A film with mourning as its keynote is actually healing and hope at the end.
"Suicide Shop" is the first animated film by French director Patrice Lecomte. The French-style dark humor tells the story of a family that has an ancestral business of suicide perpetual products, but the birth of a child, Doron, who loves to laugh, changes the family business and brings people out of the gloom.
The protagonist of this film, Alan, is a child who loves to laugh naturally. Even the gloom of others in the family cannot affect his happiness. In a sense, he is the savior of the suicide crowd. While other supporting role directors deliberately borrowed the names of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Lucrece in Shakespeare's poems, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and American actress Marilyn Monroe, these suicide-related names are strengthened. The effect of black humor.
By adding a lot of singing and dancing elements, supplemented by a Gothic style of painting, low-saturation background colors and contrasting colorful characters, the film forms a peculiar and magical style, and uses the setting of selling suicide supplies. perspective on the meaning of life.
Storyline: Exploring attitudes and meanings about being alive through the bright thread of cheerfully helping people commit suicide
The film adopts a conventional linear narrative. At the beginning, through the flight of a listless pigeon, it brings out a small town where suicide is common to people, and brings out the daily life of a family in a suicide store. It seems that suicide is packaged as joy and happiness. Relief, in fact, ironic people's contempt for life.
The Mishima family cried and laughed all day long, and the peace of the family and the town was shattered by the birth of Arun, a child who was born to laugh.
The turning point of the story begins when Aaron sees a man who crashes a car and kills himself, and decides to do something about it. In the end, he succeeded in destroying the family's business and rekindled hope for people to live a good life.
The film adopts a romantic expression technique, capturing the audience's curiosity with exaggerated and vivid characters and imaginative settings.
Shots of the film: The alternating use of wide-angle and telephoto lenses renders and highlights the repressed atmosphere and inner activities of the characters in the film
Wide-angle lens:
In this film, the wide-angle lens is slowly zoomed out and pushed forward to express the depressing atmosphere of the outdoor distant scene. When Allen and his classmates were riding the school bus to school, the driver saw a person who wanted to commit suicide and bumped into it without hesitation. A wide-angle lens was given at the back to pull the distant view farther, and the road was still full of traffic. It shows people's numbness and accustomed to suicide, which strengthens the film's depression and gloomy atmosphere. ,
telephoto lens
In this film, the telephoto lens is mostly used to close up the close-up, highlighting the expressions of the characters and expressing the emotions at the same time. In the scene of Allen growing up, the director used cross-editing and telephoto to zoom in on the camera, expressing the surprise, wonder, and horror of the Mishima couple.
The cross use of the two shots forms a unique feeling with the contrast of rich expressions and actions and the oppressive environment, which enhances the expressive power of the picture and intensifies the conflict of the film.
Colors in the film: Massive grays set the tone for repressed black humor, with a dash of warm tones to accentuate warmth and hope
background color:
The main tone of the whole film is gray, and the high-rise buildings with non-extremely low color saturation and a large number of gray backgrounds represent depression, numbness, and silence.
There are only two backgrounds in the film that are warm: the suicide store and the repair garage, and the warm yellow in these two places represents hope and warmth in this film.
Character Color:
In the film, except for the family of the Suicide Store, the colors of the clothes of the others are dark and low-saturated, while the clothes director of the Mishima family set extremely high saturation and rich colors.
Mishima's clothes are striped with green base. Green is originally a symbol of peace and tranquility, but Mishima represents a unique gloom and forbearance; Lucrece's clothes are red, which usually represents a warm and unrestrained presence. This represents termination and magic, which is in line with Lucrece's identity in the film. All the chemical suicide drugs in the store are prepared by him and her; Vincent's clothes are purple, representing melancholy and obscure, and Monroe's clothes are The horizontal black and gray stripes represent disappointment and dullness; Allen's clothes are pure green, representing liveliness and vitality, and he has indeed played the role of "savior", saving people from the darkness.
The film's strong color contrast enhances the irony of the story, but the whole lifeless town makes people feel warm in the place where suicide supplies are sold.
Music in the film: Extensive use of singing and various musical symbols, the combination of inner monologue and emotion is just right, and it also implies that music is closely related to life
In this film, a large number of singing forms have laid the foundation for using lyrics as a narrator, expressing the inner activities of the mission in a more interesting way than the dialogue, which is used to promote the plot and develop the characters.
At the beginning, the jukebox played the French national song king, the representative of chansons in the 1920s and 1930s , Charles Trenet (Charles Denet), "There is still joy", a vibrant scene in the lyrics It is in sharp contrast to the gloom of the picture.
As the story progresses, the form of singing expresses the inner activities of different characters. Kazuo Mishima sings the heart, depression and pain caused by helping people commit suicide for a long time.
Allen sang his determination and idea to change the status quo. The lyrics directly express the subtext of the characters' hearts. This is the feature and advantage of song and dance films, which can help the audience better understand the characters and character settings.
musical note
In addition to singing, the director buried several music-related symbols in the film.
VOX
In the film, the vox logo appears twice. Vox is Latin, which means "sound". Vox is a European music brand. It was founded in 1945 by Hungarian Mendelssohn in New York, USA to record classical music. Mainly music. The first appearance is of pigeons flying by, and the second appearance is when Alan runs to the rooftop of Vox and pretends to commit suicide after Mishima is provoked by Alan.
album
When I gave my sister a silk scarf, I also gave her an album of oriental music, and my sister danced with the silk scarf.
Modified high-power music player
Allen and his friends wanted to end the business in the store, so he asked his uncle to build a modified sedan that could play super loud sound and power. Using the car to shock all the goods in the store, it also shocked my sister's love.
The film starts with music and ends with music. At the end of the film, Allen uses music to save people and rekindle their hope of living. This implies that music heals life.
The practical significance of the film: In the face of the hardships of life, we can mourn, but we must still be brave
In the film, before Mishima fell into depression and collapsed, he sent all kinds of poison to an old gentleman named Carmel, and said such a very sad paragraph before Carmel took the poison
"I've had enough of this mess." "The problem can only be solved by going to the other side." "When a person dies, there is no remorse"
"No more troubles, sleepiness. Trance."
It seems that death is the best way to end all troubles. Although we can't spy on the world after death, because of pressure and pain, choosing death to end life is an escape.
Who has never been hurt in the middle of the night? It is true that the life of an adult is not easy, but only when you are alive can you have the opportunity to taste the delicious food in the world, see the beauty of the world, and feel the true feelings of the world.
Jiang Zilong said in "Life is hard, but please believe enough": There is no eternal night in life. There are cracks in everything, and that's where the light comes in.
At the end of the film, the Suicide Shop becomes a crepe shop, and the Suicide Shop family sings a song with a few lines: Stop the useless complaints, happiness needs to be found. Oppose the mentality of being sick, because life is magnificent.
Life is always cruel and beautiful.
Although the years cannot be turned back, we can still move forward.
This article was first published on Toutiao today, Fenghui Xiaoyuan
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