This article was first published on the WeChat public account of Global Screen
For domestic audiences, Spanish films have gained a good reputation in recent years.
Films such as "The Invisible Guest", the Spanish version of "Perfect Stranger" and "The Mirage" have constructed layers of plot reversals based on subtle creativity.
Recently, another Spanish sci-fi thriller has become popular in China, so let’s talk about it today-
"Hunger Platform"
As the feature film debut of rookie director Garde Gaztruh Urrutia, "Hunger Platform" performed very well.
After its debut at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019, it was widely acclaimed. Rotten Tomatoes' 82% freshness and MTC 73 points are great recognition for this type of film.
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There is no doubt that the most amazing part of "Hunger Platform" comes from its high-concept setting.
The story of the whole film takes place in the "prison pit". This is a vertical prison with 333 floors. On each floor, there are two detainees. Some are criminals, while others choose to live in it. "volunteer".
"Prison Pit" has a foreign name-the vertical self-management center.
Let me talk about "vertical" first. This prison is extremely unfriendly to people with acrophobia. There is a rectangular cavity in the middle of each cell, and each floor is about six meters high. One can imagine how deadly this is.
This hollow is actually a passage through and staying on the platform that transports prison food every day. Regardless of the depressing minimalist style of the prison itself, daily prison food is not simple.
Large lobsters and breaded crabs with attractive body, exquisite cream desserts and multi-layer cakes, whether it is Japanese or French cuisine.
The upper kitchen is a Michelin three-star style, carefully selected ingredients are cooked into a daily gluttonous feast.
Of course things are not that simple. The platform full of food will be teleported down from the top of the prison every day, staying on each floor for a short time.
Storing food in private will cause the temperature of the cell to rise or fall sharply, and there is no way to survive.
People in the upper tier will eat more, and those in the lower tier will eat less.
Although the daily food is enviable, for the people below the prison, what is waiting for them will be leftovers from the upper level, and this is already considered luck. As long as the number of floors is low enough, they can wait for food every day. The debris has been scoured to a clean platform.
This is "self-management" after "vertical". Without the intervention of prison guards, the entire prison is in a state of "herding sheep" under a single mechanism. How to use fixed resources depends entirely on the consciousness of the detainees.
In addition, every detainee has the right to bring in one thing without any restrictions, such as ropes, sharp knives, pet dogs, etc.
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In the micro-society in a confined space, the daily cycle of resource allocation exposes tragic class contradictions. Such a setting is easily reminiscent of Feng Junhao's "Snow Country Train", and it is also from Feng Junhao's "Parasite" It is also aimed at the gap between the rich and the poor and class contradictions.
"Hunger Platform" has a similar presentation concept, but it is much simpler and straightforward. The emphasis on core concepts and the blurring of background settings make "Hunger Platform" more like a fable with a bright theme.
"Platform" has pulled the thinking about class society directly from the "metaphor" and photographed it on the desktop.
The protagonist of the story, Glenn (played by Ivan Masago), awakened on the 48th floor of the prison, and the elder Trimagus (played by Zorion Higueriol), who was on the same level as him, confronted him with actual actions. He taught a lot of "life experience".
Tremags, who had been on the 132 floor, did not show any mercy because of his own experience. When dragging the leftovers down on the platform, he naturally spat down. This is the arrogance of the upper class, and he Turning around and cursing the same behavior from the upper class, this is the humbleness of the lower class.
The screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero deliberately took the fable one step further, making the original extreme even more extreme.
The so-called "class" in the prison pit is not static. It is different from the solidification of classes in the real society. Every month, people in the prison will be anesthetized by chemical gases, and then randomly exchanged levels, a forced class movement by luck. , Completely dispelled the unchanging barrier.
"Hunger Platform" is simple enough, it does not even have "Snow Country Train"'s tragic insight into the evolutionary laws of human society, but it is more explicit about the fragile and bad side of human nature.
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Temporarily detached from the concept of class, the numbers in the film have another mysterious idea, which provides another level of interpretation.
The prison has 333 floors with two people on each floor, which was originally designed to accommodate 666 people. This number is quite bad in the eyes of Christians, and it corresponds to the scene of hell on earth.
The letters of Hebrew and Ancient Greek have corresponding numbers. In the "Bible Revelation", 666 became the number of the beast, which satirizes the tyrant Nero, then generalizes to the mark of the devil, and acts as the mark of the devil in the film. The character is exactly the person in the prison.
The design of the prison itself has many unreasonable points. For example, according to the setting, each person chooses one dish, and 666 dishes should be provided every day. From the show in the film, the food is seriously inadequate, and some people are destined to be destined to be Starving to death, no matter what the purpose is, this place itself is hell, but it is the people living in it that make the situation worse.
Some people say that "Hunger Platform" is like an extended version of Villeneuve's short film "The Next Level" completed in 2008. There are indeed visual similarities between the ideas of "Gourmet Feast" and "Continuous Falling". However, The gaze of the act of "eating" itself is from a different perspective.
If there is any similarity, it is people's irresistibility to primitive desires. Whether it is out of their own will or helplessness, most people will naturally fall into greed and eventually merge with most people.
"Hunger Platform" still revolves around the classic advice behind the superficial class contradictions, never try to test human nature.
The vast majority of prisoners are guilty people, but few people in samsara realize how to "atonement."
On the contrary, "egoists" like Tremags make up the vast majority, embracing animality in the name of survival, and facing the dilemma of extreme scarcity of resources, all civilized systems are vulnerable.
The second cellmate of the male protagonist Glenn is Imoguri (Antonia San Juan). Contrary to Trimagus, she is an idealist from the real upper class.
Noble ideas and moral standards can't take root in the lower soil. She just went to the other extreme of Trimagus, and the Three Views were destroyed and eventually could not survive.
Imoguri’s pale advocacy slogans were ignored, and the “spontaneous unity” envisioned by the prison administrator was like a joke.
In fact, this is the epitome of the entire prison, the vertical prison is like a cursed Tower of Babel. People are speaking the same words, but the meaning contained in them can no longer be conveyed.
Everyone can only piece together the whole picture of the so-called prison through their own experience. Everyone lives in the worst speculation about human nature, because they only have food in their eyes, especially in the top kitchen.
This also constitutes the most ironic ending of the film, which seems to be open-ended, but actually reveals the tragedy of the ending early.
All "signals" are absurdly reduced to "mistakes", communication is meaningless here, "Hunger Platform" ingeniously restores the suffering in human history.
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Glenn and his third roommate Bahalat (Emilio Buale) brought the most heroic and intriguing journey of "Station of Hunger".
According to prison regulations, Glenn did not choose weapons or the like, but a book, "Don Quixote the Gentleman of Wonders". Glenn and Bahalat are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in "Hunger Platform".
In the prison pit, kind humanity and order are the unattainable "chivalry spirit", and pursuing such vain things in the beast hell is tantamount to idiotic dreams.
As the film approaches the end, the boundary between reality and fantasy is gradually blurred. The children at the bottom of the legendary prison have therefore become the biggest suspense of the film.
Whether children really have different opinions, but it is undeniable that the director's pessimistic attitude towards human nature.
When Glenn tried to establish a better order so that more people could survive, he repeatedly proved the uselessness of communication, and only force could persuade others.
The child at the bottom is actually the embodiment of the remaining morality and humanity, a glimmer of hope left in hell, but this hope is set at 666, which constantly lures active idealists into the abyss.
Perhaps the Asian woman in the film knew from the beginning that the child might not exist at all, and Imoguri’s words almost gave iron evidence, but the constant pursuit of this behavior in itself gave the suitor a goal of survival, just like Glenn. , Are very few people who put idealism into practice.
With the label of "sci-fi", "Hunger Platform" still has many setting loopholes that need to be filled. How the vertical structure as small as 2,000 meters circulates the air, and the connection between the original meaning of the establishment of a prison and the social environment that gave birth to the prison, in fact, it is completely feasible to expand into a series of several hours.
The actors' acting skills are online under various strong settings, but many of the settings are still expressed by the mouth of the character, which is a little regrettable (maybe it is due to budget).
But none of this prevents "Station of Hunger" from becoming a masterpiece worth seeing.
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