There is an ancient Chinese idiom called "carve a boat for a sword", which is to say that a person's sword fell into the river, and the person on the boat took the knife and carved it to see where it fell, trying to find the trace to locate the sword in the water, but because the boat As the water swayed, the scale had long since moved away from the position where the sword had fallen.
I once wrote a review of Blow-Up, my first Antonioni film, where I read the photographer's inexplicable sequence of actions after the body disappeared: "He wanted to find another shot to shoot the murder. opportunity on the spot.”
Almost two years later, I watched "Red Desert", "Night", "Eclipse" and "Affair" again. Looking back on my explanation two years ago, on the one hand, I felt that the explanation at that time was somewhat solid, and the content of the action in it may not be so clearly referred to by the director. The impossibility is indeed the motif that often surrounds Antonioni's films. It doesn't really matter what the male protagonist is looking for. What matters is that "things disappear after they leave the present, and the follow-up search is just a series of non-stop digressions. ". In this regard, I am still a little complacent that I had come into contact with a certain core of the director's concern when I first came into contact with "Happy Love". "Breakthrough" is simply a self-talk about Antonioni's own creative theory, as if we would not understand the style of his works, so this work was created to annotate his other works.
If "Breakthrough" is a declaration of Antonioni's creative concept, "Affair" is more ubiquitous and almost deliberately expressed in every link than his other works: everything is in a moment. The moment of sex, and the search and anchoring that follows is nothing more than a series of incessant digressions.
Martin Scorsese once commented on the film "Love": "The first time you watch it, you will be curious and ask yourself what you see? But it seems to have placed a spell on you, and the more you watch it, the more intense emotions you feel. ." As if to echo the motifs of "difficulty of representation" and "difficulty of anchoring", Antonioni's films have always had a strong "process" and "presentness", and the characters in the play are constantly talking about themselves The state is in a kind of lost and hesitant, and words seem to be trying to catch something without meaning, which makes us in the process of watching the movie also seem to be paradoxically entering the state of the character because we cannot enter the state of the character, because the play The character does not know what state he is in.
If we express the plot of Antonioni's "Affair" in words, the following description will appear:
"A long-distance couple reunited after a long absence, and the woman decided to break up. During a trip with their friends, the two came to an island to play, and the woman mysteriously disappeared on the island. The man was in the process of looking for his girlfriend. , fell in love with his girlfriend's friend who was looking for his girlfriend with him. Although his girlfriend's friend resisted at first, the two ended up together. One night, the man didn't return home for a long time. During the search, he found that the man was flirting with a strange woman, the man who was found followed the woman to a chair and sat down, and the man cried in grief."
Isn't everything pretty obvious after the text description? The storyline of the entire play is a series of failed attempts to capture and recreate the past. The friendship that fades away after a long-distance relationship, the man tries to pretend that there is no such thing, everything will still be as good as before; a person disappears bizarrely, and can never be found again; a growing love, can not be found to find the missing lover The urgency of the man, and gradually the woman, has to gradually accept that they love each other, even if it seems like they are ruthless towards their friends (but seriously, aren't those who think they are ruthless and ruthless? a "failure"), they can no longer pretend to be back in their eagerness to find friends.
The final ending was wonderful. The heroine couldn't get rid of the shadow of the man's girlfriend. On the one hand, she thought that she should not take her man as her own when her friend disappeared, but on the other hand, she always believed that as long as his friend Appears, the man will immediately change his mind, but this whole movie, not only vehemently denying the former's worries is just a digression to the current state of affairs, but also negating the latter through the fact that the man has a new cheating object: the one who once The one who occupied that man's heart will never return to his original position, and there will only be new changes to replace it. It turns out that the two seemingly different worries actually share the same premise. This premise is that oneself and others can maintain a constant and lasting state, and perhaps we can further say that if a man can't forget his missing girlfriend in the end, Both parties may have been paradoxically fortunate that their relationship could have some kind of constancy, but now they are also desperately admitting that their relationship has also been lost after admitting that they have truly forgotten the missing friend. Likewise, the slaughter of the pandemic can only be left to the change itself.
Antonioni once commented on the film "Love": "This film may appear to have nothing happened on the surface, but in fact a lot of things are happening. The rhythm is sometimes fast and sometimes slow, and this is the rhythm of life. The mechanical action of traditional films is different. Perhaps the real strength of this work is the innovation of the rhythm of the film.” Antonioni’s films have always displayed a fascinating paradox to me, this paradox is: a confession of reproduction Impossible creator, but in his works, truly presents the impossible rhythm of reproduction. We can even put it another way, when he gave up or tried his best to question the possibility and boundaries of realism, he opened up another realism, which at first glance is a kind of realism. Surreal, but actually our closest and therefore most alien experience of presentness (as Wittgenstein puts it).
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