Text/Aaron As a literary film dressed in science fiction, what attracts me to "Cloud Atlas" is its wonderful structure: from the tribe of the ancestors to the dystopian future, the protagonists of different time and space are passed down by some intergenerational legends. Objects, and more importantly, some kind of intergenerational belief linked together. Diachronicity is here transformed into synchronicity: each generation senses the silent presence of its predecessors in its own stories, and in the context of the stories of its predecessors, they write their own stories that will infect future generations. A great and inspiring metaphor and intertextual relationship is created in the stories of generations of struggles, love-hate and sacrifices for similar ends, pointing out that "the soul that travels through time and space is like a cloud across the sky ( Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies)" theme. For a long time after that, I was amazed by this original, novel and ingenious design of narrative text structure, until I watched this film: Moments. Like Cloud Atlas, it relies on an original novel of the same name that has won critical acclaim. American author Michael Cunningham published this book in 1998 as a tribute to Virginia Woolf, a great British female writer of the twentieth century, a pioneer of modernist and feminist literature, one of the pioneers and major exponents of stream-of-consciousness techniques. , and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. I bet David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, has read this book and was as impressed with its approach and creativity as I was. This kind of excitement finally prompted him to decide to write a novel of his own by imitating this technique, except that the protagonists will be expanded from three to six, and the artwork that connects him (her) through time and space will also be composed of the novel "Dello" "Mrs. Wei" becomes the music "Cloud Atlas Sextet". So there was "Cloud Atlas" in 2004. Whether this is the case, I can never know for sure. This is not research, just a guess that satisfies me. With "Cloud Atlas" at the bottom, "Every Moment" is not a difficult movie for me to understand. Just as the "Cloud Atlas Sextet" has six voices, three voices appear in this film, playing in three different locations on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1920s, 1950s and early 2000s. And strangely, there is a harmony that travels through time and space - this harmony is constantly expressed in the film with skillful montage. If you happen to be unfamiliar with this technique, there is a sense of trance brought about by the seamless transition of time and space. The furthest up the river of time is Nicole Kidman's Woolf herself, after all, this is a biographical, arguably biographical work about her. Woolf in the film is now living in a secluded country house in Richmond, England, writing the last novel of her life and her masterpiece "Mrs Dalloway" (there is a movie of the same name, you may wish to compare it). ). She moved here from London on the advice of her doctor and with the help of her husband Leonard. Those around her believed that the tranquility of the countryside was good for her health. Previously, she had suffered from auditory hallucinations, syncope and other symptoms, and tried to commit suicide twice. Also trying to commit suicide is Laura Brown, who lives in Los Angeles in the 1950s, in the second link of the time chain. In "Revolutionary Road", "Shutter Island" and even "Inception" (there is no clear account of the background of the times, it should be in the near future, but it is very similar to the aforementioned films in the tragedy of middle-class family life) and other films. The typical living conditions and traumas of post-war bourgeois women, which are deeply reflected, also happened to her. The men returned from the battlefield in a dusty manner, and immediately returned to their regular and busy daily work after the war. Women are left at home, husbands and children do housework. The empty House, the empty lawns and streets, the humming of boiling water on the increasingly quiet furnace, and the frozen time of prison, all speak of a family crisis centered on the dysfunction of gender power relations. If the role of wartime women, as in the miniseries "War in the Pacific," was to publicly comfort American soldiers who had just escaped from Guadalcanal and came to Melbourne to recuperate; the role of postwar women , it is Breeding& for these triumphant heroes Nursing offspring. The suffocating environment has led to many impersonal, socially-structural tragedies for women: miscarriage and death in Revolutionary Road; madness and murder in Shutter Island; In the film, it is the Eternal Fallen Fantasy; in this film, it is running away from home after the suicide is terminated. Laura's son Richard is a naturally sensitive child. Woolf calls it The Visionary, which means that. He instinctively sensed the impending goodbye in his mother's strange behavior, and it made him panic. This is the paragraph that moved me the most. It reminds me of my own childhood, the attachment to my mother and the fear of her disappearance that still comes alive in the past. Is there any young child who has not suffered from this lovesickness and phobia? The difference is that most of the children's worries never came true. Richard was not so lucky. The shadows of childhood left irreparable wounds on his soul, and a complex feeling of fear, loneliness and abandonment intertwined throughout his life, and even in the moments before his suicide, the only thing that flashed in his mind was The image of shouting at the mother's figure through the window. Clarissa Vaughan, the character closest to the audience in time among the three voices, is embedded in the time-space chain in the interaction with the adult Richard. This woman who lives in New York and is called Mrs Dalloway by the latter seems to be the reincarnated woman in Woolf's writings today. In order to celebrate Richard's award for his poetry works, and to encourage him to reintegrate into society and embrace life, he is preparing to hold a Party at home. Her efforts didn't bring about Richard's change of heart, just as Leonard's efforts didn't pay for Woolf's change of heart. Because of their physical pain, the latter two share the same philosophy: they die for the better life of others. But those finest moments with lovers and partners, Not faded in the slightest by their death. These times, like the existential proposition that Clarissa summed up to her daughter: I thought they were the beginning of happiness, but they were happiness, happiness itself. In this way, three different time and space weave into a complete ensemble. Woolf wrote Mrs Delovey in the English countryside in the 1920s, Laura read Mrs Delovey in the West Coast of the 1950s, and Clarissa became a real-life version while caring for the terminally ill Laura's son Richard Mrs Delowe. Woolf and Richard are both writers, and they have the same creative techniques and adherence to work standards. In addition to being useless, Richard can't stand the pain of not being able to achieve his ideal creative state. This state, according to his own description, should be able to describe everything, all subtle feelings at all times. This is exactly in line with the stream of consciousness method pioneered by Woolf. Furthermore, it goes without saying that all four are homosexual. Whether Laura's kissing of a visiting female neighbor in front of childhood Richard's face is not certain, but the fact that Clarissa is an open Lesbian and has an artificially inseminated daughter is a certainty. In any case, homosexuality is not so much another medium connecting time and space, but another way of paying homage to Woolf. After all, the latter has deeply explored gender roles and gender cognition in his works, and he is also ambiguous with some women, including his sister, in his life. These facts have been repeatedly pointed out in the extensive Woolf research literature. . The similarities in narrative structure cannot hide the major difference between Moments and Cloud Atlas in terms of thematic temperament. Cloud Atlas' pursuit of personal freedom is extroverted. Its edge refers to external oppression, whatever its form—savage and murder, prejudice and arrogance, slave owners or mental institutions, corporations or governments. In this sense, it is realistic and modern. It is full of progressivist heroic passion and high self-confidence. It represents the modernity of the 16th-18th century, the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, or early modernity, even if it joins the dystopian future society that seems to be a bit postmodern on the surface, and resistance The same is true of the Sisyphus-style pessimistic romanticism that some people will still raise their flags and march forward without success. It cannot be erased from the agitation and superficiality in its bones. "The Moment" is different. It is at the other extreme of the spectrum, the trend Woolf himself initiated and represented: modernism. It is reflective and introspective. Its pursuit of personal freedom points to the heart of man. It represents another variant of modernity, a much later modernity, one that flourished in the 1910-1930s, for Woolf, Eliot, Joyce, Baudelaire, Benjamin A spiritual awareness that is widely shared by a generation—those who have lived through one world war and watched as another world war looms and finally comes. I am incapable of evaluating which one is more successful when the same structural form is applied to very different themes and artistic trends. I really think that both are good at winning and each is good at it. In works such as Cloud Atlas, the cross-temporal ensemble technique can more forcefully illustrate the theme of struggle, multiplying the inspiring moral force. And in a work like Moment, the same technique can inspire empathy in the audience, making them feel attached to specific human situations that are constantly shuffling and chaotic in their lives. The former makes people feel that different time and space are unobstructed in the field of vision of a four-dimensional observer, showing an extension; while the latter seems to be twisted into a knot and nailed in one place. This difference is not accidental, it is related to their respective imaginings of time. The time view of "Cloud Atlas" is linear, it believes in the final coming of the Savior, it believes that victory/success/happiness is ahead, and what is left for this moment is struggle. Unlike Moments, it does not believe in messianic narratives. On the contrary, it believes that the value of life is to taste the occasional moment of divinity in a long struggle and struggle, as Clarissa told her daughter: a certain The feeling of happiness that suddenly came when I opened my eyes this morning. In this way, with the attempt to write three women's lives in one day, the author of "The Moment" has completed a sublime tribute to Woolf. They succeeded in capturing the key word that appeared in Woolf's terrific letter to her husband - the hours, for the modernist essence behind this simple phrase - life has no grand purpose and rationality, but only divided The moments of throbbing, fear, patience, satisfaction, and gratification are just the entanglement of these emotions and the entanglement of the pain in the hearts of others—understanding. The ingenious structural skeleton holds up what Woolf himself calls the eternal flesh and blood of his work - life and death. The performances of the three diva-level actresses make the whole film even more brilliant (I personally think Julianne Moore played a little better than Nicole Kidman; the latter's makeup artist is no less credited than the actor himself). If there's anything to mark Woolf's 120th birthday, it's the movie "The Moments" (released in 2002).
View more about The Hours reviews
