First, let's briefly evaluate:
1⃣️The ultimate maze. The reality in nothingness constructed by language and image structure, the nothingness in reality.
What comes first, the present or the past? Past = Fragments of the Present + Hypnosis.
2⃣️ Genius clip. Willful freeze-frame, flashback, muting, dislocation splicing, it is a puzzle of reorganization.
3⃣️The other and the meaningless words in the air are like the walls and decorations in the hotel. Character construction.
Although for this type of film, discussing the plot is not very meaningful, what the film wants to present is an incomprehensible idea and a labyrinth without an exit. But let’s write a personal interpretation and organize my thoughts.
4⃣️Four interpretations of the plot. The first interpretation: From the opening dialogue "I walked through the corridor again and again..." and the countless pictures of women in the drawer, it can be seen that the story has been repeated countless times. Year after year the man begged the woman to leave, and she always promised "next year".
The second interpretation: All the stories of encounters are made up/imagined by the man. He processed and hypnotized part of the present reality to create the "past".
The third interpretation: Due to the similarity between their stories and the protagonists of the theater stage, it may just be the audience's imagination of the plot after the curtain call.
(After the curtain call, a couple of men and women were discussing "I can't stand the silence you put on me. Silence is harder to bear than death. We are like two coffins side by side, in the bottom of a congealed courtyard." The man may be inspired by the plot, Expand your fantasies.)
(And when the private meeting was discovered by her husband, the scene switched between indoors and the side of the fence - as if consciousness switched between reality and drama.)
Fourth Interpretation: Given the constant emergence of statues, the story may be an extension of the statue’s association, or it may be the statue’s self-awareness.
(As the hero and heroine said when talking to the statue, there is no need to name the statue, they can be anyone.)
(Also, when they first met in the courtyard, the man said that there was a statue in front of him, and it was a woman stroking the man's lips; as if the consciousness implantation was successful, the woman did the same thing as the statue afterwards.)
5⃣️I prefer the second interpretation, because many pieces of information in the dialogue are processed into memories by the man. For example, when he saw the elopement drama and the discussion between a man and a woman after the play, a similar elopement story was generated; there was someone after the play. Gossiping about broken heels, freezing in the summer of 28 or 29, he also said this memory; the woman rushed out of the mirror and hanging paintings, and he added it to the memory.
These are all like a dream. The man is in a state of mind wandering after watching the play (so the characters will suddenly move and stop suddenly, and suddenly speak and suddenly mute, just like the world we see when we doze off and lose our minds), and then he takes the captured fragments, The images seen before going to bed and the thoughts implanted in the drama merge into one, psychedelic the boundaries between reality and dreams, and the past (like "Mulholland Drive").
6⃣️ Memories officially start when the husbands of men and women play games. When there was only one card left on the table, the woman laughed and the man narrated, "You haven't changed, as if we only met yesterday." But the memory was interrupted immediately, the picture was aimed at the woman's contemplation, but the voice came from the conversation between a man and a woman behind.
When the man introduced the hotel, the woman laughed again, he stretched out his hand to invite her, and the movement immediately followed the dance of the two.
Where the exit of the maze is unknown, where fantasy begins, and there is nowhere to be found mixed with reality.
Perhaps the men's table is the beginning of a fantasy? Because memories are interrupted here again and again. Maybe the woman breaking the glass is the beginning of the fantasy? Because her laughter opened the man's imagination, and the other woman's laughter shattered the imagination.
7⃣️The screen and language are out of sync. The language of the first encounter in Fader Court precedes the picture (the second time the man asked the woman to recall the first encounter, the picture appeared, as if the subconscious implantation was successful.)
8⃣️The picture of the barefoot scene precedes the language (when the man describes the chat scene on the terrace, the picture of the woman barefooted in the woods appears. It seems that other fragments are inserted in the memory).
When the barefoot play was first narrated, the picture was of a group of people such as a man and a husband playing cards; but the language described was not the scene of walking in the woods, but the scene of taking off shoes that happened earlier.
The scene of taking off her shoes occurred when the woman rejected the man’s third recall of the eve of the elopement. She suddenly ran out and saw the statue in the overexposed sunlight.
But this paragraph is followed by a card playing scene, which seems to imply that a large part of the plot in the middle is just a man's imagination for a moment.
The barefoot scene has undergone three divisions, but the audience is like a woman. Even if the fragment is broken, the brain associates and reorganizes, so that we can build a "reality" that is enough to be fake.
9⃣️Recalling the eve of the elopement, the first time a man and a woman were at the bar. As the man narrated, the woman's flashback time gradually lengthened, as if she was gradually confused.
The second time was when they met at the corner, the woman was like being dropped into the memory, wearing this year's clothes, and resisting "don't bother me", but she was still inevitably in the scene of the memory.
There is also a recollection of the previous eve play, in which the woman in different positions was shot from multiple angles (by the window, by the dresser, by the door...), and the woman got on the bed four times from two directions, implying the inaccuracy of the memory.
The man's recollections were initially precise and precise, but then began to collapse, and he himself said "I don't remember", like the confusion when a big dream is about to wake up.
?Fantasy restart mechanism: When the fantasy plot goes wrong, we often turn on the restart mechanism. For example, on the eve of the elopement, the fantasy turned into a woman who was extremely reluctant, which made the man's thought palace collapse ("the room does not exist, not even the courtyard"), so he restarted the plot, and the woman welcomed him with open arms when he entered the room.
The same restart happened when the woman was shot by her husband and when the man fell off a guardrail.
⏸ Metaphors for statues: can be anyone. One sees danger, the other sees hope, but the two views are not opposed. Just as the man recalled in detail, the woman denied the past, but the two time views were not opposed, just one vertical and one horizontal.
The large section of the opening shot, as well as a large number of symmetrical, mirror, picture-in-picture, and column structures after the end of the theater play, perfectly shows the complicated maze, and the characters are like the strange and silent marble statues and walls in the maze.
"These things will congeal in a few seconds, like a marble-like past, like this empty courtyard itself." The ultimate nothingness and reality.
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