On the night of the lunar eclipse, a group of old friends who hadn't seen each other for a long time had a dinner at someone's house. This was a successful meeting as expected, they brought wine, tiramisu, and their own secrets. The seemingly everyday scene setting makes the film immersed in a peaceful and pleasant atmosphere at the beginning. The footage is cross-edited, and the relationship between the seven protagonists is explained in turn. As the key trigger of the plot turning point, the mobile phone is like a time bomb on the dining table. From the moment the trust game begins, it constantly pierces the calm on the surface, triggering a series of relationship turmoil, corresponding to the process of profit and loss of the moon outside the window, which makes people see in a trance A hand of God stretched out from behind the clouds, controlling the subtle changes in the atmosphere in the room. The only thing that confuses us is the identity of the master behind the power.
In the sophisticated modern society, everyone stores their secrets in a specific private space. In the film, Ava quipped with her mobile phone: "This is the black box of our lives." Due to the serious lack of security, modern people have invented all kinds of mobile devices as omnipotent butlers who trade stocks, navigate, and communicate on our behalf. Most people are confident that the information placed in it is infallible. With the exposure of privacy and frequent eavesdropping incidents, optimists find that the ideal refuge does not exist, and the seemingly most secret place is exposed to all-round monitoring and peeping all the time. The shadow of media control permeates every corner of our lives, and on the other hand, we are still too dependent on the umbrella of technology. In this stalemate of contradictions, personal freedom is squeezed into nowhere to hide, let alone self-preservation. Thirteen years ago, Feng Xiaogang made a particularly down-to-earth movie "Mobile Phone", which made an accurate prediction of the future media society through the portrayal of black plots. Thirteen years later, in Italy, tens of thousands of kilometers away, with rich cultural heritage, this small-budget masterpiece with a similar topic was born. Almost all the scenes in the film are set indoors, but with the clever script setting, a magnificent pattern is sublimated in a closed space, thus exploring a proposition that closely follows the pulse of the times: the fragility of interpersonal relationships.
To what extent do social networks affect our lives? The controversy behind this topic seems worthy of a big book, but it is often automatically filtered by the busy pace of life. People have long been accustomed to the convenience brought by information tools, and even ignored the vulnerability of virtual systems. In the film, the mobile phone acts as such a condensed secret carrier. It seems to be a vacuum, but it is not loyal. Every time the bell rings suddenly like a gunshot, we can't help but wonder how much bloody and naked truth is hidden in that small black box? The narrative method of the film is different from the traditional three-paragraph structure. From the beginning of the film, when everyone evaluates the sexes, they use a desktop computer and a Mac as an analogy, revealing the evolution of the way of thinking in the information age, to the dinner table mentioning that a friend ruined family life because of a text message. , as the subtext of the unfolding of the plot, attracts the audience's attention to hidden corners, witnesses it uncovers the secrets behind the audience one by one, concocts high-energy bridges, and then shakes off even bigger burdens, making the whole sitcom stained Hearty dramatic color, until the farce is difficult to end, the three views are broken.
There are pros and cons to this approach. The disadvantage is that in order to serve the plot, the film has to deliberately create a lot of coincidence conflicts. On the other hand, similarly powerful portrayals have become part of the film's DNA. You will be amazed at the screenwriter's treacherous and vivid conception, which allows a room of middle-class people who are good at disguising to take off their glossy masks, and fully expose their inner unease in mutual suspicion and exposure. Although a little didactic, it can also be used as a critical fable that reflects contemporary social syndrome groups, and inspires people to think about the complex interpersonal relationships around them. When evaluating Rashomon in class, the teacher said that the most offensive lie in the world is gray. Isn't everyone in reality bound by grey lies? Both good and evil, self-surrender, wandering on the border of morality and ethics, carefully weaving glass-like fragile dreams. It's not that we give up being in the company of good qualities such as loyalty and integrity, but in a social environment full of contradictions, absolute integrity never exists.
We've all experienced a moment when someone close to us exposes a carefully packaged lie, and the other party accuses us of being untrustworthy. However, the so-called trust is difficult to measure and judge with rigid standards. Who doesn't have a few ghosts in their hearts, blindly wrapping others in a storm of words, but can't see the gray area behind the storm, no matter how much illusory sense of justice is just moral quicksand. Human nature is inherently good, human nature is inherently evil, and human nature cannot stand the test. A high level of civilization has enabled us to evolve into decent modern people, but in terms of relationship needs and choices, psychological motivation still cannot cross the primitive jungle. Instinct self-interested tendencies make people toss and swerve at the intersection of each other and hesitate. A human network that has expanded to a certain level is like a building carefully constructed with building blocks, which collapses instantly after a small piece is taken away. Therefore, there is no such thing as a necessity of encounter, and the essence of relationship is transmutation.
This is not just a movie that satirizes marriage and romance. You can see different aspects of the contradiction in reality: the mainstream society's rejection of sexual minorities, the sensitivity and rebelliousness of adolescence... Regardless of the gap between generations, Whether it is a conflict of value orientations, they all end up in the prejudice and harm caused by selfishness within the group. Too often, it is this blindness that allows us to direct fire on others, unaware of the deception that is so close at hand. How can you be sure that your partner's phone is not of the opposite sex? How do you make sure your best friend hasn't slept with your fiancé? How can you be sure that the single man who is teased by everyone is not really in love with a man?
We know each other's interests and gossip, but it is difficult to define the intimacy of this understanding. Finally, we pass by the true confidant and become perfect strangers. What's really commendable about the film is that surreal parallel ending:
At the end of the party, the soft moon shadow reappears in the night sky, and friends say goodbye to each other. The men agreed to play football together tomorrow; Ava and his wife were sitting on the bedside chatting; Cosimo and his girlfriend continued to enjoy the sweetness before marriage; Carlotta and Laile returned home to hide their secrets, and the children fell asleep quietly; Pep pulled up on the empty road and did aerobics in solitude. I think this is close to the real state of most people's lives, less chaotic and less hysterical. After dawn, the smoke screen dissipated, and under the sun, there was nothing new, and life flowed peacefully. But the more calm the surface is, the more undercurrents flow inside.
People are like the moon, and there is always a dark side of incompleteness. In the end, everyone is their own biggest constraint.
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