The most eye-catching film of the 72nd Cannes Film Festival is the 22nd film of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. From the most anticipated film of the year in "Cinema Manual" at the beginning of the year, to the enthusiastic acclaim at its premiere in Spain last month, in everyone's mind, Almodóvar still has undiminished creativity.
Almodovar, who will turn 70 in September this year, took his new work "Pain and Glory" to the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival again.
Almodovar is undoubtedly the uncrowned king of the three major film festivals. He has been nominated for six times but has never won the Palme d'Or. The best result is the best screenwriter at Cannes in 2006 for "Return", and in 1999 for "All About My Mother" ” won the Best Director at Cannes.
It can be said that this "Pain and Glory" is a retrospective of his directorial career and even his life, with strong personal emotions. Although the director has repeatedly claimed that the new work is not a personal biography, just a personal drama (self-fiction). With an average score of 3.3 in Cannes, it can be said that it is the most championship-like work this year so far.
1. Looking back half a lifetime
From the debut feature film "The Legend of the Strong Woman", Almodovar's films have always had a strong personal touch, with bizarre and exaggerated plots, unexpected turns, rich and heavy colors, and complicated camera language; if you only look at the introduction It is often mistaken for a dog blood ethics drama. But Almodovar will always have the ability to break the boundary between reality and fantasy, show reality with exaggerated fiction, and even have more sincere emotions than reality.
When talking about his creations, most of them are based on the theme of "sex and gender" and "mother", often appearing homosexuality, transvestite, SM, transgender, feminism, mother-child (female) relationship and so on. Under the lens, it is inseparable from the vigorous male desire, the bright and refreshing female image, the diversified expression of sex and gender, and the rupture and return of family relations.
In Almodovar's early creations, there is always a vibrant enthusiasm, with anarchic passion, wantonly running in queer and erotic, such as "Woman on the Brink of Collapse", "Bad Education" and "Bad Education" The Law of Desire, Kika, Tie Me, Tie Me, and The Skin of My Residence; when he is emotional, he will also shoot things like "All About My Mother", "Love High Heels" and "Return". Feminine theme.
Almodovar fans always look forward to hearing Almodovar tell strange and crazy stories time and time again, but rarely explore why the director is so keen to tell these similar themes through different angles. This time in "Pain and Glory", Almodovar decided to tell everyone the answer at one time. In his original words, it was "naked and honest about his soul".
The film "Pain and Glory" brings back Antonio Banderas, who played the leading role in "The Law of Desire" 30 years ago, to play the "director" Salvador in the film. As the protagonist of the film, El Salvador is also in his twenties as a director, and Almodovar designed El Salvador to be "another self".
The first shot of the film shows Salvador immersed in the pool, motionless. The body is on the downward slope of aging, the skin is loose, the pigmentation is increasing, and the whole body begins to wrinkle. Struggling with illness and anxiety, he is sluggish in his creation and alienated from the crowd.
On the 30th anniversary of the release of his most important work, Sabor, Salvador went to the theaters to see a restored version of the film, only to find it wasn't as bad as he thought.
It was this opportunity to contact the past that made El Salvador willing to touch the past for the first time, to face the broken relationship, to try to reconcile with his work partner Albert, with his first love Federico, with his mother, and with himself.
The film uses El Salvador's entanglement with different stages to find the answer to reconciliation in the flashbacks of the past. And Almodóvar's narrative style always has a sense of ingenious flexibility: using one event to lead to another event, whether it is horizontal or vertical, or the memory related to it, can hook up a complete picture Character chain diagram.
The picture jumps back and forth between the past and the present, following El Salvador's thoughts, from the same-sex sexual enlightenment in childhood, to the Catholic family's defense of tradition, from the childhood when he felt that his mother was beautiful and bright like the sunshine of early summer, to the old mother's old age. All kinds of stubbornness and inhumanity at times.
When Almodovar borrowed the words of Salvador in the film and said the words that he never had a chance to say again (Almodovar's mother has passed away) "I'm sorry, I'm not the son you expected", the sorrow in my heart As you can imagine.
If El Salvador is Almodovar's self set up in the film, then El Salvador, who also wears a mask, also designed a scene for himself in the film. With the help of the actor Albert in the film, he recited that moving monologue on the stage, which is also Almodóvar's most thorough dissection of life, himself, and film art.
In my eyes, "Pain and Glory" is like a late autumn movie, more like a calm minor tune in the backlash of life. Although life is always more painful than joy, it is another kind of luck to be able to reach the other side after experiencing it.
Salvador in the film is undoubtedly the perspective of life that Almodóvar brings to the audience: he and the people he cares about, and the film he loves, from birth, through joy and pain, until death, everyone. They are all in a different way to reconcile with themselves at different times.
2. Flow imagery
Judging from the overall creation of the film, "Pain and Glory" can be said to be Almodóvar's masterpiece. The film's theme and technique are the comprehensive reflection of the director's years of cultivation; in other words, there is not much room for new exploration. Bold and strong colors, bright and warm atmosphere, kind and optimistic tone are still the iconic style of Almodóvar.
However, compared with the darker predecessors such as "Love High Heels", "Bad Education" and "My Living Skin", the overall texture of "Pain and Glory" is more literary. The blocky and scattered memories are intertwined with reality, in fact, with the flow of liquid emotions, the pictures of a large number of medium shots also maintain a sufficient distance from the audience.
Similar to Fellini's "Eight and a Half", Salvador, the main character in the film, is also struggling in the stalled decline of life, like falling into the slow quicksand, the breath of death has come to his face, but he can't break free. not open.
But the difference is that in "Eight and a Half", the more flowing texture of consciousness flows like a cloud, and in "Pain and Glory", it has a more realistic texture of flowing water.
In Pain and Glory, there is no metaphysical thought flow floating in the air like existentialism, but every memory can bring real psychological touch. The film rotates freely in different time and space through the image of water that appears from time to time as a carrier of memory.
The solitary male body at the beginning is curled into a curled shape, like a baby in the amniotic fluid of the mother's womb, soaking in a swimming pool.
The cold temperature of the pool water reminded him of his mother washing white sheets by the river as a child. On a sunny summer day, the boy sat on the shore, watching his mother and other women, sweating and laughing loudly and singing songs. As he said in his reminiscence monologue, his childhood memories always smelled of piss and summer breezes.
When he first saw the painter showering his body with water jets in the garden, the restlessness that surged up in the young Salvador made him realize his sexual urge for the first time. The repeated use of water imagery explains the special fluidity of the characters' emotions, thus realizing the transformation under different narrative frameworks in the film, concretizing the past and the present.
The character "El Salvador" intervenes in the viewer's perspective in different ways, physically, vocally or subjectively, in almost every scene. Almodovar hides the emotions between the characters in exaggerated and gorgeous color blocks. From a structural point of view, it is more like a chapter-style text than a consciousness. It is like flipping page by page in the most private diary of an old man.
Just like the literary passages that are heavily quoted in the film, Almodóvar also tries to be as close to the character design of El Salvador as possible from the overall atmosphere. From Chekhov to Cocteau to Eric Willard, the one with the most gentle breath of the film is undoubtedly Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquiet". , Alienation praise.
"I find life repulsive, like a useless medicine," Almodóvar described The Book of Disquiet as "an umana comedy of heaven, hell and purgatory intertwined, cancelling each other out to Light up a space where pain and magnificence coexist."
Flashbacks are introduced in the film through different objects acting as emotional media. Sometimes through matching splices between similar objects, such as the piano in the bar corresponds to the piano of the church choir as a child; the mother places the Catholic rose in the jewelry box; the mother's influence on the literature of "I" in childhood, and writing in old age The script corresponds to; or it is the soul-like memory immersed in the halo.
Using Salvador's oily opium fantasy installation, the film explores the different stages of childhood and adulthood, constantly drifting away from sexual arousal, mother images, religious imprints, and memories of life in Madrid.
The photographic lens basically uses a medium shot to shape the composition. Compared with the earlier works, the color of the film is relatively naturalistic, and the art has been subtracted. , more in line with the changes in narrative style, psychological mechanism and character design.
3. The duality of self-portraits
If you want to understand this film, you still have to go back to the title of "Pain and Glory". Why the pain and what is the glory is to solve the El Salvador in the film, or it is part of the confusion of Almodovar's creation in reality. key.
Perhaps, we can get a glimpse from Salvador's memories in the film. Salvador's pain comes from three aspects: physical pain, creative depression and identity shadow.
If physical pain is the most intuitive feeling of low life, then the shadow of identity is the most direct source of pain.
In his childhood, El Salvador lived in a hometown with a strong church atmosphere. The tearing of his cognition of sex and gender and his own identity led to the rupture of personal and family relationships. In reality, Almodovar left home when he was young and estranged from his parents for the same reason. It can be said that another "Almodovar" sexual evolution and the shadow formed by the old social values have always shrouded his life.
In fact, El Salvador (Almodóvar)'s creative achievements stem from the deepest pain. When you come to realize that everything that happens to you is a fair trade in creation.
Every experience in life will inject inspiration into creation again and again. As Jung said, the driving force of artistic creation comes from people's unconsciousness, and autonomous creation is actually the collective unconsciousness in the mind that absorbs nutrients from the original image.
In other words, Salvador (Almodóvar)'s greatest glory in the first half of his creative career came from the word "pain" mentioned in the title. The weakness in creation also stems from the limitation of a single source of consciousness.
On the other hand, Almodovar's creations in recent years, starting from "The Skin of My Residence", seem to have fallen into a period of creative weakness like El Salvador. The mediocrity of "Julietta" and the waterloo of "Flight Attendant Lover" once gave him the idea of retirement. .
If "Pain and Glory" only stops there, and looking back on Almodovar's entire creative career, it is just a lonely ending. Compared with its colorful other works, it is still not commendable. But Almodovar is Almodovar after all. He expressed his lifelong pursuit through the hero Salvador. "Without (movie) shooting, my life would have no meaning."
For El Salvador, the pain in life, the exhaustion of inspiration, is not necessarily the end of life. Only to be honest and naked with his emotions and to reconcile with himself at every stage of his life is his life goal.
At the end of the film, the former lover Federico appeared in front of Salvador, the two looked at each other with relief, and the picture was pushed to the highlight of the whole film at this time. Glory doesn't have to be radiant, proudly embracing the pain and beauty of this life is already worthy of being proud of yourself.
Throughout most of the world-class famous directors, age never seems to be the limit of creation. The 86-year-old Shi Yunmeier also had a new work "Insect Story" the year before last; the 78-year-old Miyazaki kept backing his promises; the 86-year-old Yamada Yoji was still filming the series "Family Suffering"; the 89-year-old Grandpa Dongmu Last year also exported "The Mule"; 83-year-old Ken Lodge brought a new work to Cannes this year to compete with young people; 90-year-old Jodorowsky is still busy shooting the final chapter of his life trilogy ; Similarly, 89-year-old Godard is still walking around with his new work "Book of Images" at major film festivals and art exhibitions; and 84-year-old Woody Allen is still active like a young man.
Perhaps, for Almodóvar, who is about to turn 70, this "Pain and Glory" is both a summary and a manifesto. After the previous stage is over, it is time to look forward to the arrival of the next peak.
Author | Peter Pan; Official Account | Watching Movies and Seeing Death
Editor | Teenager on the Roof; Please indicate the source for reprinting
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