Edges under group portraits

Thomas 2022-03-27 09:01:13

A dilapidated house gathers a very different group of people, living together day and night, everyone is an edge in it. Mills goes straight to laying out the macro state and nuanced individual form of the entire group from the start. Dorothea, who has rich experience in life, is open-minded and kind. While exuding the brilliance of motherhood, she irresistibly creates a gap with the young society. She listened to Louise Armstrong's jazz, Jamie to punk, and the two were like two incompatible music, the melody never resonated. The completely different personalities and experiences of the five people are bound to generate various frictions. Mills laid all kinds of frictions on the extension line of the plot. While keeping the group portrait full, he continued to analyze its interior. What he saw after digging was Various colors. The communication of ideology is brought to the screen through the process of contradiction. Everyone has different positions and different growth stages. The images created by age and background provide rationality for various incompatibilities, and because of mutual desire for understanding and tolerance. Knead it into a rounded group. In this angular group portrait, feminist consciousness and personal consciousness act as the internal driving force of some characters' actions, stirring and pulling the uneven attitudes under the colorful lens more and more tightly. The brief fusion of the skateboard and the car seems to be the brief gentleness between the edges and corners. However, in this large group portrait, there are always sharp edges and corners, and finally go their separate ways.

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Extended Reading

20th Century Women quotes

  • Jamie: I thought that was just the beginning of a new relationship with her, where she'd really tell me stuff. But maybe it was never really like that again. Maybe that was it.

    Dorothea: In March of 1999, I'll start to feel tired and confused. When I finally go to the doctor, he will say that the cancer in my lungs had already travelled to my breast and brain. I'll try to teach Jamie what to do with my stocks, but my instructions will be impossible to understand.

    Julie: Abbie will take me to Planned Parenthood. And I will go on the pill. I will go to NYU and lose touch with Jamie and Dorothea, and I will stop talking to my mom, I will fall in love with Nicholas, we will move to Paris, and choose not to have children.

    Abbie: I will stay in Santa Barbara. In just two years, I'll marry Dave. A month after I get married Carlotta will die. A week later, Max will die too. I will work out of my garage and show in local galleries. Against my doctor's advice, I will get pregnant, and by the time I'm thirty I'll have two boys.

    William: I'll live with Dorothea for another year. Then I'll open a pottery store in Sedona Arizona. I will marry Laurie, a singer-songwriter. We'll get divorced in a year. Then I'll meet Sandy, we will marry, and I will continue to do my pottery.

    Jamie: My mom will meet Jim in 1983, they'll be a couple until she dies. On her birthday each year, he will buy her a trip on a biplane. Years after she's gone I'll finally get married and have a son. I'll try to explain to him what his grandmother was like - but it will be impossible.

  • Jamie: [to his mom] You know, when the firemen come... people don't usually invite them for dinner.