Woody Allen said it was his most satisfying movie. This is a movie that uses all kinds of comedy but leaves a tragic ending. This movie is a dream, a rose-like but fleeting purple dream.
The story takes place in New Jersey in the 1930s, just ten years after the smoke of World War I dissipated, and the United States fell into a severe economic depression. Bankruptcies, unemployment, people struggling to survive flooded the city, people have lost confidence and expectations in life, our heroine Cecilia is one of them, and unlike others, Cecilia exists in such a life One outlet - movies.
The development of the story should not need to be repeated, Woody successfully gave the three men in the film their symbolic meanings. Cecilia's husband, Monk, is a rude, vulgar, and vile man. He drinks too much, flirts with other women, is irritable, hangs out with a bunch of friends all day long, and plays mentally retarded games, which makes people lose hope for this man's future. Of course, he is real, available, or, in other words, existing. Just like Cecilia's life, after being fired by a small restaurant owner, what kind of expectations and expectations can such a woman have in real life? At this moment, she has only one emotional outlet - movies.
It can be said that the movie is Cecilia's lover. In countless nights, cecilia is not intoxicated in the arms of her lover, but in the cinema. She is deeply immersed in the glitz and beauty of the movie. , romantic, brave, and fascinated by single-mindedness, so when TOM walks out of the movie, we can easily accept cecilia's overwhelm and excitement at the moment. Because such a man is what she thinks about day and night, even if TOM is unreal and fictitious.
Yes, TOM's greatest quality is fiction. He doesn't belong to our off-screen world, just like he can't understand Jesus, why he didn't "fade out" after kissing, didn't know the props and bills on his body were incapable of paying, didn't know he couldn't save cecilia in the real world , even though he loves her. Tom is not actually viable.
Regarding TOM, the arrangement of the two scenes is worth mentioning, and Woody's exquisite layout is also reflected, one is in the playground and the other is in the brothel. The playground is a somewhat dreamy place. The dilapidated and deserted playground under Woody's camera has become the best place for the two to quickly warm up and let Cecilia ignore the "reality". In the playground, we see Dreams come true. A kiss that couldn't be more real, a love that couldn't be more pure. It's really TOM's pure and ignorant love that makes the story move to another scene - a brothel. This is the most vulgar, filthy, dirty, and lowly place in ordinary people's understanding. When the prostitutes tried to make Tom have sex with them, TOM showed the prostitutes the purity and fidelity of his love for Cecilia in a somewhat retarded way. The persistence of love, firmness and truth, and Tom's inevitability of life in the real society cannot continue.
In fact, rather than saying that Cecilia loves movies, it is her yearning for a glamorous and beautiful life. This is a golden dream in that era, when the material is scarce, citizens lose their motivation and hope for life, Cecilia can fall in love with any man who has the characteristics of a movie hero, so gel plays this role very well. When the same handsome, romantic, brave, single-minded (at least it seems) man appears in front of Cecilia, we have reason to be sure that her final choice, in fact, she will choose gel, because gel is real. What Cecilia loves is not a dream, but a reality, a reality that can be exchanged for dreams, and a reality that can make herself truly feel the gorgeous life. It's just that this reality has a beautiful shell in front of Cecilia, which has never been real and will not be in the future. For gel, he wasn't ready to bring Cecilia to Hollywood, all he did was coax this silly, poor woman. With the slight flick of Gel, Cecilia's dream was shattered.
This film hides a deep sadness behind the brisk narrative style and the pictures, and the combination of them makes people feel the shock of the soul. Through the film, I can see Cecilia's helpless life, the bleak and harsh reality, which is really real. It's the best possible representation of Woody Allen's personal worldview, although, arguably, such a worldview is pathetic. After all, the monks and gels that symbolize the real world, they bring us nothing but rudeness and badness.
The value of this movie is that she tells a beautiful dream, but in the end, it gently pierces her. Movies are a different world from real life, and in 1985 Woody Allen showed this proposition to the audience in movies. Movie within movie, Woody played us all.
Just like every time Cecilia pulls a small suitcase and runs away angrily and has to return home, the movie tells us that reality is so inescapable. In fact, we all forget that when you choose reality, it means that you choose cruelty.
False is false, and true is not necessarily true. This is the sadness of many times....
psyche_hh
2009.10.02
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