Watch "Mother! "The experience is unique. This is the first main competition movie with sporadic applause and boos at the end of the show. When I watched it, I was fully immersed in the gripping tension, and I was constantly interrupted by some details. At the same time, I had deep doubts about what the director wanted to express. Many attempts to build my own understanding ended in failure. The process of watching was full of contradictions.
It is destined to be a controversial work.
In fact, watching Darren Aronofsky movies has a similar experience. "Requiem of Dreams" laid the tone of all his works since then. This film grabbed my heart with supernatural montages, but in the end it didn't convey its meaning to me. I only felt its depression. But "Mother! "" and "Requiem of Dreams" are very different. It is more like another "Black Swan" which is also full of depressive atmosphere. This philosophical construction and some Freudian psychological suspense construction use the same technique.
However, "Mother! "The emotion conveyed to me is not depression, but anger. The creator is like a world destroyer, trying to burn everything down, just like the heroine in the film burns down their house.
Director Darren Aronofsky said at the press conference that this script was written based on his anger, and it was written in 5 days. It was something that came out of the heart. In this movie, he showed solid and superb director ability. He is very good at portraying the psychology and subconsciousness of the characters, which makes this film impeccable quality in terms of lens scheduling, use of sound and light, as well as suspense creation, multiple metaphors, etc. In his lens space, consciousness can be concretized into a house, a toad, or abstracted into chaos. He built a magnificent philosophical bridge between imagination and reality.
Since it all starts from the heart, then we can see Darren's artistic philosophy, world outlook, cognitive system and his compassion for the world in this movie.
As a stream of consciousness story, the construction of the reincarnation structure makes the film's interpretation level quite rich. We can establish a multi-dimensional interpretation based on the male and female protagonists played by Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Baden: 1. The heroine's excessive giving and the male protagonist's excessive demand refer to the relationship between men and women in marriage; 2. Based on the title of the movie As well as the female protagonist's gestation process, discuss the psychological changes of women's subconscious during pregnancy; 3. Based on the male protagonist’s identity as a writer, discuss how the writer’s wife manages herself in the relationship between the writer and the writer’s characters, and discuss the conception process of the writer’s work; 4. Based on A large number of strangers flooded into the relationship between the guardian and the intruder of the heroine’s house, and the contradiction caused by the hero’s welcome and the heroine’s resistance, to establish an insinuation of the current situation of the United States in the context of refugees...
These interpretations are basically traceable. The intruders are not only the characters written by the male lead, but also have different skin colors and languages. They also exist in different scenes of war, hunger, plague, and death... Darren's idea is grand. The complex ones involve multiple fields such as gender, psychology, society, and philosophy.
Among them, one of the most worthy interpretations is still a reflection of the plot and the current status quo in the United States. The director said at the press conference that as long as you open the sixth day in the "Bible", you can understand the meaning of the movie. This chapter reads:
mother's prayer
our mother who art underfoot,
hallowed be thy names,
thy seasons come, thy will be done,
within us as around us,
thank you for our daily bread, our water, our air, and our lives and so much beauty;
lead us not into selfish craving and the destructions that are the hungers of the glutted,
but deliver us from wanton consumption
of thy vast but finite bounty,
for thine is the only sphere of life we know,
and the power and the glory, forever and ever,
amen
So the film still has a thick religious meaning. The heroine personally decorates the house in order to create a paradise of her own. On the poster, Jennifer Lawrence’s 45-degree uplifted face resembles the Virgin Mary, and the conceived child seems to be regarded as the Holy Child. The title of the film consists of "mother" plus "!", which points to the angry prayer. No wonder the original title was "The Sixth Day."
The director explained that his anger was not without reason. Humans have such a wonderful world, just like a house carefully decorated by the heroine. However, we don't know how to cherish it, and wantonly destroy it. There are so many conditions in the current society, pollution makes nature dying, the nation and the economy are weak, culture and language are scarred... All this is seen by the director and anxious in his heart.
However, based on the interpretation of the current situation of the United States and refugees, it would appear to be ignorant to put the director on the hat of "criticism of the leftist views in reality". Darren did not clearly state his attitude, he did not simply support or oppose it. All he was angry was the result, everything he saw was destroyed. As for why it is ruined, Javier Baden’s actor has a very obvious answer: selfishness, self, good face, love of vanity, no principle.
However, is it because there are so many bells and whistles that give us clever audiences room to exert our subjective initiative, and let us find that we still have a working brain, so should we give this movie a high score? I think it is wrong.
If we sort through the text of any of the dimensions just mentioned, we will find that every explanation is difficult to justify, is damaged, and has its own contradictions. After all, this is a script written in 5 days. It is like a poem written with strong emotions, and there is a lot of room for deletion.
There are basic laws in literature and art, such as overfilling and overflowing. The Chinese call it blank. Just like Van Gogh's paintings, there is no need for any other color impurities. And a good novel has no extra paragraphs at all. A movie, when establishing a certain narrative system, should not have any plots and scenes that are irrelevant or contradictory. Because the artist must not lead the audience astray, any plot that leads the audience astray—even if it is inclined—is not allowed.
If we use any dimension to explain this movie, there will be a lot of waste writing, and many plots will become unexplainable. Even its multiple metaphors still rely on a section of "Bible" verses in the film database of the Venice Film Festival's official website to dominate.
In addition, it must be pointed out seriously that artistic creation is self-disciplined, and artists are not irrational, passionate young people who run wild, even though they have been young and impulsive. The birth of a mature masterpiece of an artist often requires accumulation of age and experience.
The artist should not over-interpret the content in the work to make it superficial, and it is not necessary to explain too much outside the play to kidnap the audience's thinking.
Darren Aronowski is out of control in this film. Driven by his anger, he added excessive conflicts and excessive suspense elements to the film, which all dilute its artistic value and make it change. Become a cheap Drama. Many of the details of Drama will let the audience play out from time to time, making the suspenseful sense of painstakingly created in the film art break the work. The change in the narrative perspective at the beginning and end of the story made me as an audience at a loss, and made my thinking erratic.
So it can only be said that this is a movie that is both wonderful and regrettable.
View more about Mother! reviews
