Coincidentally, Linklater's new work "Boyhood" took exactly twelve years to slowly boil a pot of fragrant soup with the most patient and slow fire. Following the "Love in the Trilogy", Linklater once again wrote the trick of time.
It is this original taste of life that can be savored that makes "Boyhood" soaring all the way in this year's awards season. Although it unfortunately lost the Oscar in the end, the film critics have almost unanimously praised the film. On the altar, and the base of this altar is the kind of mellow taste like life itself accumulated by the long river of time.
This kind of taste can lead your sight through the bland plot like a documentary, to look directly at the suffocating life force behind it. Life is always tied to time.
What does time take away? It makes your little friends disappear into the crowd, like the one riding a bicycle who only had time to wave as another childhood friend. He makes the people you know grow old, kill their youth, forget their passions, and even leave the world, such as your parents, teachers, and friends from somewhere.
What has time brought? It brings us to grow, bringing strangers who were once to you. Many of them have become passing strangers, with stories, or not. And those few of them may also become the most important part of your life, in real life or in memory.
Just like what the protagonist Mason said to the girl he met at the end of the film: It is not we who control the time, it is the time that controls us.
Yes, the real protagonist of "Boyhood" is only time.
There is a saying that when you feel the flow of time, what you feel is actually the present. As a creature in the three-dimensional world, human beings can never truly perceive the true face of time, and time to us is a fragment of the present, and a memory of the past. Whether it's a quiet time or a fleeting year, time has shaped what we are now, and we are also waiting and arranging our destiny ahead.
Many major events that were considered great back then are probably not worth laughing when thinking about it now, and many experiences that were only ordinary at the time have subtly changed us. Time is such an elusive thing, it seems to have a dual nature: when time is present, it is a kind of appearance, and when time is "past", it becomes another kind of perhaps sweeter, perhaps more bitter. , adds a bit of vicissitudes of taste.
If the growth of children is the gift of time, the aging of parents is the side effect of time. Compared with the child, the mother's twelve years in the film make people feel the ruthlessness of time. A single mother, falling in love with a scumbag, having a rough marriage, and growing up children. In the bland plot, only the mother's character has encountered the most dramatic and tragic plots. The most touching scene in the film is when Mason leaves home to go to college. The moment of the mother's moment of collapse. Patricia Arquette's wonderful performance early made this year's Oscar's best supporting actress one of the most unsuspenseful awards, but unfortunately it became the only award won by "Boyhood".
Whether it's content or novel structure, Boyhood has created a miracle that's hard to replicate. According to the director's own words, he took out a little pocket money from the company every year to make the movie like this. And taking a few days off every summer to shoot is more like an annual family gathering. So that the boundary between film and reality is not as clear-cut in this film as in other films: the specialty setting of photography is adopted according to the true hobbies of the actor Mason, the actor Coltrane, Harry Potter, Planetary The details of the era background, such as the war, were the hottest topics at the time of filming, and even the pickup really belonged to the actor himself.
By the way, the actor who plays Mason's sister Samantha is named Lorelei Linklater, the director's baby daughter. Being able to use an Oscar-level movie to record my entire youth is the greatest gift my father has ever given me.
The image plays the sharpest role in this film. It records a person's growth with a truth that cannot be achieved by words. Although the story is fictional, the child's little growth is real. Linklater calmly stood behind the camera, calmly bringing this natural rather than carved story closer to reality.
Perhaps "Boyhood" will not be the film with the longest production cycle in film history, but it must be the one with the longest duration from start-up to completion, and has even exceeded the maximum contract period stipulated by US law. Therefore, the director could not even sign a contract with any working actor, and he even worried unfoundedly that he would not live to the day when the film production was completed-so he made an agreement with Ethan Hawke, who is a small and one of the leading actors of the film, if he himself There are really three longs and two shorts, and the other party will definitely carry this movie to the end for himself.
A movie was filmed to the point where even the solitary scenes were almost released. Even if there are many deficiencies, we can't doubt his sincerity. What's more, the film itself is great enough.
The time of nearly three hours is not short, but for twelve years, it is like a drop in the ocean. Thank you, Linklater, for giving us the opportunity to examine our lives for more than 160 minutes.
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