American Honey tells the story of a young American girl on the road.
Star is a girl from a low-level family. Her father continued to sexually harass her, and her mother remarried, regardless of her children. Eighteen-year-old Star takes care of his two younger siblings alone. By chance, Star met Jake, and since then he has set foot on the door to door to promote the magazine. In the crew of this promotional magazine, Jake flirted with Star. The two fell in love and spent a lot of passionate time. At the same time, the boss Krystal seemed to have affairs with Jake.
On the way, Star met many various customers. Three old cowboys tricked her into jumping into the pool and paying to watch her drink mescal with worm. The wealthy oil workers treated her as a prostitute. Although they did not have sex with her, they still tried to exchange money for her body. Finally she met a poor family, her father was away, her mother took drugs, and the three children had nothing to do. Star bought some food and gave them to them.
Star knows how the crew works. Every time Jake brings a girl, Krystal will give him money, and Jake has had sex with every girl he brings. When the new girl arrived, everyone introduced him to each other enthusiastically and gave her squirrel to play with, just like when Star first arrived. At night, everyone had a carnival and a bonfire party. Jake quietly handed Star a little tortoise, and Star put it in the lake. Afterwards, Star walked into the lake by herself, the water of the lake submerged above her head. But she didn't stay at the bottom of the lake any more. She lifted her head from the lake, her hair fluttered, and looked up to the sky. There were a few shining fireflies in the sky.
Andrea Arnold said: "I grew up in a working-class family, so you could say I write from what I know." For example, Red Road and Fish Tank, she portrays life at the bottom of British society. American Honey is the first time Andrea has tried American themes. She said: "America is a vast and complicated place filled with all kinds of truths and contradictions and I wanted to find my own emotional connection to it," she says. "Otherwise I couldn't have made this film. It's a mixture of what I saw and learned on those travels, but also what I grew up seeing on films – the mythical America of westerns and road movies. That's all in there, too."
Andrea Arnold's film is not a traditional realist style film. As she herself said, this film has a strong director's personal style, and there is a strong personal emotional expression of the director. Although the theme and story theme express the various experiences of a group of young people in the young and impoverished American mag crew on the road. However, in the expression of audiovisual language, the director has mixed a lot of romantic and fantasy atmosphere, and many expressions are obviously different from traditional realism films.
André Bazin is known for his realistic aesthetics. He believes that the uniqueness of photographic art lies in its inherent objectivity. Film images themselves are records of the external world and are more real than all other art. He admired wildscreen, long lens, and deep focus lens, to show the whole picture completely, and give the audience the power of feeling, allowing the audience to experience and shape the meaning.
The frame ratio of American Honey's film is 1.37:1. Not only is it not a wide format, but in fact, this frame ratio is quite limited. The film is full of close-ups of the face and body parts of the protagonist Star, as well as many subjective shots depicting the world in Star's eyes. The deep focus lens is almost absent in the film. Part of the body of Star is often used as the foreground to shoot the crew in the car, and customers who may sell magazines are encountered along the way. In almost every scene the director wants to focus on a certain character or a certain action of a certain character. Coupled with the limitation of the frame, American Honey hardly uses a deep focus lens to clearly express the foreground, middle and background scenes. condition.
Some subjective shots are the product of the combination of reality that Star feels and her imagination. The director intuitively expressed Star's feelings with the lens. The two most obvious are the first two intimate behaviors of Star and Jake.
When shooting sports shots such as running, Andrea prefers hand-held photography and shakes violently with the action shots of the characters. This is also evident in Fish Tank. But when filming the chase before Star and Jake kissed for the first time, the director used a panoramic panning. The color saturation in the picture was extremely high, the sun was shining and there were a little sunshine spots dotted in the frame. It wasn't until the two of them lay and kissed on the grass that the camera advanced to close up their faces. Then, the two fountains on the grass happened to be turned on at this moment, the camera was switched, and the kiss of the two lying on the grass was shot from above, and then cut to the sky to shoot up, and a bunch of strong sunlight shone from between the branches. The director did not use craning or panning here, but used montage editing, suggesting that the strong sunlight and the right fountain may be false and beautiful fantasy. Perhaps these beautiful things have not happened in the real world in this time and space, these Only exists in the subjective impression of the heroine Star.
When Star and Jake had sex for the first time, the screen was often out of focus, and there were often the same sunshine spots as when they first kissed. Close-up of two people's facial expressions, lips and two people's buttocks. The shot taken after this one-time love is the ants in the car. After the close encounter at dusk, the sky turned dark. Jake and Star were lying in the car. Jake told her the story of how he learned to bark a wolf in his childhood.
In comparison, the last one-time behavior of the two in the film seems much more realistic. Just before Jake inserted, Star took out the tampon. The lens still has a slight defocus and shaking, but when taken from an overhead angle, the picture is very compact and oppressive, and the position between the two has also changed. Jake completely dominates, unlike the first time the two are on the same level. Star has the upper hand. The tone of the picture is also different, and it is colder and darker than the one-time love above. Contrary to the first kiss, after the last one-time love is over, there are two less bright spots in the dark sky.
In the three sexuality-related scenes, each time has a very emotional expression. The director used the environment, light and some wonderful little things to set off three different atmospheres, which also represented the changes in the relationship between the two people. The film is full of music, but no background music is used in the three sex narratives. The director only conveys emotions through the language of the lens and conveys to the audience a seemingly more real, but in fact, more romantic and passionate. With a strong personal style, Andrea Arnold's romantic realism.
Eisenstein, a Soviet director who advocates formalism, believes that the nature of nature is a constantly changing process, and that this change often comes from conflict and the dialectical of contradictions. Artists should grasp the nature of contradictory changes and conflicts. In his famous film
In Bronenosets Potemkin, the director used symbolic montage. When the warship betrayed soldiers fired their cannons against the Tsarist forces, Eisenstein used three close-ups of a sleeping lion, a squatting lion and a lion stone about to jump, symbolizing a deep sleep. Awakening and rising up to resist.
The situation is similar in American Honey. The director uses many animals as metaphors. After Jake sent an invitation to Star, Star returned home and finally couldn't bear the tedious life and the sexual harassment of his stepfather. At this time, Andrea’s lens was aimed at a small spider crawling on the wall. The foreground was constantly changing. The small spider passed through numerous obstacles, and finally reached a blue area on the wall, symbolizing the blue sky and freedom, but on the wall. The painting also represents falsehood, implying that the freedom that Star will pursue in the future has its falseness, and life is endlessly trapped in poverty. When Star went to the parking lot to wait for the mag crew early in the morning, a few birds in the distance flew up from the billboard, symbolizing Star's longing for the distance.
Dogs appear in the film several times, and the situation and the mood of the protagonist are different. The first time was at home. The two big dogs and younger siblings were in the kitchen. The small kitchen was even more crowded, which also implied that the Star family lived like dogs. The second time was when Star had just joined mag crew, and she looked for Krystal but was late. Outside the door, she looked at the big yellow dog downstairs. There were still several shots of this big yellow dog before mag crew left the motel. There is a metaphor for sex. The third time was when members of crew adopted a big black dog like a squirrel. They took care of small animals like the sincere but insignificant pity of the people at the bottom of each other.
Star rescued the insects twice and let them go. The first time was in the swimming pool of three old cowboys. The little insects floating on the water were like themselves, struggling to survive in the world. As a low-level girl, he had to face Facing financial difficulties, and having to bear the coveting of men on her body, every time she embarks on a journey, she does not know whether it is safe or not. The second time, after a big fight with Jake, a bee desperately ran into the glass and Star buckled it up with a cup and bottle cap and put it out the window. The bee couldn't distinguish between the glass and the outside world, and kept hitting the false freedom. Star letting it go also indicates that she is the only one who can save Star's own plight in the end.
There are two scenes with thrilling aura: Star and his friends are peeing on the side of the road, facing the beautiful natural scenery of the Danxia landform in the United States. And after Jake asked Star if he had sex with the oil workers, Star was sitting alone in the wasteland. A wild bear approached her, sniffed her, and left. The story of this wild bear and Jake’s wolf howling has formed a wonderful intertextual relationship. The girl and the bear photographed against the light before dawn creates a unique tension in the picture and conveys a strong romantic atmosphere.
In terms of the storyline, Andrea continued to shoot a consistent ending that reconciled with life and started back on the road. In Red Road, the ending is that the protagonist Jackie reconciles with the family he has not contacted for a long time, reconciles with the man who killed her husband and daughter, and re-starts on the road with a sunny smile on his face. In Fish Tank, the protagonist dances with his mother and sister, who have always been in a stalemate, and hugs her sister deeply, rides in his boyfriend's car, and heads to Cardiff in the distance.
In addition to American Honey’s depiction of Star’s family at the beginning, there is only one paragraph in which Star makes a phone call at home. It does not depict as many family as in the previous two Andrea’s movies. But the ending is similar: Star submerged in the water, then raised his head high, his hair flying, the fireflies in the sky, although tiny and fragile, still gleamed, just like Star.
In terms of character setting, there are several characters that are obviously symbolic.
Such as Pagan. Pagan is a different girl in mag crew, she likes Darth Vader, to her he is like the epitome of just darkness and suffering and misunderstanding. He is just a broken heart that lost any hope for love and life. The first day In the morning when he participated in the magazine sales, Pagan told Star that he had received a sticker from Jake when he first arrived. Foreshadowed the subsequent plot conflicts. Midway through Pagan’s birthday, because he was angry and disappointed with Jake, Star gave Pagan the stolen ring that Jake had given her before as a birthday present. Everyone sang for her and wished her a happy birthday. This is one of the few tender moments in the film.
Pagan is an image similar to a prophet and a psychic in the film. She is calm in the day and has sleepwalking at night, but she can see through the development of everything. When Star left early in the morning, Pagan faintly said "stay" and the story of the previous sticker, all implying that Pagan was the girl who was brought to the mag crew by Jake before Star. She has experienced all the things that Star has experienced, but her role is more abstract and has a guiding role in the film. And Pagan also represents a completely opposite concept to the protagonist Star. In the car, she mentioned Darth Vader for the second time: "You know what Darth Vader looks like inside his suit? He's a skeleton just like the rest of us." Pagan's completely pessimistic mentality makes her depressed all day long, never laugh like other crew members, and this concept is not advocated by the director.
Traditional realism movies, such as Ladri di biciclette, the originator of Italian neo-realism movies. In the ending of the film, the father not only lost his dignity as a human being because of stealing a bicycle, he also lost his dignity as a father in front of his children. The father and son can only return to the symbolism. Living in a warm home, but the future life is unsustainable, which is desperate. There is a similar theme in American Honey, the despair of life, the intertwining of poverty and oppression, and the coveting of young girls' bodies by men. The only love worthy of attention in life was also destroyed, and he was nothing special in Jake's eyes.
But the difference is that the director left some ambiguity in the suffering of this story, and there are some ambiguities in Star's love. Jake shed a tear when he heard that Star wanted to build a house in the forest with her and live together. Maybe in Jake's heart, Star is indeed special, but he still needs to survive in the world, or he is used to living like the lowest ants, so the love in his heart can only become an unattainable distant fantasy for the young people at the bottom.
In American Honey, everyone's attitude towards money is almost barbaric. Loser's night is also a night full of violence and sexual desire. The humiliation of the two people who earn the least money is itself an attitude of desperate desire for money. But while they yearn for money, they also yearn for fun and care for each other. After all, nothings sweeter than summertime, when everyone sits in the car together, all the grievances about money and love are reconciled, and life can continue, with happiness and hope.
Andrea Arnold uses her personal romantic features and youthful energetic eyes to dispel the excessive pain of reality and give people hope. But she does not compromise with the mainstream ideology, and still objectively records the filth and ugliness of the world, the injustice and malice of the patriarchal society towards women.
Her romance and realism have formed a wonderful tension. In a small mag crew, people deceive and squeeze each other, but everyone also cares for each other, and each other has the most sincere kindness, and this kindness is the most moving.
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