Director Alfonso Cuarón, known as one of the "Mexico's Three Greatests", has finally got his wish after nominating the Venetian Golden Lion for "The Same Your Mother" and "Son of Humanity", with his new film "Rome" Successfully won the Golden Lion Award for Best Picture at the 75th Venice Film Festival.
From "The same with your mother" to the "Son of Humanity" that astounded the world of cinema, to the Hollywood "Gravity", or "Harry Wave" with a personal style. Special and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Alfonso Cuarón used different types of films to prove his ability to control a variety of types.
But no matter what the subject matter is, it is not difficult for us to feel Alfonso Cuarón’s innocent original intentions, "Little Princess", "The same as your mother", "Son of Humanity", "Gravity" and even "Ha 3", every film They always cherish hope and strength, and look forward to the future with hope even after hardships.
The new film "Rome" has a lot of twists and turns in the premiere schedule. It can be regarded as Alfonso Cuarón from the direct line of Venice, but this time he took "Rome" to Cannes. From the point of view of the film's temperament, it is indeed more suitable for Cannes's taste. But Netflix and Cannes are still talking about the theater. In the end, Fumao has no choice but to let go and returns to Venice.
If we lose our horses, we can't know what a blessing is. Although he failed to compete in Cannes, he still escaped the Cannes New Year. The province had a head-on conflict with films such as "The Thief Family", "Burning" and "Capernaum".
Eighteen years after leaving home, Alfonso Cuarón turned his attention back to his homeland, full of the long-lost wanderer's desires, and filmed this "Rome". People often say that the best thing to write is the memory, and the worst thing to write is the memory. The land that used to grow is full of bits and pieces, but because of the deep love, the slightest difference is not allowed.
1. Life is a series of isolated moments
When Alfonso Cuarón used images to bring us back to Mexico City in the 70s, the homeland that the director loves-Rome; suddenly discovered that this is not a recurring witness, because it does not exist in space , But exist in time. The person who revisited the old place could not regard himself as the boy who decorated himself with enthusiasm and impulse.
The film "Rome" starts with the passing of the plane and ends with the passing of the plane. At the beginning, the camera aimed at the water stains on the side of the road, watching the silhouette of the plane reflected in the water, the blur of the past and the ignorance of the departure when I was young, and the trajectory of the movie was properly expanded. Until the end of the movie, the camera looks at the sky from the perspective of the characters, watching the planes passing by in the sky, the vision becomes clear, and it forms a strong contrast with the blur of the past.
The story takes place in the 1970s, a well-to-do family in the Roman district of Mexico City. Alfonso Cuaron used his family and his childhood maid as the prototype of the story to create the two central figures of the maid Cleo and the female employer Sofia. Their relationship revealed the complicated social class structure at the time. Although Cleo was an employee, when she was abandoned during unmarried conception, the only shelter for her was still the female employer Sofia.
Through Cleo's eyes, the film presents two important narrative clues to the audience. The first is as an individual, Cleo's personal encounters and his relationship with Sofia's family; the second narrative line is much more macroscopic. From the collective level, Cleo has witnessed the conflicts of the times and social turmoil for the world.
Love, pregnancy, tragic abandonment, forest fires, student movements, military repression, and the Corpus Christi massacre, Alfonso Cuarón showed the audience a sense of powerlessness while also letting us see the flexibility and patience of the women in the film. Be strong and bold. When personal life is crushed by the great wheel of the times to nowhere, he still gritted his teeth and moved forward instead of being washed away by the flood of fate.
Similar to "Son of Man", Alfonso Cuarón perfectly combines the individual and the collective into a dense scene, reproducing the sudden but unstoppable nature of life. With delicate lenses, the individual, the collective and the society are intertwined.
The smooth personal level narrative and the broken social turbulence are blended into a very peculiar narrative rhythm. Two narrative clues, each of which are complete but twisted with each other, move the audience into the memory of Alfonso Cuarón. Dimension. The attraction of the film lies in the deep-seated drama conflict.
Alfonso Cuarón inherited the Latin American gene of good speech, the kind of quiet talk and slow motion of the camera, non-story, anti-climax but particularly convincing.
From "Little Princess" and "Son of Man" to "Harry Potter 3" and "Gravity", Alfonso Cuarón's narratives are very clear, clue-driven linear narratives. It is particularly obvious in "Rome", where he rarely uses sudden turns to trigger the plot, using details such as "aircraft passing" to metaphorically flow time instead of setting up deliberate plot points.
2. The real discovery lies not in the landscape, but in the eyes
Alfonso Cuaron no longer uses rigid narrative lines and conventional structures to construct the film, but instead relies on atmosphere, details and texture to show such an autobiographical memory with a sense of age. From the slow shots, the director seems not eager to persuade anyone that these subjective and monotonous images are directly drawn from the memory of how important it is.
The most amazing thing in the film is the precision of the scene design. Most of the scenes in the camera are selected for medium scene positions. The close-up shots are selected when chasing people on the street. The camera pans and stares in the indoor space. The world in Cleo's narrative. The lens always keeps a certain distance between the characters and the exquisite audio-visual language design makes people feel more immersive.
The camera moves around the city following the perspective of the characters. From scene to scene, there is almost no obvious causality. But the soft and smooth scene switching makes people feel unobtrusive. Shooting with a walking rhythm and a slow circular horizontal camera is like a viewer looking back from now on, recording the chaotic reality of life one by one. The narrative flows and jumps, followed by a soothing and focused breathing, immersed in the image.
Alfonso Cuarón’s iconic lens depth of field and panoramic lens are used to the extreme here. With the movement of the characters, the camera slowly captures every frame covered with historical dust, whether it is Cleo walking on the busy streets of Mexico City, the simple excitement of meeting lovers through the streets and alleys, or students The tension and noise of the protest march.
High-resolution, wide-format, 65mm black-and-white film shooting, slowly switching between different scenes, immersed in a unique atmosphere, and at the same time from many familiar and unfamiliar places, radiating bits and pieces of memories.
The shots and scheduling of the film are really beautiful beyond words. The low-contrast black-and-white visual image gives the past a layer of historical dust, and has a dreamy texture in style. Flowing transitions promote the development of the plot. This is of course related to Alfonso Cuarón’s keenness for long shots. Tolstoy’s gaze condenses the lens language into a purer silence, with exquisite sound design, from constant barking dogs. To the hawking that haunts the street vendors, he created a set of dynamic environmental language.
With the ups and downs of Cleo's fortunes, lively weddings on rural farms, forest fires, and dusty dust during the turmoil... the whole film is like a narrative prose poem, or, in other words, a compressed memory of time. The arc-shifting camera presents the dreamy perspective of the stream of consciousness, including a street scene and a piece of broken furniture.
But it is also difficult for us to define this work as a classic masterpiece because of this. In fact, it has a kind of closedness as a corner of the coffee table, which may remind people of Guy Martin's "My Lake Winnipeg". , You can experience and watch, but there is no need to interpret it in depth.
The picture of this "Rome" is so detailed that by the end of the movie, it feels like you have spent your whole life there: bookcases full of books, soft sofas, shit on the floor, garages with graffiti, every day Airplane passing overhead. For Mexico City in the 1970s, life was the same as before, and those unpredictable collapses and collapses will eventually return to calm.
What the film lens simulates is not the eyes that people look at when walking, but the constantly flowing thoughts in the mind, the scenes that can only be seen by closing the eyes.
This time Alfonso Cuarón chose to fill the picture with his own memories rather than other people’s stories. With an extraordinary technique and a unique wide-angle lens, he quietly revealed the ups and downs carved in the depths of his memory, and he did not bother with effort. The panoramic pictures of the great era are combined together, and this strong sense of intimacy and the fate of the times are intertwined with each other, which has made this "Rome" epic.
Author | Peter Pan; Public Number | Seeing Death in Movies
Edit | Riding a Rooftop Boy; please indicate the source for reprinting
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