(Author: Zhang Chong, associate professor of Beijing Film Academy)
Danish director Thomas Winterberg's film "Alcohol Project" won four awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor at the 33rd European Film Festival in December 2020. "The Hunt" (2012) is another great work after eight years, and it still follows the director's usual way of thinking about universal problems. Eight years ago, "Hunting" was more optimistic: "There is too much malice in the world, but if we support each other, those malice will naturally go away." The director discusses people themselves from the possibility of love and trust. , the relationship between people and the generation of the meaning of human existence, but at the end of the film, this optimism and romance are shattered with a cold shot. While presenting the diversity and unpredictability of human nature, it also proposes The question of where to go in the face of adversity or everyday life: who should one refer to, and what should lead them.
"Alcohol Project" further explores this. When dealing with issues such as rationality, irrationality, and death, director Thomas tries to analyze the contradiction and conflict between order and passion in the "visible world" from the perspective of "knowable world". How should one face this illusory dream. The hero Martin's "jump" in the last shot of the film is quite meaningful. This action presents the sadness, passion and happiness in the general sense of human beings.
The Absurd: Between Rational Order and Passion
The focus of the film "Alcohol Project" is not to discuss midlife crisis or middle-aged drunkenness, but to think about the universal issue of "the nature and meaning of human existence". Is the meaning of human existence the comfort of the senses, the success of the ethical sense, or the love that follows the piety of "destroying excess and making up for what is lacking"? In the film, physical education teacher Tommy said: "There are too many students, and the little boys are struggling." In modern society, due to the rapid economic development, the concentration of industrialized people and the urbanization of living spaces, its residents must abide by a set of conventions. The rational system, cognitive system and ethical system, etc., make even children at the stage of children have to "struggle desperately" in order to smoothly enter a "order", "cognition" and "logical discourse system" with absurd characteristics , meet its standards and requirements, and complete the cognition of "successful learning".
In this case, everyone must be like Sebastian, a high school student who calls himself a "loser", in order to become someone in the future, he has to endorse and take a series of examinations in order to get rid of the "failure" style Existence, with certain absurd characteristics. The director introduced the thought and cognition of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard without a trace, who believed that "faith is the highest passion of man", which "begins from the absurd" and ends the absurd to achieve the ultimate victory. "Alcohol Project" reflects on the whole absurd social order and rational cognition through the "absurdity" presented by "little boys struggling desperately".
The Alcohol Project features four main male characters: Martin, a taciturn high school history teacher, his colleague and friend, Tommy, a physical education teacher, Peter, a music teacher, and Nicola, a psychology teacher. The four men represent the four men's marital status: single Peter is full of vision and passion for women, love and marriage; Nicola lives "happily" in a house facing the sea, but has to deal with three young children. The problem of children's bedwetting and lack of sleep; Martin is in a middle-aged marriage crisis, his passion and love in his early years have been exhausted by more than ten years of daily life, and the family of four is separated from each other; Together, they were in a state of depression and nihility, and finally fell into the water and died in alcoholism. The marital status of the four men presents what Kierkegaard called the absurdity—“Marry, and you’ll regret it; don’t marry, and you’ll regret it; marry or don’t, and you’ll regret it.” Tommy in the film He also thought that all this was "meaningless", and in the face of the absurd, he chose suicide in the physiological sense. In the film, Martin and the other four start drinking during the day under the pretext of corroborating psychologist Finn Scadreau's theory of 0.05% blood alcohol. The second alternative to the absurd: spiritual suicide.
So how do people choose and realize freedom between the first life and the second life? At the end of the film, the director completes his symbolic answer with Martin's second leap - the "Abrahamian leap".
A Dionysian "jump" to the mundane
Wine has the characteristics of "overstepping the existing order" in the world. In "Alcohol Project", in various occasions and spaces of drinking, Martin's expression, who is usually silent and unsmiling, is always relaxed, sometimes even smiling and ecstatic. Alcohol or revelry made him temporarily enter the second world. Driven by alcohol, he temporarily got rid of the moral laws of his father and teachers, and also got rid of the serious and hierarchical world of order, and also got rid of the prudent work and daily life. Fear of authority, truth, dogma and death. During the carnival in the bar, Martin jumped into the arms of the crowd at the bar. Carnival made love and laughter possible, and then reached the peak of ecstasy. Bakhtin believes that carnival "has a powerful and vigorous transforming power, has an indestructible vitality", has all possibilities, and can even complete subversion/innovation for reason. The English poet Young also questioned reason: "Is it only reason that is baptized and named, and is passion a heretic?" Putting it on the title page of his own work, he considers the universal meaning of human beings as a lonely and irrational individual existence, and believes that the either-or choices that people make under the impetus of irrational extreme emotions are precisely the The clear proof of the true existence of human beings breaks the core pattern of pure thinking, absolute reason and logic as the core of human existence since Hegelianism.
According to the logic of "I think, therefore I am", in modern society "I work and I exist", so where am I when I am not working? "Work" is an important manifestation of the existence value of Martin and other four men who are gradually entering middle age. After a long time, they hope to use the state of drunkenness to consider human oral language ability, psychological rhetorical effect, social and professional ability, so that the boring classroom and lifeless married life are full of laughter and passion, and they temporarily gain interest. Unexpected results. But when they got drunk, the Dionysian carnival and ecstasy disrupted the daily order and made the daily existence lose its sense of stability. "The carnival life is a life that is out of the norm, to a certain extent a 'turned life' and a 'reverse life'", but this "reverse life" can also appear in more serious political moments , and even promote the development of human beings. For example, in the 46th minute of the "Alcohol Project", several heads of state were drunk during diplomatic moments: Johnson, Yeltsin, Clinton, Merkel and Sarkozy. In international diplomatic occasions, ten thousand people In a moment of remarkable solemnity, the various drunken states of these heads of state drinking at work seem more human and impressive. At the end of the film, director Thomas made the funeral meet the carnival parade of the graduation ceremony. During the carnival, they playfully handcuffed the headmistress who represented order to the railing, subverting and developing the order she represented.
Life is full of contradictory double colors: "If you are obsessed with gaps, you have to accept the fence." (Finnish poet Klaas Anderson) In "Alcohol Project", Martin and his wife have been married for more than ten years. As a doctor, his wife often works night shifts. The two people live a very serious and frowning life, their love has gradually become dull from the former passion, and even escaping and alienating each other. But when Martin entered the alcohol binge plan, he subverted and innovated all the daily order in an eclectic way, making "boring" full of passion again. Similar to Cassavetes' "The Husband" (1970), which has been called a "real film", "Alcohol Project" presents such a presence. The three men in "Husband" also began to think about serious issues such as life and death and the existence of people because of the sudden death of their friends. After the funeral, the three men broke the routine, had fun, and even ran from New York to London to have fun; At the end, the style of painting suddenly changed, they returned to their doorsteps and restored their original appearance, becoming "fathers" and "husbands" in daily life, and continuing to play their roles in secular society - this can be called "casa". "Witz-style tolerance" or "Ancient Greek-style tolerance" completes the progression from everyday to carnival, shadow presentation and sublime sublimation. Longinus believed that the first source of the sublime was "the ability to grasp great ideas", followed by "strong and moving emotions". If the first element of the sublime source has a rational color, then its second source shows a strong irrational emotional color, and it also constitutes a spiritual refuge for people to temporarily escape from the absurd, but it is not the final solution to the absurd. way.
The second "jump" from revelry to faith
"Alcohol Project" quotes a sentence from Kierkegaard's "Either or That" at the beginning of the film: "What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of this dream." How to face it "Pain" and "happiness" are two antinomy universal problems, Kierkegaard said that his "life is a great pain, this kind of pain is unknown and incomprehensible to others". Work feels happy and fulfilling, the only thing that feels sad is the inability of others to share his happiness. Like the happy smile of Martin, the protagonist of the film, few people can understand this unspoken and silent "Abraham" belief. In the eyes of directors and philosophers, this silent "belief" or "belief" can serve as the ultimate solution to the absurd and all other problems.
In the film, Martin said to his students: "The world is never what you expect." There is a difference between the nature and the truth of the world seen by the eyes and the world, or the opposite cognition. How to really recognize the world, in addition to Tommy's suicide and temporarily avoiding the absurd in the carnival, the director used Martin's second jump to give a third possibility of existence: jumping into the "Abraham" style Faith has become a metaphysical religion-like existence. Martin leaps to the sea to the accompaniment of jazz and ballet, where his friend Tommy is buried. It was a leap to Tommy, to death, and to belief in existence. It is also a true belief, a test of oneself, with the characteristics of "fear and trembling", jumping at the risk of irreversible redemption, facing funerals, carnivals and mediocrity, and bridging and healing them. In "The Analects of Confucius Advanced Eleventh", it is said that "if you do not know life, how can you know death", Chinese people rarely discuss and understand death, while Western philosophy and religion consider it more systematically.
Sadly, director Thomas Winterberg's 17-year-old daughter, Ida Winterberg, died in a car accident in Belgium when filming began. She had planned to participate in this film before, which also added sadness and solemnity to the action of "carrying the coffin" in the film, and added tension and contemplation to the "jump" in the film.
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