after watching open your eyes, but I only felt shocked. Could there be a movie like this? On imdb, it got a good score, 8.1 points.
A recent popular movie "vanilla sky" was adapted and remade based on this film. Although I have not watched vanilla sky, I think it is unlikely that the audience will be more shocked than open your eyes. You can expect what you will get from a Hollywood movie, but this Spanish movie is completely beyond your expectation.
Director Alejandro Amenábar cleverly used film narrative methods such as memories, dreams, and "realistic" scenes in this film, incorporating a variety of film elements. At the beginning, you may only think that this is a romance film, but later you may think It is a moral film, and you will think it is a psychological suspense film or a horror film. IMDB also lists it as a sci-fi film, but it seems difficult to really fall into any of these categories.
Let me first repost a short introduction to the first half of the video:
The handsome and rich boy Cesar is romantic, only advocating "one-night stand" and never spend the second night with the same woman. At a party, he borrowed his buddy Pelayo's girlfriend Sofia to get rid of the "one night lover" Nuria who was obsessed with him. The selfish Cesar ignored Pelayo's warning and took the opportunity to launch a "one-night stand offensive" against Sofia and came to Sofia's apartment. During the "offensive" Cesar found himself in love with Sofia and spent the night purely with her. When he went out in the morning, he found that the jealous Nuria had been watching him outside the door. He got into Nuria's car awkwardly. Desperate and crazy, Nuria wanted to go to Huangquan with Cesar and drove the car down a high slope at high speed. She was killed on the spot. Cesar was severely disfigured and became extremely ugly. Cesar was afraid to see his terrifying face, hiding behind a human skin mask all day long. Sofia's attitude towards him is extremely cold, which makes him unhappy. After a miraculous hangover, everything seemed to be getting better: Sofia got close to him again, and the plastic surgery was successful... But for some reason, Cesar kept hallucinating, sometimes found himself still the face of the devil, and sometimes felt that Nuria was still alive. And from time to time and Sofia do "shifting shadow" games. Finally, in a poignant sex, Cesar treats Sofia as Nuria and hysterically kills her.
But the story is far from over here, but it is difficult for me to introduce it further. It is even impossible to faithfully record what I see on the screen in words, because it seems that nothing happens in the film. Yes, what is an illusion. And I can't find any introduction to the film that can introduce the rest of the film clearly, but in fact, if the introduction is clear, this film will not shock people. I still try my best to introduce the plot that subverted my whole idea of the first half of the film.
In the first half of the film, the overall plot development is driven by a conversation between a psychiatrist and Cesar, until we already believe that Cesar killed Sofia because of his hallucinations. Cesar recalled something and went with a psychologist to a company that provides frozen life services to find out the truth. However, Cesar was in a state of confusion. He hysterically snatched the guard’s gun and shot several police officers. When firing at Cesar, the psychologist pounced on Cesar and was shot. But from this scene, the director takes you to a world full of suspense. The previous scene is completely negated: because the psychologist seems to be in a hallucination, he pounces on Cesar, but there is no gunshot wound on him. Is there no injured or dead policeman around? Since then, it seems that it has been futile for you to add an explanation to everything you see from any angle, because there is no explanation at all, and the logical relationship has surpassed our ability.
Has this ever happened? Where are the boundaries between reality and illusion, existence and consciousness? The director may be reminding us to ask ourselves, "Is the world we live in real? How do we verify its authenticity? What is truth? What is reason? What is madness? Beauty and ugliness, to what extent it is Affect us?"
Another question raised by the film is "Does the desire and terror in our hearts affect our understanding of reality, making us unable to distinguish between reality and dreams?" For a charming and beautiful man like Cesar , He is most afraid of losing his appearance; for Cesar who has lost his beauty, what he most hopes to do is to avenge Nuria; the doctor can’t repair Cesar’s appearance, what he hopes most is that technology in the future can make him beautiful and charming again , He hopes he can live to that day; both
the beginning and the end of the film remind us to open your eyes from the illusion.
At the end of the film, no fixed explanation is provided. There are countless possibilities. Let me imagine several of them here:
1. The whole story has never happened, all are Cesar’s dreams, the ending "Open your eyes" is exactly the alarm that urges Cesar to wake up;
2. The stories behind Cesar's overnight stay at Sofia's house are all Cesar's dreams. He likes Sofia, but he is worried about the revenge of his ex-girlfriend Nuria, so he has such a dream;
3. After Cesar crashed, he was not awake. The plot after the crash was his thoughts and activities during the coma. As mentioned earlier, he was afraid of losing his beauty, so he had a series of associations behind;
4. After the hangover, Cesar just lay on the ground and fell asleep, and dreamed of the following story. He hoped that Sofia would return to him, and hoped that the doctor could help him with plastic surgery, but on the other hand, he felt that it was impossible and was in this kind of thinking. In the contradiction between the two, all kinds of stories and hallucinations have appeared in the back;
5．Sofia really loves Cesar. She returned to Cesar's side, but Cesar's friend Pelayo was very jealous. Therefore, the doctor at the United Hospital pretended to be able to perform plastic surgery on him, but used some methods to cause countless hallucinations in his mind. The following story (hehe, the imagination seems a little bolder, but for this film, it seems that any idea is possible, because everything may be realistic, real, or it may only exist with illusions and dreams. In);
6. After the hangover, Cesar woke up to the realization that Sofia no longer loves herself because of his appearance, and it is meaningless to continue living like this, so he decided to freeze himself until the development of science and technology can provide better plastic surgery. Technology, so he committed suicide, his thoughts did not stop during the freezing process, and the fantasy shown in the movie appeared;
7. Nuria is not dead, he and Pelayo take revenge on Cesar.
There are many possible explanations for the film, and I cannot and cannot list them, because the explanation depends on what you think is a dream and what is reality.
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