I can’t write a short review...
Linklater’s goal is obvious, not simply to make a film to achieve its aesthetic value, but to use art to convey (practice) his own concept-"to think, to live, to find yourself", but his ambition is not Not only that, what he hopes is to convey metaphysical thinking that only text can convey (the first layer) and cast it into the story, transform it into the empathy of the audience, inspire and guide the audience to find their own answers (second Layer), making the movie from the individual (the audience enters from their own perspective to interpret the story + evaluate the movie) into the whole (the audience enters from the perspective of the world to analyze the problem + explore the self and life), which requires a strong movie Of interactivity.
Therefore, the form of the film must first turn to a complete interview and recording to complete the first step (to exclude the audience). This form of film is no longer a film in the traditional sense (to guide the audience), and it will cause the image to become dull and boring (see Woody Allen's "Love and Death", where the protagonist talks to himself in the film Talking about Spinoza, talking about metaphysical propositions such as God and soul, but Woody Allen obviously performed it with a sarcastic and exaggerated attitude. Because he knew that such a state is difficult to exist in daily life. , Putting these concepts into the movie in a serious way will only make the images hypocritical and artificial, so he added these segments just to let the audience know that he is satirizing people like this in real life, and the audience does not need to think about it by themselves. Advanced concept), if you want to convey these content effectively and not create a counterproductive ironic effect, you must sacrifice the reality of the image and turn it into an animation. But Linklater’s cleverness lies in sacrificing realism and at the same time complementing it on the other hand-the performance of real actors, so an unprecedented effect appears on the film level, and the truth and the false are unified (which happens to be Conforms to the theme of half dream and half awake).
During the first half of watching the film, I felt a contradiction with the protagonist himself in the film-obviously false but so realistic that it convinced me that it was true. Subsequently, the completely real environment in which the story took place, the dialogue relationship between the characters and the characters, all finally made me no longer doubt it. This is a real movie, even though the scene is constantly jumping and the characters are floating like phantoms and changing their forms. . Because all of this is in line with our experience, isn't the perception that we perceive when we indulge in dreams is like this? Even if we do supernatural things, our brains are still deceived by delusions.
So the film achieves the first level of purpose, and then it needs to enter the second step: let the audience take the thoughts made in the first step to their own answers. First of all, the movie must return to the traditional sense. The metaphysical propositions of large sections are gone, and they become ordinary conversations closer to life; the protagonist realizes that he has become autonomous and begins to actively seek out instead of waiting for others. Indoctrination, other roles also become uncertain, no longer teach the protagonist as a professor, but give inspiration to the protagonist as a passerby. The story became more tangible, and even reminded me of "The Tribe of Wei Ma" because the protagonist began to be motivated to find the answer: who am I, where am I, and where am I going?
And we and the protagonist are not the same? Isn't the way Linklater treats the protagonist the same way he treats us? Here, the audience is actually the protagonist, and the protagonist searches for the answer in his consciousness just as the audience searches for the answer when watching a movie. The protagonist realizes that what happened before is an illusion experienced unconsciously, and the audience is also aware of this; the protagonist starts to wander around looking for answers at the same time as the audience is there. We are the protagonist, and the protagonist is us. So, everything seems to be suddenly clear. The target character designed by Linklater is us when we are watching the movie. Why did the protagonist barely say a word before and don’t give any answers, because this is our thinking: we don’t have anything. Knowing, just listening, the protagonist, like us, is also an audience who just opened the movie. What he wants to experience is exactly what we want to experience.
Finally, Linklater gave his own thoughts, his own philosophy-fatalism (you can never understand the truth). Although from the result, Linklater deviated from the existential propositions that the movie has always revolved around, but he did let the audience really think about the philosophy of life in this materialistic world, and opened the door to life in the true sense. It can be seen that the result does not seem to be as important as the process. At the same time, he also gave later filmmakers an idea, a philosophical film idea. Finally, here, I would like to add an irrelevant sentence: Don’t think of philosophy as a tool for pretending to be mystery (although it has become so in the hands of some people, but this is not the original intent of philosophy), the purpose of philosophy is for all people. The whole world (and science) serves the truth. Philosophy is the only way for human beings to achieve themselves. The pursuit of philosophy is the unconscious pursuit of mankind, and it is the most noble mission of mankind.
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