art itself is clear. This is Buñuel's "hazy" desire; always maintaining the ambiguous nature of reality.
In "Hazy Desire," we can never understand the real relationship between the rich man and Conchita, which is reinforced by the film's narrative. The plot of the film's story is mainly narrated to several other passengers in the carriage on the train to Paris after the rich man had a big fight with Conchita. The reliability of this narrative is highly questionable. First of all, the rich man just had a big fight at this time, how can the narrative in the emotional impulse be reliable? The audience saw the rich man pour a bucket of water on Conchita, who we didn't know at the time, before driving. We, like the passengers in the carriage, had doubts about the rich man's mental state and character. How much truth can his words contain? In addition, the rich man is talking about his love (desire) for a young and beautiful girl, and the sensitivity of the content also makes people suspect that he will deliberately hide some unfavorable content. Such an unreliable narrator has of course made the truth extremely "hazy". In the end we found that Conchita also came to avenge the train with a bucket of water. Then, the train stopped, and we saw Conchita get off the train with the rich man, as if they were back in their old relationship.
A metaphor that appears before the end of the film is a very apt hint of Buñuel's attitude towards reality: the rich man and Conchita come to a window, where a middle-aged woman is sitting and sewing a wedding dress, the wedding dress directly corresponds The thing is a pure bride that is not owned, but it is broken, so is the real world, it is broken before it is understood by people. The rich man and Conchita began to quarrel with so-and-so again over something, and the harmonious relationship they had just established was split again. Harmony—split, clarity—blur this never-ending cycle and struggle begins again. Suddenly, a huge explosion sounded behind them, and the picture was filled with flames and smoke for a few seconds. Perhaps, for Buñuel, that was certain.
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