A female writer once said that life, on the back of anyone, is an abyss. French director Au Rong always likes to use simple life scenes and absurd storylines to deconstruct the desires and crises hidden behind life. Since the original short film "Family Photos", he has been keen on it, and has shown it most vividly in this "Eight Beauties". Ou Rong's films often like to show the sin and lust in people's living conditions in a single environment. Many critics say that François Ozon is a devout Hitchcock follower, keen on thriller and eroticism. He once said that love should be photographed as murder, and murder should be photographed as love. And in many of his films, this trait is also shown. "Beautiful Pictures" is of course no exception.
[Life]
The owner of the villa, Matthew, is a typical middle class. Moreover, it was a career crisis and a middle-aged man with a broken heart who died unexpectedly at the beginning of the film. Wife Gabby is preparing to elope with her lover. The eldest daughter, Susan, came home from London and, like her mother many years ago, was also pregnant. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law were under the fence because of the difficulties in life, but they did not give out their own bonds to help Matthew solve the crisis when his career was difficult. The black maid Chanel and the new glamorous maid Louis seem to serve the family wholeheartedly, but they also have ghosts and dark knots. Matthew's younger sister, Kerret, is a rambunctious woman who comes to her brother from time to time because of embarrassment to get money to spend. And the most innocent is the youngest daughter Catherine. If you look at such a brief introduction, you will definitely think that this is an ethical tragedy from a family that pretends to be a middle-class. So, apart from watching jokes, apart from seeing the sadness of life, and seeing the fragility of human relationships, what else can we see? We have been experiencing a life of hidden crises, but we rarely see anyone living rationally. We are used to drawing circles with the left hand and circles with the right, with one eye open and one eye closed. Then, living brightly on the surface, this materialistic, tempting surface. All the beauties in the film have their own bright or dark lives, but they still live, just like we live under enormous pressure.
[abyss]
The materialist theory always reminds us that we must look at things comprehensively, and everything has its two sides. Anything that is bright and moving has an unknown dark side. I used a theory in this extreme. The seemingly simple eight women's private lives each have their own scars hidden. The first to bear the brunt is the hostess, Gabby. She was already pregnant with Susan when she married Matthew, and it is because of this that Susan said "this is not necessarily a bad thing", because the child in Susan's belly is The result of "incest" with his father. On the other hand, Gabriel's lover who is about to elope, and Matthew's sister Karret have already crossed Chencang secretly. The most ironic thing is that the money that Kerret borrowed from his brother for the man he loved so much fell into the hands of Gabby and became the food for their elopement. Next, the comics ensue: Carret has a same-sex relationship with Chanel, a black maid; Louis, the new maid, is actually Matthew's underground lover for many years; He once poisoned his husband; his sister-in-law Augustine also secretly fell in love with Matthew, and wrote many letters and expressions. The only remaining daughter, who didn't seem to be hiding anything, became the most important figure in this murder in the end. The dark side of life. We have always seen that under the abyss, there are seemingly blooming flowers, but no one has ever considered such gloomy flowers with thorns and poisonous blossoms.
[Unexpected]
For the unexpected, we even have multiple layers of understanding: unpredictable, or more disasters. But many people like this way of verifying the solidity of their relationship. The youngest daughter Catherine is such a simple but cruel person. Matthew's death was her way of uncovering this accident. She disguised her father's death, changed her father's house key, cut the telephone line, and broke the car's engine, all of which she had originally intended to give everyone as a Christmas present, but made other mishaps. Unexpectedly, this is also multi-level expansion, multi-line extension. In a situation where everyone could be a murderer, everyone suspects each other, exposes each other, blames each other, and hurts each other. However, the biggest accident happened quietly and inevitably at the end. Matthew was in the locked room and heard everything. It turned out that the eight women around him, eight well-dressed, or noble or sexy, were like this. living in front of his eyes. The moment Katherine opens the door and reveals the truth, he lifts the gun to end his life, that absurd, hilarious life.
[shattering words]
Avoiding the plot, there are still many shining points in the filming and handling of this film. The first is the eight song and dance performances interspersed in between, which are presented to everyone by eight women, either alone or in combination. You can think of it as borrowing elements from musicals. But it's not really a musical, because even if you delete eight episodes like this, you can still understand the storyline very well. However, these eight paragraphs are indispensable. The innuendo lyrics and the ambiguous and blurred actions seem absurd, but they are sobering. In addition, there are eight women's distinctive dresses, all of which more or less express their respective experiences and personalities. The simplification of the scene often leads to visual fatigue, but the director's bold shooting techniques and fascinating storytelling methods have embedded this movie, which looks like a stage play, into your brain vividly and deeply. No matter which woman you remember, which song and dance, which plot, we all know that we are walking on an unpredictable abyss and an unpredictable life.
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