What I want to say is that the good thing about "Stay" is that it is not a simple and powerful director's film, nor is it a simple screenwriter's independent film, but a deliberately done, a play based on the director plus the director In creation, the two should cooperate and assist each other, and a film with foreplay and details, pheromone and climax, and a meticulous and meticulous film was achieved. The choice of details of the script and the ingenious structure are like a slender and rigid skeleton, the director's lens language is appropriate, and the intention is exquisitely shaped, and it is like a precise skin. Bone and flesh grew and grew at the same time, so the few minutes before death were completely transformed into 100 minutes of true touch.
First, let's talk about the script. If "Stay" is abbreviated, it is actually: a man's confession in the last few minutes of his life. If the whole story is only developed around the characters directly related to the protagonist, the successful movie may be "127 Hours". There will be no suspense, and no need for suspense, just wait patiently and see how the film brings out all the background of the core protagonist a little bit. However, "Stay" has all the people and things that Henry saw, heard and touched in the last few minutes before his death, all delicately arranged in the whole story showing his life. Tom (Ivan), a stranger who came to rescue him, became another avatar of himself, and Lila, another stranger, became the girlfriend of another avatar. The child on the side looked at the dying man and said, "Will this man die?" It was repeated in subsequent stories. All the people Henry saw at the scene of the crash became legitimate characters from the previous stories. And until the last five minutes of the film, you have no idea what kind of story this is. For example, in the previous 95 minutes, I always felt that Henry was actually another personality of Tom played by Ivan. He was just Fight to himself, but in fact all the stories were that Henry spent his life in the few minutes before he died. The combination and arrangement of everything in front of him in the past few minutes, and everything is only because of Henry's deep repentance.
Such an arrangement of characters is so in line with our cognition of memory: it is the chaos of memory, the initiative of subjective consciousness, rather than the multiple personalities that are unpredictable and do not match the life of ordinary people. This is really cool.
There is also the choice of details. King Farmer Elk Jokes, Floyd's Boy on Fire, Proposal Rings, Signature Oil Paintings, First Year Photos Projected in Strip Clubs, and more. A lot of meticulous plots are not much or not, and a reasonable mapping can almost be found in the last quarter of an hour of the film. If you are careful, you will feel pleasure everywhere in the last quarter of an hour, and from time to time, you will exclaim "Oh~ that's how it is!"
Speaking of style. The director fits such a script and does three best things: transitions. special effects. intention.
Most of the transitions of the scenes in the whole film are completed by the superimposition of similar shapes, whether it is the superposition of faces and faces, the superposition of chandeliers and street lamps, etc., the effect is to make watching movies very enjoyable, just like Branches of brain nerve cells, you never know which direction your memory will go in the next second. And in the post-rendering of the big scene in the second half, similar to the processing of radio waves, the haze of the city empty mirror and the dramatic torrential rain, like peeling off a cocoon, the film was successfully transformed from the real part of the first half to the final part. Totally dreamlike. And the best part is the precise choice of intentions that incorporate the content of the story: the escalating stairs that have been folded, the revolving corridor, the walrus in the aquarium, and the two identical women stepping off the taxi. It is strongly recommended that films such as "Second Exposure" can learn from this film in terms of the fit between the intention and the theme of the story.
There are actually a lot of movies like this. "Inception", "Chilling", "Source Code", "Memento", "127 Hours", "Crash" and so on, I personally think this one is a more versatile and interesting one. There is also a great improvement in personal emotion in the final credits: the background music turned out to be "Cold Water" by Uncle Damien Rice, which fits perfectly!
View more about Stay reviews
