Since the debut of "Wild Weeds" at Sundance, Kelly has demonstrated her precise control of long shots and her love of real-life documentary elements (most prominently radio). The subsequent "Old Dreams", "Wendy and Lucy", recorded the unity and maturity of its lens style. Kelly is good at digging out special emotions that transcend her narrative time and space in a limited film length. The movie can be simply summed up in one sentence, "Old Dreams" is a camp where old friends gather, "Wendy and Lucy" is a young woman's loss and recovery of her dog, and "A Certain Woman" is the career of three women , family, love.
In fact, it is wrong to rudely decompose the three stories of "A Certain Woman" into three separate layers. There are clues added by the director to connect them. I would prefer to unify them as a whole, the different stories of the three women. , which can be a subject's experience.
"The moment when nothing happens is the most moment in our lives. So why is there a new problem every second in the movie?" - Jia Zhangke
A Certain Woman begins with a one-and-a-half-minute-long shot of a train running, and the narrative unfolds in a real time dimension. Just as when the film was created, the Lumière brothers' "A Train Arrives", "A Certain Woman" returns to the film's record in the image style. After that, the radio was used as the background sound to cut into the first story. The female character played by Laura Dern and the male character played by James Legro were arranged in two separate spaces by the camera. From the beginning, the film made it clear that women are in Attributes defined as "others" in society. And then the first paragraph of the story also mentioned a little, about the treatment of female lawyers different from that of men at work. But the story cleverly sets up a client character who, deep down, desperately needs female care. In the later stories, even if men are used as tools to complete the task (rescue the hostages), women can still show their unique warmth and calmness in a complicated and exhausting life.
Michelle, who has worked with Kylie several times, plays a powerful woman on screen who dominates all family affairs. Although there was no breakthrough in character design, Michelle still completed her performance appropriately.
The last paragraph of the love story between Xiao K and the horse farm girl is a paragraph that is generally praised by everyone. In this passage, however, the characters hide certain femininity, so that the love between the two characters can be purified. Just like that secret affair that we all may have had no beginning and no end. This section has the longest time span, and the director cleverly uses the changes of snow to hint at the passage of time in the story. Just like the chaotic room in "Nobody Knows", the smart director always starts from the environment, allowing time and real life In the same way, it flows silently.
In "A Kind of Woman", Kelly seems to expand the richness of the narrative, no longer a single space, the stretch of a single character. However, the camera is still restrained, a large number of shooting actions (including driving, riding), depicting the characteristics of characters in details, and wrapping delicate emotions in an open environment. On the one hand, Kelly pursues the real texture of the image (this is also evident in the director's obsession with film. Kelly initially planned to shoot with a digital camera, but after the trial shooting, she felt that the effect was not good, so she chose film), On the one hand, a lot of personal emotions have been injected into it. This makes the film's handling of female group portraits accurate and unpretentious, while leaving a lot of space for the audience to perceive, without succumbing to the emotional needs of the audience. We need to mobilize our own experience and use the image as an incision to feel the real emotion.
However, this is becoming more and more rare in today's environment. Movie theaters are full of movies that stimulate us to feel the system with exaggerated plots. Celebrity history in public accounts has also become the focus of everyone's consumption. , and set up all kinds of strange images for the creation of the environment.
When darkness rules space, images become the only exit. A good movie, like "Some Kind of Woman", she never preaches, she inspires emotion with her gaze.
Godard said: "A sound film, let us discover silence.
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