2. The director clearly intended to leave traces of collage in the film. In a sense, "collage" is his signature. Alex visits Michèle's past, he enters Marion's room and sees four portraits Michèle painted of her first love, Julien. The camera stares at the portrait long enough to make it clear to the viewer that this is a dark-haired, sensitive-looking man. However, the Julien we meet at the subway station later is blond. In fact, the faces of the four portraits are all drawn by the actual director himself.
Also, the red cover manuscript Michèle et Julien, ou L'Amour de la Fille et du Garçon (Michèle et Julien, ou L'Amour de la Fille et du Garçon), which Alex took from Marion's desk, apparently alludes to the director's 1984 film. Boy Meets Girl, and there is a book with a blue cover next to it: "Dry Eyes" (L'Oeil sec), which points to the film itself, and thus has a "meta-creative" color. Not to mention the rich intertextuality that exists between the director's autobiographical trilogy (Boy Meets Girl, 1984; Mauvais sang, 1986; Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, 1991): Hans, Alex, Marion, Julien all Appeared in the previous two films, and Hans recalls his dead wife Florence, who was both the heroine of the first film and the director's boyhood lover, and her face was omnipresent in all three films.
The text, the pretext, and the reality outside the text are all articulated through the memory of the characters (the ones excavated or articulated).
3. The repairing power of the state apparatus is clearly expressed through the lens language. At the beginning of the film, a car runs over the foot of a drunken man who falls to the ground, and the latter faints - the car symbolizes the destructive power of consumerist culture, suggesting its complicity with politics - and Alex is arrested. The patrol car was taken to the shelter, and along with many other frail, aged and dirty bodies with tattoos, wounds, were washed clean, stored in separate compartments, and packaged together. The next day, a leg in a cast below the knee is seen on camera, which the doctor carefully smoothed with gauze and bandaged. The "repaired" Alex is allowed to return to society and to the new bridge, which is also being "repaired".
Yet "fixing" does not mean compassion. Some "irreparable" bodies are left to run their course and become floating debris on the fringes of society. Michèle was born into a wealthy family, but her family did not seem to make an effort to find her during the more than a year of homelessness due to eye problems. However, when a new treatment appeared that might cure Michèle's eye disease, we saw the pervasive power of the state apparatus: every tunnel, every telephone pole, every inch of wall, covered with Michèle's unspoiled beauty Face, like a nightmare in the rain. Even though Alex burns all the missing notices, Michèle overheard the news inadvertently on the radio. "Come back!" The whole society is calling, "You can mend it!" The
mending technique is the embodiment of the powerful integration force of the national ideology. In the climax of the film, on Bastille Day, which celebrates the bicentennial of the French Revolution, we see nine fighter jets lined up in a wedge shape, pulling out a red, white and blue smokescreen in the sky. Michèle rushed out of the subway—flocks of birds flew, helicopters, tanks, infantry, cavalry, all the military services marched in a neat parade formation accompanied by the strong rhythm of the cello. Director Leos Carax admitted in a 1991 interview with reporters that there were some insinuations of Le Pen and his fascism; but more than that, the scene was a symbol of the powerful oppressive power of the state apparatus. "Individual will" is suffocated by this repression, just like Alex's face painted by Michèle after his foot was crushed by a car and fainted: twisted, deformed, half blurred, as if squeezed by an invisible force, The open mouth forms an irregular oval black hole in the center of the frame.
4. Michèle runs through the army, the tanks, to the new bridge, to Alex; their way of fighting against this powerful external force is to sink into alcohol and forget reality, or to revel in their own way. So the twenty-minute Bastille Day and Night in the film has become a classic of surreal collage: the director uses dozens of completely different styles of music, mixing Latin dances, folk songs, waltzes, minuets, rock and roll. , rap, and even symphony, etc., are edited together without any transition, while Michèle and Alex change their dance steps and rhythms with different music in the sky of fireworks, and use their insolent body language to show their paleness. The vitality of the silent body is flourishing.
This scene also marked the director's total rejection of genre. The film begins with what appears to be a realist, even "creative realist" style (as in the asylum segment described above); later, the subtext that Alex discovers, the story of Michèle and Julien, has all the elements of a romantic melodrama ( First love, life and death, betrayal, love murder, etc.). On the surface, the scenes of Bastille Day and Night are realistic - Michèle said: "There are continuous songs in the city", and it seems natural to enjoy the fireworks on the New Bridge in the city center on the night of National Day - but it is actually A situation that cannot exist in reality (a collage of various music, beautiful fireworks on the Seine, the typical comic style of stealing a yacht), showing a surreal poetry. After this scene, a plausible narrative gradually becomes impossible, and the plot increasingly blends comedy and absurdity: Michèle and Alex use the narcotic Alcyon to steal money to spend an Eden day on the beach by the sea; the old wanderer Hans took out of his pocket the keys to almost all of Paris—even the Louvre Museum—(a bit of Balzac, isn’t it?); and, as described earlier, Alex’s nightmare in the rain, Michèle's staring eyes are plastered everywhere; at the end, after the duo jumped from Pont Nouveau into the Seine, the mysterious sand ship; and so on. There are clear rifts in time, space, and plot plausibility between the scenes.
5. Absurd collages are also reflected in the identities of the characters: Alex, the fire-breathing artist, juggler, and a cripple; Michèle, the colonel's daughter, a street artist, and a painter who is about to go blind; Hans, who has mastered all Parisian The key is the homeless King of Newbridge. And, if Michèle's wandering is more or less passive (due to lovelorn or blindness, we don't know which comes first), then Alex and Hans' choice is completely active. As Hans said: "This life, for me and for Alex, is the only life." To choose a life without a family, a fixed job and a shelter from the wind and rain, there is only one thing to pursue, and that is freedom.
Freedom is not only the theme of the director's creation, but also the theme of the film. The director said: "I have only one idea, to tell a love without makeup, without a phone, without a bedroom, a state of pure, swift love. . . It is an unfamiliar virus that devours the body and mind.” Freedom means not relying on any tangible material conditions and spiritual resources. In this sense, Michèle is justified in leaving Alex for her eye surgery, which makes her increasingly dependent on Alex, who tries to make her a prisoner of New Bridge for fear of losing her. True love can only be found when it is freed from subordination.
However, this freedom is different from the freedom as a national idea engraved on the lintel of the Palais de Justice on the Isle of Cite behind them. Freedom, rather than making it a religious mission, should only be regarded as a belief deep in the heart of the individual. (Don’t forget the classic French Revolution quote: “If the citizen is not free, make him free.” As Gottfried Keller predicted for modern democracies: “The ultimate victory of liberty will be barren.”) So, ironically, The scene takes place in the second half of the film. When Michèle, accompanied by Hans, enters the Louvre to see her painting "I want to see one last sight before going blind", she walks past Delacroix's famous painting "Liberty Leading the People", not bothering By the way - although this painting is far larger in size than the Rembrandt self-portrait, and thus more suited to her bleak vision than the latter.
6. The carrier of the ideology revealed by the director in the film is not only the image, but also the music and color. Except for the contrast between the triumphant aria of the uniformed man in the patrol car at the beginning of the film and the confused nursery rhyme hummed by the old woman - Michèle's eyesight is deteriorating in the middle of the film, and she is humming the same nursery rhyme in the early exercise. In addition, the deep and broad tone of the cello was chosen as a symbol of "national strength", while rock music and bass guitar belonged to the music of Michèle and Alex respectively. Red, white and blue, the symbols of France, have also been pointed out here for their ideological elements. The red, white and blue smoke of the air show announces the beginning of Bastille Day; and the film ends with Michèle and Alex dating on the bridge, Michèle stepping out of the cab in a white coat (echoing the beginning), and Alex stepping out of the subway in a black coat; after midnight , when only they were left on the bridge, Alex turned somersaults on the bridge railing in only a red sweater, revealing the blue jumper collar; and when Alex saw through Michèle's lie and walked towards her, the wind blew open Michèle's placket, inside her He was also wearing a blue sweater - red, white and blue fell to the bottom. After being rescued by the sand carrier, they took off their wet clothes and put on dry clothes. Although they were still mainly white, with orange, red and blue in between, they were no longer an obvious three-color contrast.
What the director opposes is not freedom, equality, and fraternity per se, but opposing them as national ideals, thereby depriving the right of value judgment originally belonging to individuals and degenerating into ideology. Here, in the transformation of color, this position is also reflected.
7. Ideology is omnipresent. As a small individual, in order to fight against this pervasive force, the only way is to leave scars that cannot be healed. Alex shot and broke his left ring finger after Michèle left. By doing this, he refused to be repaired - the timing of the shot was quite right, we see that despite the possession of alcohol, narcotics, and a pistol, Michèle, Alex and Hans' rejection of society has always been peaceful, not entangled in sex, violence, and drugs. Only when Alex set fire to Michèle's missing person, the worker who posted the advertisement was accidentally burned to death (the director's handling of this part is unbelievably calm), so the next morning, after Michèle left and Alex self-harmed, Paris The police found him with astonishing efficiency, woke him from his dreams, arrested, beat, tried, imprisoned.
Three years in prison healed Alex's lame leg - the prison doctor was apparently as competent and responsible as the asylum doctor - but the mutilated hand still clings to the memory of love. And although Michèle healed her own eyes and married her ophthalmologist, Alex's heart burned by the flames retained his clear figure. In the end, like the last line of Jean-Paul Sartre's play "Dirty Hands" (Les Mains sales): "Not recyclable!" Three years later, at midnight on New Year's Eve, they embraced from a refurbished new The act of jumping into the Seine on the new bridge seems to loudly declare: "It can't be repaired!"
8. Individuals fight against the state repair technique by protecting the "cracks" of the body and spirit. In a sense, it is a kind of self-mutilation and self-injury the behavior of. Therefore, the protagonist of the "collage" must be the image of the anti-hero: his/her way of confrontation is non-organized and non-violent, and compared with the splendor and strong will of the "national power", they are small and unbeautiful. Only in his insistence on his own position, it reflects a lonely uncompromising, a real heroic temperament.
Therefore, an unavoidable dilemma is that after the symbolic elements of ideology are fully realized and completely discarded, Utopia will correspondingly become a ruin - ideology and utopia, they were originally a pair of brothers who were born together and opposed to each other. Abandoning all "false consciousness" also means abandoning utopian consciousness. The binary opposition of "here and the other" disappears, and utopia is replaced by a "here-and-now" philosophy of happiness. The power of "here and now" in collage works is amazing. It reflects a more banal, immediate, everyday sense of temporal events, and the artist thus weaves a world of floating dismantling. Towards the end, Michèle's "Happy People's Story" - "Because it's tonight!" is the embodiment of this philosophy. However, as the bells of Notre Dame struck three in the morning, reminding her of the existence of the outside world, she seemed to forget the story she had just told: "Alex, I have to go back. . . . You have to be patient with me. I'll tell you
someday , but not tonight. . The "seaside" of life is not a specific place, nor can it be a real place; and at the end they leave Paris in a sand boat, Michèle asks the owner: "Where are you going?" Answers: "Until the end." "Where? Leah Fur?" Le Havre, the mouth of the Seine. The reference here is obviously not the real city of Le Havre, which is also under the administration of the French government, but the meaning of being located between land and sea. Like "New Bridge", it is also a floating, indeterminate signifier.
9. Perhaps it is by virtue of the surrealist "lightness" (légèreté) guise that we can hardly perceive the heaviness of the final scene: in reality the individual cannot overcome the power of the state, or escape the whole ideology that bears its legitimacy. , never possible. The only way out is death. In the cold blue river water, after some struggle, the two suddenly stared at each other, and the powerful sound of the propeller came from above. This seems to imply that their lives are over. However, the film did not end. The two of them surfaced separately and were rescued on the mysterious sand ship. Seeing the two mysterious ship owners, Michèle asked, "Are you guys selling sand?" "No, we're only in charge of shipping." "This is us. The last voyage," said another. ——"Sand" is a symbol of time, "Bible • Job": "...It will add to my days as much as dust." ——Michèle asks: "Can you take us?" "Yes." "Of course. Let's make arrangements." So they got out of the cabin and ran on the sand, as if running across the plains and mountains, and came to the bow to sing the song that appeared for the third time in the film, but the mood was very different. 's children's rhyme, and exclaimed happily: "Paris, you stay in my heart!" But what lies ahead? They don't know it, as the children's rhyme sings, but go with the waves of the Seine, "...but the Seine is so calm/Never disturbed/Night and day/Her gentle waves/To Le Havre /Towards the sea/Like a dream/Glides through the mystery of Paris/and misery.” (Translated from Jacques Prévert, Chanson de la Seine)
10. The film shows the vacuum left by the death of end-of-the-century sentiments and ideologies, Only aesthetic form can fill it. Some critics, while arguing that the film's narrative is flawed, admit that its visuals more than make up for it. In fact, the "defective narrative" is the typical feature of collage; and the pleasing visual effect is the guarantee that the work itself can surpass the ordinary, perishable material fragments to establish its artistic value. As this final scene of the film suggests, the floating "fragment" is no longer alone, it acquires meaning in the eternal flow of time; the scars remain, but the film itself, as a "collaged" work of art, gains of eternal value. (END)
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