- A Comparison of Two Stories of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" The
film "French Lieutenant's Woman" runs through two clues, showing the emotional confusion and choice between men and women in two different eras through the interlacing of time and space. The main clue of the film is to show the love story of a pair of Victorians with unique personalities, Sarah and a noble young man Charles, while another clue is to reflect the feelings of two actors Anna and Mike when they filmed the story of the main clue. "The French Lieutenant's Woman" adopts a layered structure, that is, the form of a play within a play, and repeatedly uses montage to form an interlaced effect of ancient and modern times, connecting the stories reasonably.
In "The French Lieutenant's Woman," the contrast between the ancient and the modern is revealed in the process of two threads running at the same time. The Victorian period more than 100 years ago was a closed, conservative, and traditionally hierarchical era. Even though Sarah is educated and loves to paint, she comes from a poor background and her social status does not allow her to display her artistic talents, nor does she have the freedom to love and think. The film presents the audience with a ruthless, hierarchical Victorian period. Perhaps in response to the saying "wherever there is oppression, there is resistance", Sarah has a clear goal, longing to get rid of a shackled life, and hope to be free to enjoy love and a good life. Facing an unfair fate, Sarah chose to resist. Sarah's pure heart is hurt by being abandoned by the French lieutenant she once loved. Since then, Sarah may have been vindictive, or influenced by a strong desire for freedom, she has not hesitated to destroy her reputation, positioning herself as a despised image of "the French lieutenant's woman". Compared with Sarah, Anna, who was on the actual filming site, lived in an era of highly developed civilization. It was a free and open world, without too many restraints and imprisonment, and had more autonomy. As Anna progresses in filming, she develops a relationship with Michael, who plays Charles. At this time, the film uses montage techniques such as parallelism and contrast to continuously compare the two time and space, so as to highlight the two heroines' completely different living environments and similarities and differences in their personalities. The story structure of the film "The French Lieutenant's Woman" gives the film its variability, thus attracting the audience's attention to the characters of the fate of two different eras.
Sarah is always represented in the film with dark tones. This shows Sarah's emotional depression, contradiction, arrogance and indifference. In the scene of Sarah and Charles dating in the woods, the thick and gloomy trees with intertwined roots give the audience a powerful pressure. The director skillfully used this scene to show the feudal and conservative society in ancient times. The environment, suppressed and restrained feelings, at the same time achieves a strong visual impact. The film "The French Lieutenant's Woman", at the end of the story, when Sarah reappears in the camera, the color tone is bright. This tonal shift also hints to the audience that Sarah's life has received a whole new turn. After three years of marriage and separation from Charles, Sarah seems to have been reborn. She has gained real freedom, pursued art without any burden or restraint, and found the true love she once lost. In the film, Sarah and Charles are reunited, the boat passes under a gray bridge arch, and then the director puts the camera in a still shooting state, letting the two people sit in the boat gradually moving away from the camera, and the color of the picture becomes brighter and brighter. Through this set of lenses, it is reflected that Sarah really got rid of the pain and bondage, and the lover who had experienced hardships gained the hard-earned love after rebirth.
In modern stories, the color tone of the film is mostly bright, which highlights the autonomy of modern women and forms a sharp contrast with the characters in the story. At the end of the film, after Anna played the role of Sarah, she re-examined her relationship with Mike and chose to leave Mike. And the most dramatic scene is in the last scene, when Mike opened the window to save Anna, the blurted "Sarah" made the audience immediately release from the disgust of Mike's betrayal of his wife's feelings. When the camera closes up and freezes Mike, the audience can more or less realize from his expression whether the relationship between him and Anna stems from true love in the heart or the so-called "too deep into the play" confusion. Perhaps at this time each other's hearts have been baptized and reborn.
The film "The French Lieutenant's Woman" ends with a modern story, which echoes the beginning and end of the film with the start-up sequence of the story, and it is not abrupt, and truly achieves the effect of corresponding to each other inside and outside the scene, and the beginning and the end. The whole film uses the montage technique many times to achieve the effect of natural transition through time and space conversion, which shows the director's ability to control the lens and describe and show the story vividly. The two clues are compared at the same time, leading the audience to think about whether a balance can be achieved between moral standards in society and the freedom of love, and at the same time, it also makes the film more dramatic. In addition, the sharp contrast before and after the color tone of the film is more helpful for the expression of the content of the story from the side, and the audience can also grasp the changes in emotions.
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