I read New York Synonyms again today. The first time I saw it, I liked this movie very much, and I sighed that Kaufman is really a genius. After knowing the ending, watching from the first act made me realize the intention of more details. Synonymy is a rhetorical device that uses parts to refer to the subject, just like in the movie, the male protagonist Caden's life is represented by fragments of his life. From which I saw his loneliness, helplessness, pain and fear of death. At the beginning, Kaufman used several shots to create the mediocre daily life of the male protagonist. He later won a MacArthur Award for directing stage plays. But his wife left him with her daughter. He rejected the offer of love from the ticket girl hazel, and he began to fear death.
He decided to compose a grand, real and difficult play, through which he wanted to find the meaning of life. He lamented that everyone was dying and everyone was living by chance. He built a bustling New York City, in which he reproduced the daily life of himself and other living beings. He wants to understand his own life through analysis and reconstruction.
Since then, the real life of the male protagonist and the script have been alternately performed. He is obsessed with his daughter Olive. He went to Paris to find her, the first time he didn't find her, the second time he saw her stripping. No matter how he knocked on the glass and called out his daughter's name, Olive ignored him. He moved in with the beautiful lead actress Clair, had a baby, only to find that he didn't love them at all. It was heartbreaking and heartbreaking to meet Hazel again, and he realized what he had missed all these years. Caden recreates his life in the play, showing his loneliness, timidity, and sadness. caden asked sammy to play himself because sammy has been watching him and told him that caden can only see himself through himself. In fact, Caden has never really understood others, he sees others who are always imagined in his mind. Just like his plays, all the characters and lines are picked by him.
In the end, sammy did something that Caden never dared to do - jumped off the roof for love. Caden is getting old step by step, witnessing the love of his wife and others and the death of his daughter. Because of his indifference and selfishness, he never knew them. He wanted to make amends and begged Clair to go back to where he was, but Clair finally left him. When he finally got up the courage to be with Hazel, Hazel died. He was willing to freeze the time on the previous night because it was the happiest time of his life. Caden is aging step by step, and gradually the director has become an actor who listens to people's commands. The resulting New York City collapsed under the ravages of time. Caden died peacefully in the ruins, and the drama he wrote and directed also ended with his death.
Throughout the film, caden's choreographed characters and real-life people begin to interact, overlap, and become unrecognizable. Caden is part writer, part himself, part cleaner. And sammy is caden. Caden examines his own life by being played by others, and escapes his own life by playing others. The so-called allegory, caden can refer to anyone. We share his indifference, loneliness, cowardice and fear of death. Like him, we have love, hope, and redemption opportunities. Kaufman shows the sea of life in this film, and also reflects the nothingness of life through the drama in the play. Abandoned New York City, a script that can never be performed, tattoos of fallen roses, like an empty life. The others are actors and passers-by. Caden has only himself in the end. And if you had been braver and more attentive, life would have been different. Kaufman spends two hours showing Caden's life from middle age to death. This is a movie full of emotions. The story is fragmented, and what surrounds it is the helplessness of a person who knows that old age is coming, and his nostalgia for the emotions that have passed. We also felt the loneliness and sadness of his half-life.
Many directors talk about life. Most of them tell the pain and redemption of life through a story. And Kaufman used so many scattered fragments to outline a picture of a person's life. Death fills the whole movie, Caden attended several funerals, and in the face of death he only stood by the grave in a suit, calm and helpless. Aging is irresistible, and only death is the ultimate belonging of everyone. Loneliness and helplessness pervade life. But there was also a moment of sunshine in it. These sunshine are love and hope, it exists in every happy moment, but also in beautiful childhood memories.
It's quite messy to write so much. What is unclear is life.
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