At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Spanish director Pedro Almodova’s new work "Pain and Glory" defeated the Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s "Traitor" and helped Antonio Banderas win Won the best actor award in the main competition. Not only that, the film has also been highly praised in English and French journals, and was once considered one of the most powerful contenders for the Palme d’Or. Of course, there are media and film critics all over the world who have affirmed Almodovar's amazing creative power and regret that he has never won a grand prize, but it is undeniable that the film does have an extraordinary charm different from the past.
Different from the previous works, "Pain and Glory" gives people a more restrained feeling, and even makes fans who are familiar with Almodovar's consistent visual style a little uncomfortable: the kind of "big red and purple" in the color we expect. And Bacchus-style emotional catharsis has been greatly reduced, replaced by more blue and white and the emotions surging under these colors. It is conceivable that Almodovar has incorporated more personal and emotional experiences in this film, and these experiences are precisely because of the accumulation of layers and become deep, making the film together with "Law of Desire" and "Bad Education" , Constituted a trilogy with varying degrees of intensity and autobiography.
Although it is difficult to say how autobiographical this film is, one thing is certain, that is, this film can be called Almodovar's "spiritual autobiography" to a large extent: On the one hand, "Pain and "Glory" and Fellini's "Eight and a half" have too many similarities in plot and even details. They are about a series of problems faced by film directors during their creation; on the other hand, the protagonist and director Salvador Marlo There is a unique sensitivity and fragility of the art creator. This fragility comes from his deteriorating physical condition in the film (the compression of the spinal nerve often makes him suffer great pain and torture), but also from his mental state. Instability, all of which can be traced in Almodovar’s personal experience, and it is also vaguely reminiscent of Nanni Moretti’s narration of mental state in films such as "The Pope" and "My Mother". Write.
The external and physical pain had a great impact on El Salvador's psychological state, so that he had to use drugs to obtain both physical and psychological comfort. Salvador, who is addicted to smoking, seemed to fall into the abyss. It was not until one day that he unexpectedly re-encountered his lover who had been separated many years ago. He began to try his best to make up for the emptiness of life and renewed the courage to face life.
Drugs create hallucinations, and with the opportunity of reunion with a lover, the passive hallucinations begin to be replaced unconsciously by actively reconstructed memories. In the end, we discovered that the so-called "memories" that the audience saw on the screen were not entirely the characters "lived the movie" in their minds, and most of them were scenes that were moved by Salvador to the movies he created later. On the surface, "Pain and Glory" played with an in-play structure similar to "Bad Education", but the difference is that the latter's in-play casts a secret of the past, and the secret also builds up the whole film. Suspense. In the former, “secret” and “suspense” do not exist. What is left is a gentle life state composed of fragmented memories, which are processed by art and “cursed” by the director. It points to the truth and testimony, and it points to the creator's thorough examination of his own personality structure.
A closer look will reveal that almost all the characters in the film are ghosts from the past. Although they show themselves as they are now, they all come from the past. Unlike Almodovar’s previous works that took place in the present, the protagonist in "Pain and Glory" does not even want to pursue anything, although he still has this opportunity-his age and experience make him believe that only the past It’s a wise choice to separate the lovers of Love, and there is no need to deliberately pursue the whereabouts of the painter; the memory seems to be "packed" by the protagonist as a whole, and it seems that this way can not be touched, continued, or polluted by reality. These packaged memory fragments belong only to the past, and at the same time only to Salvador; it is always in the position of "only to be seen from afar, not to be played with indecently", becoming a kind of eternity, and being sealed as a gift of life.
Through this kind of distant memories, the protagonist continues to go on a gradual spiritual journey: he first "discovered" his mother, and then "discovered" a young painter. The two were not only concerned about their childhood During this period, he had a decisive influence, and it also allowed him to find the courage and the right direction of life under the pain of his body, and also allowed him to return to the place where life really "started" to some extent. It's the new basement home that the whole family moved into, a white "womb".
If the red "womb" presented by Bergman in "Shouts and Whispers" means passion and conflict, Almodovar uses white to express purity and holiness. In fact, we usually think that Almodovar is synonymous with "fire and red" (Spanish passion), but in "Pain and Glory", he seems to deliberately show his subtle use of "water and white". It's hard to think of Gaston Bachelard's various interpretations of "Water and Dreams". For example, the mother in the memory was washing the white sheets with river water from the beginning. The protagonist’s memories of her childhood home were also filled with a lot of white. The sun hits the white wall from the top patio to the white wall and the stucco's Italian sculptural body. Above, a sense of sacredness almost like a church is formed. When the painter started washing his naked body with water, the childhood protagonist was completely stunned by the scene before him, and then fainted to the ground.
This very enlightening scene was portrayed by Almodovar as almost dreamlike, and perhaps until this moment, we realized that water has always occupied an important position in Almodovar’s films, whether it’s "To Her The lava lamp of "Said" is still the downpour of "Everything About My Mother", not to mention the tears that are indispensable in almost all works. In "The Glory of Pain", the protagonist floats in a pool of clear water at the beginning, and the comfort brought by floating closely links pain, motherhood, pregnancy, and other vital images in Salvador's life. It leads us to slide into a fluid, primitive, spiritual world. It is here that Almodovar met us. He arbitrarily fiddled with light, shadow and time, fusing the past and the present, reality and fiction together; the most precious pain and glory in his life seemed to be superimposed on one. In the bottomless magic box, until the end, he pulled out an extremely sincere heart from it.
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