The movie tells a story about loneliness. Finbar, a dwarf who worked in a train station, retired at a young age and inherited the house of a dead colleague and good friend, an abandoned old train station in the countryside of Newfoundland, New Jersey. The environment here is described by the lines in the movie. It is "beautiful, but nothing." However, for a person who wants to close himself up, this is really an excellent place to live in seclusion. Because of his short stature, Finbar often receives "extraordinary attention" and even insults. As a result, this old railway station has become a paradise for Finbar. He walks alone, walks, reads trains, reads books about trains, and faces other people's curious eyes. He is already okay, or smiles bitterly, or ignores him. Coincidentally, Olivia, a middle-aged woman who lost her son, also lives here. Because of Olivia's negligence, it led to the death of her son. Her husband bought a real estate here for her to keep her away from the sad place, so as not to see things and think about others. Even so, Olivia's marriage has come to an end: maybe seeing others and thinking about others is just as embarrassing. Olivia and Finbar, two people who evade reality, are unlikely to stir up the story of the story when they meet together. Because they are used to protecting their hearts with thick shells.
But the movie is originally dream-making. It is nothing to put together a pair of talented men and women; it is worth seeing two people who seem to be unable to get together to produce a story. The common way to make the lives of two people meet is for one to take the initiative to get to know the other. But in this film, the director first let them not have the desire to know it actively, and then unintentionally cut the willow. This way of dealing with characters’ emotions is different from Hollywood’s mainstream. All kinds of dog-blood scripting textbooks teach us that the actions of characters must be driven by desire: the characters must first want to do something, then overcome various difficulties, and finally get the job done. The situation here is just the opposite. The movie does the opposite, and the characters do not have the urge to know each other subjectively. After two small accidents, Finbar and Olivia had to know each other. Next, the direction of the story continues to move in the direction of separating the characters. Olivia's phone number fell in Finbar's house. This prop that could have brought the relationship between the two was handled lightly. Olivia didn't even realize that she lost the phone and then her phone was secretly sent back by Finbar. This "divided" narrative method actually creates another kind of tension and extends the time to satisfy the audience's psychological expectations, because the audience expects whether they are together in the end and how they are together.
In addition, another merit of this movie worth mentioning is that it successfully creates a soothing rhythm that fits the story. When we see the movie, it seems that we are not eager to narrate, but pay more attention to the expression of emotions. In fact, it is ingenious. At the beginning of the film, Finbar's scene from the city to the countryside, originally two shots can be explained: one leaves the city and the other arrives. But the director deliberately stretched the scene and used 18 shots to lead the audience to watch Finbar walk through the streets, through tunnels, avoid trains, and walk across the railway for a long time, before letting him reach his destination. Perhaps the corner shots that are useless in the eyes of other directors have been preserved here. If we look closely, we will find that these 18 shots are not independent of the narrative. The great thing about this film in dealing with lyricism and narration is that lyricism and narration are always combined, and the story is not stopped for the sake of lyricism. We saw that along the way, in various backgrounds, there was only a small figure of Finbar in the lens. I noticed that the director even avoided the lens of Finbar in the car in order to express this kind of loneliness, so as not to damage the existence of other passengers. He created the atmosphere deliberately. Therefore, once this loneliness of escape is constructed by the director, the authenticity and credibility of the following story will be greatly enhanced, and the entire following story will be a matter of course. After the audience met Finbar's gazes, they were also infected by the emotions conveyed in the movie, and this emotion lingered in their hearts and lingered.
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