"Foxtrot", with those incompetent men

Jeromy 2022-10-04 11:08:28

Last year, there was a person who could not be ignored in the main competition unit of the Venice Film Festival: Samuel Maoz, since his debut feature "Lebanon" in 2009, he will bring you a new film "Foxtrot" after eight years.

I watched the movie, Excellence.

Three-act drama narration, the core of ancient Greek tragedy, poetic flow photography... all of them are mixed together to achieve such an absurd and isolated gray fable.

Foxtrot, one of the western upper class banquet social dances, also known as "Fox dance". The dance steps are neat and graceful. Anyone who knows a little about it knows that it requires a very high rhythm. One after the other, one after another, like a human being, there is a degree of advance and retreat.

Director Samuel Maoz admitted that the original inspiration for the film came from his daughter.

Because staying in bed survived a terrifying bus incident, the unhappiness of being a father and the inquisitiveness of everyday materials are actually permeating the director's unstoppable powerlessness when facing life.

Such powerlessness coincides with the fatalism in ancient Greek tragedy. Stare at the abyss that you have set for you, no one can see the depths of them.

There is a wonderful sentence in the Northern Zhou Dynasty's " Buxu Ci" .

The ancients paid attention to obedience to fate, life and death had destiny, and wealth was in heaven. Life is like water in a canal, where it flows has its own set number. This seemingly simple chicken soup philosophy is very applicable in "Foxtrot".

Simply put, what the film tells is just the story of a young soldier who is alive after being "feigned to death" and then "being dead" again. "Being" to "being" is definitely not an intentional word game, the affiliation is obvious, and all living beings are passive in the face of fate.

What Samuel Maoz saw was the deep powerlessness contained in this passivity. People walk and sing like puppets dominated by strings, and live a "planned" life in Truman's creative world. This simple "be" character, the master who controls it is called destiny.

Like Sofia Coppola's "Under the Peony" based on Thomas Cullinan's original novel of the same name, tracing the roots of fatalism requires a naturalistic perspective. Putting aside the hard-to-chew professional vocabulary, in layman's terms, in naturalism, the motives of the characters and the direction of the plot require the highest degree of "de-dramatization".

Like a dead tree with bare branches, Maoz aspires to weaken the "reversed" drama brought about by the text through formalist audio-visual interventions. The embarrassment that lies in it is: on the one hand, the calm and restrained text constantly reduces the drama of the film's unreasonable logic;

As far as I know, Maoz himself came from an art background, and his photographic composition is naturally exquisite and neat, and the movement of the mirror in "Foxtrot" is even more dazzling. For example, in Acts 1 and 3, the two overhead rotating shots use a cramped space as a hint of psychological squeeze, and the "tilt" in Act 2 deals with uncertainty in a metaphorical high-risk environment. The two sets of subjective long mirrors at the beginning and the end are integrated into the so-called fateful reincarnation. The Dance of the Wild uses freeze-frame camera positions to create the quality of the stage play, adding to the absurdity.

These technical means are all manifestations of Maoz's declaration of formalist sovereignty, and it has to be admitted that "Foxtrot" itself is the product of contradiction.

The contradictions mentioned here can be implemented into specific characters.

First of all, the father is contradictory. The eye-catching "X" forbidden symbol in the comics shows his past of stealing the ancestral Bible in exchange for naked women's magazines.

This past accompanied him as he grew up and blended with him now. At the same time, there is also the remorse for his mother (father Michael's mother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, suffered from post-war trauma, and was later sent to a mental hospital by herself), and the third act In the play, the use of comics to recall the past even more exposed Michael's Oedipus complex. The thick "X" character on the naked girl's breast was attached to Michael's eyes, and the ending of Oedipus killing his father and taking his mother was also coincidentally lost. eye.

Second, the wife is also contradictory, and this contradiction is mainly reflected in the third act. After learning that her son who "feigned death" unexpectedly died on the road because her husband wanted him to go home as soon as possible, the wife, who had experienced such ups and downs, was full of resentment towards her husband. This resentment is filled with a soft sense of powerlessness. The opposite of the contradiction is the trick of fate, which can avoid the hail of bullets and fire, and the kiss of death that comes quietly.

It is very interesting that son Jonathan also reflects the conflicting colors of struggle and twist.

The occurrence of the "wrongful killing incident" pushed this sense of contradiction to a climax. One second before, he and the girl next to him were flirting with each other, and the next second, because the other party lost the can, he mistakenly thought that the grenade was merciless and brutally shot.

He is still young and not mature enough, and his companions stationed at the border also have immature faces, and at that time they changed from soft creatures to expressionless killing machines in an instant. A silent indictment of the system of war.

It has to be admitted that "Foxtrot" has a significant male color. The female characters are compressed to the simplest level, and there are many metaphors and symbols that stay at the symbolic level.

The female metaphors full of desire are a highlight of "Foxtrot" that cannot be ignored. Whether it's the incomplete Monroe portrait on the abandoned carriage, the sexy naked woman on the inner page of the magazine, or the Jessica bunny girl in the mouth of her comrades, these sexy girls with flying skirts and gorgeous smiles are the condensation of pop culture and hedonism. The gorgeous reflection of , is the irony of the cruelty of the war.

The seemingly gentle symbol embellishment is not limited to adding color to the dull battlefield life. It is a narrow and long quarrel that is like a dilemma in secular disputes, and we cannot choose another way to indulge and miss the illusion of life. Just like his father has always been helpless in the face of fate, powerless, helpless, incompetent.

"Front-Right-Back-Left", the dancer will return to the original point after four beats and three glides.

The tide-seekers who have been "taunted" by fate for a long time are rampant in the vast sea of ​​life, and they have been unable to resist in the thousands of stormy waves. The ending of the story must be sailing back.

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