This drama about the emotional ethics of trust and betrayal in love and marriage is a remake of "Natasha" by French female director Anne Fontaine in 2003. After a lapse of 7 years, Canadian director Atome Igoyan, a director who wanders outside the mainstream commercial film and who has always adhered to his own independent artistic style, remakes this story full of suspenseful drama.
As a remake of an excellent film, this film naturally has too much pressure from comparison with the original. It is true that I have not read the original work, so I cannot make detailed comparisons. After reading the plot introduction of the original film, I learned a little bit about the difference in plot between the two films.
The plot of the film has undergone a lot of changes to the basis of the original. The background and life experience of the key character in the film, Chloe, is no longer the female private detective who turned into a prostitute in the original, but a young man with unknown origin and life experience. Girl, a high-end prostitute who seduce rich and powerful middle-aged men in high-end bars and clubs to earn income and make a living from it.
This change to the main character has both advantages and disadvantages for the film. The advantage is that the character of Chloe is different from the original. For this film, she has become a brand new character without any background and life experience. , Makes her full of wonderful mystery from the beginning to the end of the story. This mystery gives this character a different texture and makes the audience focus more on exploring her mysterious emotional world. , So that this character is full of tragic colors in his new work. The point is that for many viewers who are too impatient, the film almost spans many processes from the appearance of Chloe to the encounter and acquaintance with his wife Catherine, which is a bit confusing. If If you are not patiently watching the end of the film and watching Chloe's emotional trajectory back and forth, many viewers will inevitably be dissatisfied with such a jumpy and highly dramatic plot.
After all, this is a film that takes two women's private emotional development lines to dominate the plot, and emotions are the most delicate and subtle way of expression. The audience's slight negligence and incomprehension of the characters' emotions may lead to this The story of this film is finally puzzled. And Chloe, who is always shrouded in mystery and shame, and the middle-aged wife who is always shrouded in suspicion and anxiety, make these two main characters like black ink clearly printed on white paper (middle-aged wife Catherine) , And one is like a transparent water mark (Chloe) falling on white paper. We can quickly understand the psychological situation of the married wife Catherine, but it is difficult to enter Chloe’s emotional world from the beginning of the film. One of them is in the light, the other is in the dark, the other is clear and the other is fuzzy. This is a serious imbalance in the way the characters are portrayed in this film. Speaking of this, it is a question that the benevolent sees the benevolent and the wise sees the wisdom. I personally like this "imbalance" expression very much, so I am very satisfied with the adaptation of the main characters of the original story. This adaptation makes this film different from the original. The way of expressing emotions also gives Chloe (Natasha in the original work) a different character. More importantly, the adaptation of this character makes the film more suspenseful and dramatic than the original, the suspense of this film. Sex is not only brought about by the mysterious identity of a detective or prostitute like Natasha in the original work, but a step deeper into the mystery of the character, and the mysterious emotional world of the character is used as the traction line for the development of the plot. Use mysterious emotions as the dominant color of suspense throughout the film.
2.
Watching this film is a process of pulling the thread out of the cocoon. Until the last minute of the film, you may always be in a state of confusion. It is Chloe's emotional world that is pulling the cocoon, and it is the process of slowly reaching the depths of her heart.
The director of the film cleverly used the perspective of two women to successfully fool the audience. These two women, one of them is a successful middle-aged wife, and the other is a beautiful and sexy senior prostitute who can make a man fascinated at first sight. From a rational point of view, their worlds themselves will not overlap, because women like Chloe, they are lovers around married men, and they are the protagonists of the terrible nightmare that a married middle-aged woman has about her husband’s cheating and cheating. The most hated object of the young wife Catherine. The beauty of a young girl like Chloe is like a tempting fruit that reveals fresh luster and fragrance, but it is actually full of terrible and fatal toxicity. It makes old and aging middle-aged women jealous and makes men want to think. have.
At the beginning of the film, we saw that the relationship between Catherine and Chloe started from the employment relationship of money. Catherine hired the beautiful Chloe to seduce her husband, thus confirming her inner husband and young female students in such an extreme way. Whether the cheating conjecture is true. Slowly unfolding in front of the audience is that Catherine is a helpless and poor middle-aged woman who is being bullied. Because her husband is busy with work, she is very negligent. The adolescent son is dissatisfied with her for no reason. The state is as cold as the winter in the film for Catherine. She strives to be a good wife and mother, but the effect she hopes is always contrary to her hope. At this time, she used a girl like Chloe to satisfy her mentality of wanting to peek at the other side of her husband, while Chloe said with a proud expression and even a very proud expression. The whole process and details from seducing and flirting to having sex with Catherine's husband used the method Catherine taught her to carry out the husband's derailment behavior planned by his wife. Catherine listened to all this with choking.
How terrible Chloe is to Catherine. The relationship between these two women is expressed at the beginning of the film with Chloe as the strong and Catherine as the weak. The audience sympathizes with Catherine and despise Chloe, but when the story of the film slowly develops and reaches the core of the truth, we will find that all of us are wrong. In this drama about love, betrayal, and human entanglement, the real tragic character is not Catherine, she is a bit sad at best, but the real tragic character who deserves sympathy is Chloe.
Although I really want to make my own analysis of Chloe’s emotional world, in order to prevent people who read this film review from seeing too many spoilers because of this analysis, I have no choice but to give up. Chloe is such a girl who you may never guess, but in fact it is very simple. The role of Amanda Seyfried makes this character full of extraordinary charm-she is so beautiful and simple, Bright eyes and porcelain-white skin with a pure and innocent smiling face, under the sensual nakedness of heavy make-up, under all her enchanting and charming actions, she is just a simple girl who longs for love and needs love, let go of all that Disguise, you would really think that she is a beautiful angel who descended on the earth. The greatest tragedy comes from when she shuttles through various sensual places, when she and various men vent their sexual desires in the gloomy hotel rooms, satisfying each other’s various desires, and doing all kinds of nasty movements. When moaning lasciviously, this girl who has no history, we don’t even know her real name and age, is like a sad Lolita, in the gap between precocity and innocence, longing for love but unable to get love and care Under the circumstances, she can only use her own way to hope for love to get love, which is as extreme as a moth to the fire regardless of that extreme and heartache. The biggest irony is that as a high-level prostitute, she is doing disdainful things. Among the people she faces, there are those men and women who are tired of marriage, and those who no longer understand pure love. They have sex with mistresses and high-level prostitutes. In front of the people who came to indulge, she looked so beautiful. At least, she knew what love was. At least she could love blazingly and purely for a loved one, even if she was broken into pieces in the end. In the last scene of the film, our misunderstanding of the girl has disappeared, so that we can reflect on it. Is this tragedy just caused by a neurotic middle-aged wife's suspicion of her husband? I believe that after the end of the film, each of us will have a different reflection direction for each of us.
Just like the beginning of the film, she in the mirror, naked and sexy body, in reality she is simple and pure, and those reality factors that we don’t know compel her to be in the cruel real world in this way. Survive here. I don't know if you will fall in love with this beautiful girl named Chloe just like me. Her life is like a flash in the pan, beautiful and blazingly short-lived, and in the end it hurts and hurts.
3.
In this film with the psychology of middle-aged women and the crisis of marriage and family as the background, the director takes another approach and uses another perspective to dig deeper into the theme of family emotional ethics. No longer simply expressing the emotional problems of marriage and family, but adding another outsider's perspective and expressing it from Chloe's perspective, and at the same time digging out the theme through the abnormal relationship and emotion of the two heroines full of suspenseful drama. More facets. At first, the audience will think that this is a story similar to "American Beauty", which mainly expresses and tells the story of family marriage and middle-aged crisis. Through the development of the film's story, the audience can see that the story of the film The performance of Chloe, the "American Beauty" inserted into the marriage crisis, reflects the psychological state of a middle-aged married woman from another side, as well as the social environment with a serious crisis of trust in love and marriage. In short, the existence of a girl like Chloe has reasons for her existence and a market, but her existence and tragic ending are also the most powerful questioning whether there is still pure love and marriage in this era, because she has no background in life experience. Young prostitutes living in a marginal state collide with middle-class rich and powerful families.
The importance of sex in married life and in the emotional world is just one of the contradictions in the film’s story. It is not all that this film wants to show, but it is also a key content that this film wants to show. . It can be said that through extreme sex, Catherine is looking for the physical despair in Chloe after being despised by her husband. Through such a derailment, she seeks proof and satisfaction to find the increasingly rare sex in married life. Catherine's suspicion of her husband also stems from the gradual disappearance of her appearance and sexual charm with age. Chloe sees too many married men betraying their wives in her clients and in sex transactions again and again, which makes it seem that there is a kind of precocity that is not in accordance with the age. Catherine’s adolescent son tried to understand love and the marital status of his parents in his preliminary attempts at sex. It can be said that in the adult world, in marriage and family life, he has to face when he grows up. In the face of all of this, sex is only one part of it, very important, but that is not the whole story.
Julianne Moore used her unique elegant temperament, her pale skin and thin body, to perfectly act as a middle-aged, emotionally fragile wife whose beauty is beginning to fade, her nervousness, to her husband Suspicion made her completely plunged into an anxious psychological state caused by herself, which was in sharp contrast with Chloe, played by the beautiful young Amanda Seyfried, yet complemented each other in such a way. There was an amazing emotional spark between the two actresses. The combination of an old drama and a new actor, the unique performance styles and superb acting skills of the two actresses, made this film not too dramatic. It makes human logistics superficial and clichéd. What is even more awesome is that Liam Neeson, the actor of Catherine’s husband, his wife unfortunately died in a skiing accident and died during the filming process, but he still insisted on performing all the scenes professionally and had to be deeply impressed. Admire it. It can be said that the success of this film is inseparable from the superb acting skills of the three leading actors.
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