Who has lost himself?

Michale 2022-07-11 18:36:44

I've been looking forward to seeing its first trailer for a long time, I've saved it for a long time, and I just finished watching it yesterday. To be honest, I'm a little disappointed~~

This movie is about these imitators or metaphors The stories of individuals in a wide range of the world looking for meaning in life, lifestyle and self, can also be said to be about the collision between the pursuit of fantasy and reality, everyone is actually MR. Lonely, who came to this world alone to find The meaning of existence, I want to be the person I want to be, but in this era, most people have lost their way and don't know what kind of way they should exist, and more rely on the eyes of others , living in a cramped space made by oneself and peeping into the lives of others, or like the imitators in this movie, they simply erased their names and called themselves those popular idols who needed a reason to live, but they They couldn't find it by themselves, so they parasitized in these shells, but ironically, like the one who imitated Chaplin here, his every move and every move revealed the Hitler in his nature, not that The real Chaplin who made The Great Dictator.

If this story was made by someone else, you can ignore it, but the problem is that it is the work of Harmony Colin, and it is the return of a genius who has spent eight years of detoxification. It can be seen that he is looking for a breakthrough, because his usual film picture language is not like this. His previous two works "Golden Retriever" and "Donkey Julia" all have the characteristics of Dogma95, the latter is still Dogma The sixth work. Shaky images, rough senses, in addition to those excellent soundtracks he can deliver every time. While Dogma95 has since turned into a self-inflicted joke, Lars von Trier's campaign was not so much a return to the essence of cinema as another experiment by him. Trier was a natural As an experimentalist, he can't make movies in a proper manner. In his first three works, he has used his film skills to the extreme, and the next thing he has to think about is moving to the other extreme. But Colin's films still have their own characteristics. He doesn't care about the smoothness of the story. He almost always adopts non-linear narratives. He is good at collage fragments. There are countless branches and vines running in parallel under the main line, which are used to assist the central characters to express a kind of Emotions or the humanistic care he wants to talk about, his films cannot be summed up in figurative form, you can only feel, what you feel is actually what he wants to say, no need for a complete analysis process. Moreover, his films are extremely depressing at the end.

Mr. Lonely has these things, but is covered by a swath of even more nothingness. After watching it, a sentence popped into my head, this movie is too contrived... Its design elements are too obvious. You can say Dogma95 is pretentious, and Colin's previous works are also a bit pretentious, but those movies, including his "Half-Mature Boy" directed by Larry Clarke as the screenwriter, etc., finally give people the feeling of real tragic, they did not try to exaggerate it. Emotion, just put the pieces together for the audience to see, if you see it, you see it, if you don't see it, you don't feel it, but "Mr. Lonely" starts from Diego Luna's first monologue, trying to pull the audience into a Talking about the emotional circle, and in the later stories, he let those audiences who have not been in contact with his movies enter his collage game again, but audiences without movie viewing experience are more likely to feel a kind of disconnection, they Thinking they were going to be looking at a complete fantasy with a story like Arizona Dreams, it turned out that Colin made those bits and pieces that immediately hit the nail on the head, saying: No, I'm just using it as an introduction and an ending. Indeed, Luna's monologues, including the Michael Jackson imitator he played, are just a clue. The characters have no side and no deeper digging. He just plays the role of connecting the fates and trajectories of these different characters. In the end, his Awakening only ended in a hassle. Although they are both collage clips, there is always a cohesive force in Colin's previous movies. As long as you have the patience to watch the movie, you will feel that these clips will finally come together to form the overall synergy of the movie, like the form in prose. It's the cohesion that Mr. Lonely lacks. Maybe you feel something in one clip, and it's broken in the next second. At the end, you find that you have found the insight you want in the clip, but After the movie ends, there may be an inexplicable sigh: What's it all about?

It's also a problem that the film is too beautiful. This is not like his style at all, there is no rough texture, some are just oil paintings that are obviously carefully matched colors, and there are beautiful landscapes like a paradise, we can temporarily put these The setting is called a metaphor. Colin occasionally interspersed with the shaking of the hand-held camera in the middle of the perfect camera angle, but in this 1 hour and 48 minutes, he did not find the inner sense of rhythm in his previous movies at all. To achieve a smooth running speed, sometimes it seems like a sudden brake, sometimes it seems to create a dreamy delay effect, but there are too many components in the design, which makes people feel less candid. This script obviously has a good entry point, but after a film, it feels like he said everything, but he didn't say anything. There are too many things to express and too many ways of expressing, which makes people feel empty. In addition to the Luna line, the other line is about nuns and miracles. In comparison, because this line has relatively few scenes and characters, and the way of expression is relatively uniform, it may feel inexplicable at first. , but finally, at the end of the film, it gave an ending. When people were celebrating the miracle's real existence, the miracle was shattered. This clue was fulfilled, and it made people smile bitterly, but when Luna's branch was complicated When Ye Mao's clues went to Marilyn's suicide, I immediately finished the letter, and the next step was to find myself, and then the movie was over... The first time his movie was seen clearly end, if that counts as a breakthrough. Moreover, I feel that the impact this time is very light, perhaps because the topic of this movie is relatively broader and more ethereal.

What's even more incredible is that sometimes I have to make sure that I'm not watching a Herzog movie. Some details deal with the state of the characters' speech and actions, which is too biased towards Herzog's style, especially his own. In the clue of the nun and the miracle, his style directly became dominant, and I don't know if Colin's old friend is right or wrong to play the role in friendship again. So, these various styles are mixed together, what a gibberish. The theme of this film is to find the self, but in the end, it is found that behind this fairy tale, the master who designed this fairy tale is ultimately influenced by other factors, and gradually let the self retreat to the background. But what I miss is not the beautiful scenery and ingenious designs, what I miss is the precise inner rhythm, sincerity and forbearance that this genius movie once had.

In addition, I originally liked the two leading actors, Diego Luna and Samantha Morton, and looked forward to their shining performances. As a result, I should have expected them to be used as foils and big cannon fodder. There is no space to express their respective characters, because the original setting is ambiguous. In comparison, Samantha Morton is still more interesting, and her characters at least have a beginning and an end and a process. The actions and words were not tiresome and had some compassion for the character. Her setting is a clear prophecy that her fate will end in a tragic way in the blissful Marilyn Monroe. But Diego Luna, I can say, he came out and did a space dance for two steps, and after that, he started to become a tool, God, I might as well go back and watch "Havana" to see him dance. night of". In this film, he is still the big boy with a shy smile, lacking in tension and character side portrayal, the frenzied play at the beginning can only be said to be reasonable, and then he gradually embarked on the old road, This cannot be blamed on him, because the character setting has a taste of seeing the world from a pure perspective, but for his own acting career, this character has no major breakthrough, so I still hope he can find more in the future. Broad development space, after all, his buddy Garcia has gone further and further than him. But then again, this is Colin's work, and it's not necessary to pursue acting skills or the like. It's just that Colin gave the light of change, but put it out again. If he's going to change, please don't be so sloppy.

Having said all that, it's just my personal feeling, I just didn't find what I needed, and that's what Colin's films are, feeling is the most important thing. So for everyone else, this is not a movie that is not worth watching, on the contrary, its watchability and storytelling are already much stronger than Colin's past works, and of course, those Colin movies are as tough as ever soundtrack~~

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Extended Reading

Mister Lonely quotes

  • Michael Jackson: It's hard to always laugh when you don't know what people find so funny.

  • Marilyn Monroe: [to Charlie Chaplin] Sometimes when I look at you, you seem more like Adolf Hitler than Charlie Chaplin.