After experiencing the lavish favor of the aging Queen Elizabeth I and the demise of the Golden Age, Orlando still continues the privilege of eternal youth bestowed upon him by the Queen. Regardless of the changing times or genders, almost every half-century he finds his heart's desire: love, poetry, politics, socializing, sex, procreation. Orlando is shaped as an ideal personality, maintaining the tireless curiosity and freshness of human beings about life, and exploring all the way. During the reign of King James, Orlando asked great poets for the tips of writing poetry. Although he was fooled, he paid high commissions. He was modest; in the middle of the 18th century, Mrs. The towering wig on the top of her head, her smile is as pink and moving as the two smears of pink on her cheeks, she listens to and refutes the so-called rhetoric of nobles and celebrities; after losing the castle fief, Orlando, as a mother-to-be, is heading to her twenties vigorously. century. It is not only Orlando's skin that keeps youth forever, but also his heart. The peerless beauty is not afraid of eternal life, and maintains a pure heart, but the more she lives, the more she understands.
The character of Orlando is strongly reflective in the frame of the film. Beauvoir once proposed that women are not born, but rather gradually formed, stemming from the patriarchal system and patriarchal consciousness. So they are considered second sex. Such a plot in Orlando from male to female seems to be paving the way for the growth of women. When Orlando, as a man, was abandoned by the Russian princess in the ice and snow, he said: I can only find 3 words to describe women, none of which are worth mentioning, and their emotions reveal a disgust for a proud woman and a loss of love. The exact same conversation resumes when Orlando, as a woman, rejects Duke Harry's marriage proposal.
You are so kind to me, but I can't accept it.
why? I am the whole of England. Even you are mine.
Where does this start?
because I adore you. (British people really like to use i adore you)
That means I belong to you?
Men are deprived of their own words at this time. Women overcome rigidity with softness, dialogue with authority, and express their thoughts. Woman is no longer a gender, but an ideal. Because he has been a man, he understands the badness of a man better. At this time, Orlando becomes a real woman through her thoughts, not through clothes, from him to her.
One of my favorite scenes in the whole film is when Orlando refused to propose marriage but was teased about her life of loneliness, she picked up her large whalebone skirt and slid into the green wall of the garden. Squeeze all the way forward, approaching step by step with strings and flutes, passing through layers of labyrinths, and rushing out of the heavy fog, it is 1850, the Victorian era, 100 years later. Orlando threw himself on the green grass and breathed a sigh of relief: Naturally, I am your bride, please take me away. The addition of the piano made her peerless independence even more magnificent, and she also met new hope. A strange and adventurous man from America rode a horse and took her to see the train. After the man left, she looked up in a daze and saw the plane glide across the sky.
Four hundred years is also a magnificent history of British Empire clothing. From the vibrant baroque trend of the 17th century, to the blossoming neoclassicism of the 18th century, to the clean and simple modern trousers. Sally Potter and Tilda Swinton interpret a thousand-changing life. When Orlando, as a mother, sat again under the original towering tree and watched her children play, she shed a line of tears under the agitation of the strong rhythm of electronic drums.
The child asked: why are you sad?
No, no, I am very happy.
The angel in the background sings: I am on earth, I am in the sky, I am still blooming.
To describe Orlando's amazing four hundred years in one sentence, I want to use the name of a song "ART OF LIFE" to describe
the art of living.
Woolf said that people should not be still life in a vase for people to watch, but a rhythm that spreads on the grassland and dances with the wind. Life is not an arrangement, but a pursuit. There is no answer to the meaning of life. But even if there is no answer, enjoy life without an answer to the fullest.
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In addition to the emotional core of the movie itself, the
soundtrack, especially the opening and ending singer (Jimmy Somerville), is male and female Mo Bian's singing, strange and beautiful.
Blurred electronica follows almost constantly to move the story forward.
Today, more than 20 years later, such adaptations of modern pioneers are still so rare and precious.
by Rotten Wood
2014.6.20 Shanghai Film Festival Watching Journal
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