Last year, the first place in the annual top ten of "Cinebooks" was also selected for Cannes, and the best director in the Un Certain Regard category. I don't know if it was deliberately opposed to the conservative jury chairman Spielberg, and last year's Cannes was gay. Compared with the Palme d'Or masterpiece, La Vie d'Adele, the author's style of this seemingly sketch is even more shocking to me.
The director used the simplest scene to tell a naked and true suspense story, revealing the essence of the so-called love. Can desire and loneliness overcome fear? I think there should be a final answer when the male protagonist calls out gay lovers' names in the dark woods at the end. Desire is definitely the most irrepressible primal factor in human nature, I believe. It hides in the dark but exudes a deadly tempting smell, enough to make people fascinated and lose their nature. I suddenly remembered the tragedy of Lin Jun, a Canadian student last year, and finally understood everything.
Alain Guiraudie deserves to be Godard's most admired contemporary director. His author's style seems to be simple and straightforward, but the essence is precise and sophisticated. Simple natural light photography, repeated single scenes, and a limited number of characters create a suspenseful plot, and only a few lines of dialogue reveal profound philosophy.
In particular, the "stranger", the fat man, made me stunned. It seems to be a man who appeared inexplicably in Pasolini's film "Theorem" and disturbed family relations, but he maintained a estranged relationship with other characters and was alone on the huge beach. It feels close to some kind of detached cut-scene clown in the stage play, but it is closely related to the key plot and the fate of the characters.
In my opinion, it is not only a shocking ending, but the many dialogues between the fat man and the male lead are worth chewing over and over again, and the taste of them is unforgettable. This kind of natural script is naturally unavoidable.
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