Re-watched on July 29, 2020, Shanghai Film Festival 4K restored version at Wuzhong Road Red Star Movie World.
"Sweet Life" was filmed in 1959. It is between "Night of Kabylia" and "Eight and a half" in time. In this transformational work that also has a neo-realistic temperament, Fellini Wandering almost freely in both the left and right perspectives. There are both critical portrayals of the bourgeois sensuality and drunkard, as well as the low-level appearances of the Virgin, the tabloid reporter, and the ballroom girl. In fact, Marcello’s The author’s identity has a certain level of mobility. You can socialize with celebrities, and you can go in and out of the market. Through his interviews, or instead of wandering, we can see the three-dimensionality of Rome’s hierarchical form in the fifteen years after the war, and it is also The diversity of values, the sacred Catholic symbols still appear in the sky, but on the ground are workshops, traffic jams, parties and rock music. The male protagonist seems to be good at dancing with long sleeves, but stands by. As a writer, no one knows what he is writing, thinking No one seemed to really care what they wrote, except for the melancholy Steiner. Most of the time, they just need the identity of "intellectuals" to cheer them up, accompany them, or to surpass them. Marcello understands the rules of the game. He seeks flowers and asks Liu, acting like a contemporary Don Juan, but his flirtation is always There is a deep-rooted anxiety, as if in doubt, what will happen after the immediate desire is satisfied? After taking off the costume-like charm, what kind of fragile and languid heart is inside? After the plump and sweet feast, how to face the cold emptiness?
There is no answer, just like nothing can truly dominate two different lives. The supreme and above-all meaning has been turned into ruins in the disaster of history. The world is like a circus. Only a non-stop carnival can Covering up pain, decay, and parting, here Fellini’s theme begins to incorporate a spirit of the times. He realized earlier than Buñuel’s "Angel of Destruction" and Godard’s "Contempt" that the communication between life and life Invalidation, through the beginning and end of the environmental sound, through the language barrier, through the blade-like switching of night and dawn. ——The noisy and indulgent night comes to an abrupt end, and the cold, lonely dawn arrives suddenly, just like the wind-wrapped streets in "Lang Dang Er". It seems that Fellini doesn't care about the symbolic meaning of the sunrise at all. We can't see his expression of dawn, warmth, and hope (such as the golden color on the wall at the end of "Female Addict"). For Fellini during the day It seems that it is only an interruption to the night, an inevitable interruption to the feast, intoxication, and unconsciousness. This cycle of day and night also establishes the most important narrative and aesthetic features of the film, especially the amazing transition in the fountain pool, close-up shots First noticed that the sound of the water stopped, and then cut to a distant scene unsuspectingly-the scene suddenly turned into daylight, lustful foreplay, suddenly exposed to broad daylight, here appeared a brilliant pen beyond the new realism The lens breaks the continuity of the character’s actions, and its meaning is difficult to explain with the logic of reality. Let’s just say that the film enters the psychological reality of Marcello from the external "objective" perspective, in which the sky light is like a landscape that changes rapidly. , Time is like a sinister assassin, before he can catch it, it has slipped away.
Unlike the director’s conclusive creative dilemma in "Eight and a half", Marcello in this film is still unfinished. Whether as an actor or a character, he wants to escape, but he repeatedly falls into frivolous desires. He wants to be realistic. He is unable to truly give anything. He does not want to build. After witnessing the happiness of his friends, he tried to write something, tried to restore the close relationship with his father, and even tried to face his emotions with Emma and Maddalena, but in the end Overwhelmed by the icy reality, Steiner’s death is a literary event in the arc of the protagonist. It signifies that the character can no longer get anything from the object he trusts, and can no longer open up, that humanity, orthodoxy, and love The door crashed down, and this was not from some external force, but from its internal decay. This tragedy began when Steiner played Bach’s Totaka in the church, as the salon dialogue implies, He was as tall as a Gothic spire, and he wanted to detach, so that he could no longer return to the ground-except death. From a larger perspective, the connection between the meaning of transcendence and the secular “earth and energy” has been broken. “The tree of knowledge has robbed us from the tree of life” (Berlin), the relationship between truth and life The tension between time has always been the theme of historical narration. The 20th century is full of sacrifices to various truths. Steiner’s tragedy can also be regarded as a small echo of history. Fellini is in a highly personal way. In the language of the world, he has encountered a universal and post-modern spiritual crisis. This kind of comfort produces a sense of life and death, and it has increasingly become a creative theme and mode.
Fellini said that this movie is about the inner city, for him it is of course Rome, but compared with Sorrentino’s dazzling rocker shots in "The Beautiful City", Fellini’s language is still plain. Yes, the large number of middle shots creates a sense of intimacy with a distance. All the images are within reach. It is hard to say that there is any deep metaphor. After the carnival, the back of the father sitting on the balcony is a moving scene. If it’s the current director, it’s easy to make a focus schedule-first focus on the back of the head, and then focus on the scenery outside the window to form a sense of alienation that pulls the characters out of the situation, but Fellini does not, at least in this film Here, the keynote is still realistic. Even the complex plot after a quarrel is full of morning fatigue and coolness. What we see is life, not spectacles, but after a series of rushes and indulgences, the drama is always It is the burnout that follows, like rolling balloons, scattered fluff and silent smiles. To me, this is the best thing the movie can give.
Watching "Sweet Life" is a test, a three-hour fragment of non-stop storytelling, sometimes you can hardly doubt whether this drama is unnecessary, such as the courtesy of Emma and the elderly woman at the Apparition of the Virgin. Or Marcello and Nico had a few failed rides before going to the castle, but when I rewatched it, I began to realize that it was these seemingly boring plots that anchored the unexplainable and unique characteristics of our lives, Luo When evaluating the film, Jaybert said that perhaps there is no such thing as a sweet life in this world, but you need to discover it after experiencing it yourself. I think I can add one sentence. The sweetness you expected before is often not the sweetness of your memory later. It is in this difference that we understand, grow, and reconcile with the past.
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