Aristotle tried to reveal the meaning of ancient Greek tragedy in "Poetics", which is to arouse the audience's sigh and fear of the impermanent fate and the pity and sympathy for the characters in the play. The process is often out of its control, difficult to reconcile, and extremely fatalistic.
"Foxtrot" follows this rule, a typical ancient Greek three-stage tragedy. The three chapters are self-contained, but they are related to each other, like three neatly placed grenades. When one fuse is pulled, the other two will also explode.
The first paragraph expresses the father's speechless sadness upon receiving the news of his son's death; the second paragraph is the boredom and emptiness of the son during his military service; the third paragraph is the mother's emotional fluctuations over the death of her son. Three perspectives, three emotions, the tone and style are different, the first paragraph is repressive and suffocating, the second paragraph is dark humor, and the third paragraph is sad and lyrical, but they are undoubtedly expressing a sense of the external environment and even sudden tragic events. emotional reflection.
As director Samuel Maotz's second work, "Foxtrot" took eight years after "Lebanon" which won the Venice Golden Lion. It also involves the theme of war, but the smoke of gunpowder has been transferred from the battlefield to people's hearts. Compared with the bold and stunning previous work, this work is more delicate and calm, especially the textbook-level audio-visual language is eye-opening, which can be called a model of "moving movies".
Photography is mostly based on fixed lenses, with a calm restraint and helpless alienation. In an environment full of space and technology, the layers of the picture can be seen. The beauty of lines deliberately created in the interior set is like building countless fences between people, widening the depth of field and emphasizing the emptiness and nothingness of the object environment.
As the subject, it is like standing in the vast desert, and the perspective abstract painting composed of dots, lines and planes that appears in the film is a testament to the inner panic, anxiety, at a loss, and even facing the When a sudden disaster occurs, step by step into a vortex of sadness.
The father tried his best to remain calm in the movie. Facing the sudden news of the loss of his son at the beginning, he did not faint like his wife, but stood there dumbfounded, as if paralyzed. This is a grief-stricken father, the desperate eyes, the slow body movements, the rolling screams in the throat, the numb mechanical self-mutilation, in the imaginative sound picture, it is gradually frozen, enlarged, and then like It is engraved in the frame like a brand.
Even we can't help but wonder: how can a person's pain burst out with such amazing energy.
And this energy comes from the inner truth. This truth benefits from the superb audio-visual quality of the movie. First of all, the excellent sound effect is undoubtedly the first contribution: amplifying the sound of the characters' movements, weakening the back image and sound, there is a kind of flat ground. Thunder effect. The last scene is often silent, and the next scene suddenly adds volume. The unexpected contrast makes the audience always follow the protagonist's inner fluctuations. Occasionally dotted overhead shooting angles highlight the insignificance and fragility of the characters, while at the same time compressing the characters’ space, creating a sense of powerless depression.
But this feeling of repression was quickly shattered by the flurry of flocks of birds, which plunged into a chaotic chaos, because the father learned that his son was not killed, but the wrong person in the army. This kind of emotional change from great sadness to great joy made the whole event seem extremely absurd and joyful, but also permeated with a kind of exhausted sadness.
This kind of sadness comes from the father's secret, and this secret is transitioned by the second period of his son's military career, which just reflects a certain inheritance between the two generations: the inheritance of mental trauma. Because of an unbearable experience in his young military career, his father has been living in a huge psychological shadow, so he chose to escape and hide, just like the animation in the film, and put a big "X" on his face. , to disguise yourself. Only when the night is quiet can the true self emerge and secretly wipe away his tears.
This short animation can be called the magic of the movie. It originated from my son's sketchbook and also carries the pain of two generations. Maoz adds a lot of dark humor to the second paragraph of his son's story, which seems more like a response to the so depressing first paragraph. But in fact, it was to make the tragedy that followed even more painful.
So we'll see camels roaming across borders, we'll see people rolling cans in unbalanced cargo boxes, we'll see people dancing flamboyant foxtrots, we'll see soldier sons passing by The woman's frown.
We even thought there would be a military romance, but we were still slapped by Maoz. Mistaking the sound of a beer can falling as a grenade, his son swept his machine gun at the people in the car, including the woman he almost fell in love with at first sight. Such mistakes, such tragedies, left us stunned, and our son was overwhelmed.
It seems like a cycle, the father's mental trauma has not dissipated, and the trauma of joining the army has come to his son again. Just like the foxtrot, no matter how different your dance steps are, you always have to return to the same place.
His son's trauma is condensed in his painting: a bulldozer lifts a car, ready to bury it in a pit. Parents have their own interpretations of the painting, but they still don't know the real purpose of the son's painting. The people in the car were the men and women who were beaten to death by their sons. The accidental killing was suppressed by the Israeli authorities. This incident became a secret and was destined to be an unforgettable experience for the son. It was the same as the shadow that haunted his father. They all turned into a huge stone, pressing down on the two generations.
Maoz's negative attitude towards war is self-evident, and the bulldozer and car in the painting can also be understood as the Israeli government and innocent young people. Young people are easily pinched, controlled, and wantonly destroyed by the government. This is a severe criticism of the government's random recruitment of young people to join the army. All the tragedy comes from the damn war.
Compared with the physical pain caused by the war, the inner psychological trauma is the most terrifying, and it may extend to the next generation, and then the next generation. The endless sadness and the constant reincarnation of the tragedy will permeate the present and even the future, which is the most deadly. Maoz had the courage and courage to directly point out this helpless social problem, but he only raised the problem, but the solution of the problem was marked with a big question mark.
It's like a father trying his best to send his son home to keep him safe through relationships, trying to make things happen, trying to resolve things beautifully. But what about the end? He can only remember painfully the bits and pieces of his son. He remembered going to the station with his son, but he failed to cherish the alone time of father and son.
When the husband and wife shared their memories of their sons in the third paragraph, we discovered that Maoz was hiding a theme in the film, or this theme has actually been covering the whole film, that is, the emotional relationship between parents and children.
This is largely due to a real experience of Maoz himself: one day he did not drive his daughter to go to school, and his daughter took the bus to go to school by herself. It happened that the bus was hijacked by terrorists, but luckily her daughter died because the driver did not wait for her. Missed that bus. This incident had a great influence on Maoz, and he himself said in an interview that the birth of "Foxtrot" was derived from this incident.
In addition to the sigh of impermanence, the relationship between parents and children is also changing anytime, anywhere. Death, injury and illness will suddenly strike, but what remains unchanged is the love parents have for their children. This kind of love may be accompanied by a heavy price, just like the father in the film let his son come home no matter what, but the son had a car accident on the way home.
From fake death to real death, twists and turns, the script has already been written. You can't predict everything at all, and you can't reverse your fate at all, because the reality is so cruel and absurd.
Starter: Watching a movie to see death
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