The first part of the movie
The black and white part at the beginning of the film is the panic and rescue on the set after Roy's fall. At this time, the object of Roy's stand-in, the male star, is sitting on the boat and having a romantic relationship with Roy's girlfriend. While Roy was carried away on a stretcher, the dead horse hoisted from the water hinted at the seriousness of the "fall".
Alexandria, who broke her arm from picking oranges, likes to secretly throw oranges at the priest. She wrote the secret on a note and wanted to pass it on to Nurse Evelyn, but the wind blew into Roy's ward. While retrieving the note, she became hooked on Roy's story. After that, Alexandria came over every day to listen to Roy's story, and with this story, Roy persuaded the little girl to help him steal the morphine in the ward. But because the little girl mistook the E in the morphine-tailed letter for a 3, only three pills were brought to Roy, far enough to kill. To realize his suicidal thoughts, Roy encourages the little girl to steal morphine from his patient's closet.
Roy's patient...should be a nagging person, who is healthy but suspects that he has a disease all day long, and is also very short-tempered (he raises his hand to beat his son if he disagrees in the film). He also rushed to Roy and Alexandria and yelled, thinking that their storytelling voices disturbed him. It should be at this time that Roy took the opportunity to fight with the patient and stole the key to his cabinet. Fortunately, the medicine that the doctor prescribed to this man was all candy, which only served as a placebo, so Roy failed to commit suicide. He growled in anger, begging for death. The girl was terrified, and in order to make her friend happy, she slipped into the dispensing room to steal the medicine again, but stumbled and fell.
A series of dizzying montages followed. Among them are the legs that were run over by the carriage and harpooned (consistent with the one-legged stuntman's own experience), the scene of Roy's failed stunt performance, falling off the horse, and the scene of the girl's home being burned by the thugs... Yes the fall unites a paralyzed and depressed stuntman with a displaced Romanian girl. The fall is a thread running through the play and in the play: Roy's fall on the set, the little girl's fall in the orange orchard, and the little girl's fall from stealing medicine. The Indian bride jumped down, the monkey fell into the stands after being shot, Darwin fell to his death in the rain of bullets, the Indian cut the rope and died together, and the heart-shaped pendant, after Lan Xia waved his hand, Fall from the watchtower.
The heart-shaped pendant first appeared in the close-up of the title, where Roy's girlfriend was having fun with the male star while chatting and laughing. The reappearance of the pendant is that after she fell into the arms of the male star, she cried in front of the door of the hospital where Roy lived. She should be in love with Roy, but the weight of love in her heart is not as much as fame and fortune. In the end, Roy (Blue Man) throws away the pendant, which also means that he is freed from his broken heart.
Part II on Revenge
From the perspective of the subject of revenge, the themes of revenge are generally classified into two categories, individual and group.
Among individuals, it can be further subdivided into revenge for blood relatives, revenge for love (such as against those who have one’s heart, against rivals in love), and revenge for defending personal dignity and reputation... Group revenge includes "class struggle", such as landlords and peasants, slaves and slaves Lord, etc.; or a disagreement between two factions with very different values.
In the film, Lan Xia's revenge for his twin brothers belongs to the personal revenge of blood relatives. After his sweetheart surrenders to Odious, he combines love revenge; the black Ogataban includes blood revenge (the brother was enslaved to death) and also includes blood revenge. Mass revenge (slaves and slave owners); blood revenge for Indians who lost their beloved wife; revenge for dynamite expert Luigi who fought for personal honor. Here I want to put Darwin and the revenge of the mysterious man last. Because of its subtlety, one of them is from England and the other is from the jungle. The former represents modern industrial civilization, while the latter represents mysterious primitive tribes. But in my eyes, their revenge goals are the same. Yes, the wild and civilized, the two ends of the human history process are unprecedentedly unified, in the name of "defending nature". It is the crusade of the naturalists against the conquering naturalists.
It can be said that the revenge mission carried by each person can be swayed and made another movie if they are singled out. It is too heavy, too tragic, too reckless. Or, in Roy's words, epic. Although the story of the Avengers vs. the evil governor is full of projections of Roy and the little girl's life, the themes involved are too grand after all, and there is a danger of creating an imbalance between the two lines inside and outside the story. "The woman I love dearly is the fiancee who killed my brother's enemy" - does it sound like a tragedy in ancient Greece, it is very dignified, very solemn, with a fatalistic helplessness. In other words, the power of tragedy is derived not from chance, but from necessity.
But the solemnity brought by this theme is dispelled by the tonality of the film. There are two main ways of digestion:
First, the tonality of dramatic performances. There are many differences between movies and dramas, so I won't go into details, just mention a few here. That is to say, due to the distance between the actors and the audience when they perform on stage, it is inevitable that there should be appropriate exaggeration or even deformation in the lines, expressions, movements, and makeup. In today's parlance, it's called a "player". The movie is different, the camera is advancing infinitely, the local details are enlarged again and again, and we can peek into the actor's heart from the fluttering eyelashes. Therefore, unlike dramas that emphasize "release", film performances focus on "receive", otherwise, in the close-up that occupies the entire screen, too deliberate emotional exposure will inevitably appear artificial.
"Falling" is special, especially in its anti-logic. It performs the film in a dramatic way. This sense of incongruity blew me away, because it was so fitting, its seriousness made it seem absurd . It's sarcastic but not ironic, dispelling the tragic nature of epic's revenge story with a gentle banter. So when Lan Xia was going to shoot and kill the enemy's fiancée, their dramatic dialogue and body language made people play, casting a touch of comedy on the sadness. I think this is what the director wants. He has no ambition for a macro narrative, and he has no intention of questioning fate. He just wanted to tell a good story about a couple who had never met before, and he cared about the people in life, not the people in history.
The second is the frequent involvement of the little girl in Roy's story. The visualization of this revenge story in the movie is basically from the perspective of a little girl. This perspective is innocent and interesting, so it makes us smile again and again.
For example, when Alexander received the letter from the messenger, the unfolded letter was exactly the same as the piece of paper that the little girl gave to Nurse Evelyn at the beginning. The rhombus-shaped hollows and the immature pencil writing all imply that this is a girl's perspective.
The five Avengers are also the people around the girl: Blue Man is the girl's father at first (Roy's perspective) and then Roy himself (girl's perspective); Negro is a black youth who brings ice cubes to the hospital every morning; Indian is a gift to the little boy. A friend of the girl's elephant figure (the film ends in the girl's orchard); Luigi is a one-legged stuntman who comes to visit Roy; Darwin is a nurse at the hospital (he is in surgery when the little girl wakes up from a fall from stealing medicine) I looked outside the door); Mysterious Man is a combination of an orchard picker and an old man teasing a little girl with false teeth; the evil Doge is the real-world actor who stole Roy's girlfriend; the Doge's fiancée is Eve, who takes care of the girl Nurse Lynn.
Even the few words she heard from the grown-ups permeated Roy's story. Therefore, the mysterious man who lost his mana was beaten by the soldiers, and what he spit out was not blood, but beautiful birds. (Corresponding to Roy saying that the old man's dentures are the source of his strength, he put the bird in his stomach)
Director Tasim Sim used a shell of "revenge" to tell a story of relief. He pays attention to tone and taste, not fate and epic. Even the occasional fierceness and awe-inspiring righteousness seem bizarre and imaginative. This may be where he has drawn criticism, but it is also where my eyes are confused and maddened. It is undeniable that the change of Roy's mood in the second half of the film still lacks strong impetus and convincing foreshadowing, but in Alexandria's round cheeks and smile with missing front teeth, I have to believe that she is the most sufficient reason, The Most Healing Power - The hardest forgiveness is not to those who betray us and their lives, but to reconcile with ourselves.
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