The natural scenery of Portland in the northwestern United States has become a unique landscape, and it has increasingly appeared in the works of independent filmmakers. I have seen "Leave No Trace", "Wendy and Lucy" and "The First Cow" Your friends will surely be impressed by the desolation of nature. This "Pig" also follows this image style. Although Nicholas Cage has a bloody appearance , and there is a typical revenge thriller in the first half of the film , in fact, this is not a Hollywood action blockbuster. The budding director is deliberately misleading the audience's expectations, moving from an action-packed setting to a heartwarming emotional story. The theme is to explore how to get out of the sad shadow of losing a loved one, return to peace and the process of self-reconciliation.
The director took a different approach to use food as the core of the script, dividing the story chapters with the names of three delicious dishes, which not only implies the true identity of the protagonist, but also has another profound meaning. The protagonist is a truffle hunter. He leads his favorite piglet to find truffles in the forest and sells them to buyers. This leads to the intricate relationships in the high-end catering industry, from the procurement of ingredients to cooking and production, to customer reviews. And making profits, are all full of commercial atmosphere.
However, this reality critique is not the director's ultimate intention. Through the seemingly absurd story of hunting pigs, it depicts how the protagonist faces the shadow of losing his lover, and the process of regaining the meaning of life is its main theme. The director uses a deliberately omitted narrative to hide the protagonist's previous experience as a chef, as well as his past emotional experience with his wife. We have no way of knowing how his wife left him when he left, nor why he gave up his successful career as a chef and went into seclusion in the mountains; we can only rely on the sudden plot (underground fight club) and the trivial fragments of his conversations with old friends, Gradually restore the character and fate evolution of this character.
This kind of blank space allows the audience to constantly recall the hidden meaning in the plot, and also leaves a huge space for Cage's acting skills. His extremely restrained performance subtly subverts the audience's expectations of him in action blockbusters. His signature twitches are gone, his voice has softened a lot, and his swaggering and exaggerated poses in the past are reflected by the expression on his face. Replacement makes this character full of uncertainty and mystery , making people constantly guessing its true psychology and behavioral purpose during the viewing process. This is definitely a turnaround that he has rarely come across!
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