"Mank" is not a good film in the traditional sense. Although many places make the treatment unsatisfactory, it is psychedelic enough, and therefore it is not a strong destructive ability.
This psychedelic is partly attributed to the black and white photography of the film. Director Vinci has repeatedly stated that the black-and-white photography of the film is a tribute to the expressionist style that Orson Wells loves. Personally, this tribute is indeed successful, but not only is it similar on the surface, but more importantly, it replicates a kind of aura. The black and white of the film captures the most fascinating aspect of photography of that era in the eyes of individuals-distortion. Black and white allows the film to completely fly away from reality and fall into psychedelic or even dream without apology. All exaggerated contrasts of light and dark, or overly particular light source design, are building a self-sufficient world of the film.
On the other hand, psychedelic is born from the actor's tone. I haven't confirmed whether the actor's performance has borrowed from Orson Wells's own acting style, but all the characters speak inexplicably with his own charm-weak, but inexplicably arrogant. I would like to call this kind of performance tone "Mercury style", because at first it seemed that the actors of the Welsh Mercury troupe liked to use this peculiar tone the most ("Mr. Arkadin" is a great example). The most wonderful thing about this tone is its sleepwalking feeling. A single character speaks this way and has little effect. But when all the characters began to be equally lazy and contrived, the sense of performance was emphasized unprecedentedly, and the film suddenly distorted into a carefully rehearsed dream. The nature of the film's biography makes this dream doomed to stay in the past. All the advancement of the plot only adds to the sentimentality of "decline before it is completed".
You Wu has taken many biopics about her golden age in the past two years. It's hard to say that "Mank" is the best among them, but it does capture the psychedelic of that era most perfectly.
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