Why is "Love" one of my top ten of the year

Lucinda 2021-12-27 08:01:41



"Love" is Gaspar Nou’s most gentle and normal movie, and at the same time, like his predecessor, it’s "unexplainable and endless". Using 3D to shoot sex is to capture the intimacy between lovers. Show the most intimate aspect of the relationship between the sexes. Sex, semen, and tears are all evidence of love. The deeper the love, the more animalistic the way of expressing love, and the more painful it hurts.

The purpose of 3D is to make the audience immersive and live in the same room with the protagonist. For 3D, the photography scheduling has also been greatly changed compared with the past. The camera uses a deep movement in the room, and the room is like an open stage. , Using Steadicam to shoot stable sports shots, due to the weight of the dual-head 3D camera, shoulder photography is a challenge to the photographer's physical strength, so this time there is no long shot that is too long.

This new film is quite normal in terms of photography. It does not have the 360-degree rapid rotation of "Irrevocable", nor the full POV perspective of "Escape into Nothingness", but the aesthetic style is the same as those of the previous films. The black screen is used to switch to disintegrate the montage. The editing logic, a large number of deep focus shots, voice-over narrative, and a non-linear narrative dominated by thoughts. The feelings of these films are the same sickness, depression and wildness. The madness this time comes from the sex scale of real guns and live ammunition, which directly makes this film be classified as X grade, which means almost the same as pornography.

How should we watch movies, how should we watch art movies? Some movies, especially mainstream movies, tend to watch the story itself; in other movies, especially some art movies, their focus is not the story itself, but the way the director tells the story and guides the story. If you change the same story to a different director, you will get a different movie. This is the saying that "a thousand people have a thousand Hamlet". This is the truth. Everyone is familiar with "Hamlet". The focus is on how to shape it so that everything becomes different, more personal, and a version that belongs to one person alone.

There will definitely be people criticizing the story of "Love". The protagonist Murphy relies on voice-over narratives to tell how painful he is. With the black screen and the editing of the stream of consciousness, you should not expect such a filming method to be so profound and able to carry the family, Themes such as life and death, jealousy, and nothingness are understandable if the story is too thin because of the formality. But the goodness of "Love" is not in the story, but in how the director uses the camera to paint. He is so good in color narration, editing of the stream of consciousness, and creation of a sense of form that I think this film can be part of mine. Top ten of the year.

The story of the film is simple. On a rainy New Year's Day, Murphy received a call from the mother of her ex-girlfriend Electra. After they broke up, she became an addict and has disappeared for several months. The current married life is like a cage. Murphy, who has never forgotten his ex-girlfriend, suffers from lovesickness and begins to recall their two-year love life. The director is very good in the architectural structure, props and colors of Murphy's house, especially the color. The art director is a psychology major in this aspect, and he has a lot of research on the manipulation of color on the human subconscious mind. Let's use screenshots to analyze briefly.

This is Murphy's home, the real part, the background sound has always been the sound of rain.



Pale. It's like a faded memory, low, and it makes people unable to lift emotions.

This is the memory part.



Dark red. Anger, a sense of depression.

Different areas in the same room have different main colors.



First up is the son's room, orange dominates. The color composition of orange is the color of children, subconsciously giving people a sense of active, active, and innocent, but orange is also a bittersweet color, and its other side is arrogant, selfish, and childish.



The wall of the bathroom is yellow-green. When Murphy wants to make a phone call, this yellow-green will appear. The yellow-green is here to give people a sense of run-down and sickness. Sophia Coppola’s "The Virgin The girl’s room in "Dead" uses this color.



When Murphy turned from the bathroom, the light on the back porch was amber. The light here was set deliberately. The director has been manipulating the colors in the picture according to the needs of the narrative. Yellow is an obsessive color and a contradictory color.



When Murphy, his wife Omi, and his son Gasper appear in the same picture, there are two split colors on the left and right. This is definitely not a happy family of three.







The same color is used to express the character of the characters. You can see the use of yellow in the costumes of actors. Yellow represents innocence and vitality. Murphy can also be said to be presumptuous and warning, his jealousy, immaturity and selfishness, yellow is such a contradictory color. With the complication of love, the heroine turned red, and then crimson, this red also changed from romance and lust to anger and depression. But Omi has become the kind of gray in Figure 6, losing its color.

Use the influence of color on the human subconscious to narrate. Without this knowledge, you don't even know that you have been manipulated by the director, and the human subconscious is common, and the director can always play this trick without fail. This is also used in many Hollywood movies, but most of the time, the average audience does not notice it.

The editing of "Love" is also excellent, and it is more of the director's authoritative style. For example, in Figure 6, Murphy talked about his son, and the next shot is Figure 12.



How did the son get pregnant because of a broken condom.



In another shot, Omi said that she was pregnant, and Murphy asked her to test again.



For the next shot, Omi tested it again.

The whole film is edited in this way, using editing to simulate a person's thoughts, which is actually crazy enough, and the camera rotates quickly at 360 degrees or the first-person POV perspective is almost the same. By editing to create imagery montages, simulating the thoughts of the protagonist, we follow the protagonist to different times and scenes, and follow the protagonist's thoughts in an instant.



Well, I don't say anything, it's an upgrade of "Escape into Nothingness".

But that's all, from the perspective of film audiovisual language, Gaspar Nou is not only a director, but also an artist.




There are also some interesting easter eggs in this film, such as pictures 15 and 16. In Murphy’s own little world, the director’s "Stand Alone" VHS box has become his small warehouse, next to the DVD rack is "Escape The love hotel model of "Nothingness". Gaspar Nou said that he likes to put the familiar things in his life into the movie, which will make him feel safe, so he named the actor after his mother’s maiden name Murphy, and the actor’s son is Gasper. , Electra’s ex-boyfriend is No. He has always liked to name the characters in the script after his family and friends. Murphy's Law? Electra is the daughter of Agama Nonghe Claydenistra in Greek mythology. She has an Electra complex, meaning bright sunshine? You can indeed read it that way.



"Love" is actually not a semi-autobiography, but it is indeed a familiar experience in Nuo's own life. It has been a long time since he wanted to make such an X-rated erotic movie. Its story is actually very complete, you can hardly believe it, its script is only 7 pages, almost 60 scenes, most of the lines are improvisations by actors.

In fact, many authorized directors like to put their lives in the movies, so that audiences who are familiar with them feel that watching movies is like growing up together, feeling that the director is a familiar old friend, and Gaspar Nou has always been so depressed. Dark, it is said that his later feature film is about mental abuse, very cruel and melancholic, and before that, he may shoot a short film for the head-mounted virtual reality display Oculus Rift, and continue to explore new technologies with curiosity. It is estimated that someday It's not as simple as shooting 3D to shoot you in the face.


First published on "If only one thing on weekends"
WeChat account: ifweekend

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Extended Reading
  • Gabriel 2022-04-22 07:01:40

    Melodrama's way of shooting autobiographical love of the mistress. But too narcissistic. The black screen flashback is also deliberate. Can't you take good pictures?

  • Neoma 2021-12-27 08:01:41

    It would be better if it weren't that long. The main reason is that the dialogue feels really noisy and empty...

Love quotes

  • Murphy: Are you Afraid of death?

    Electra: I'm Afraid of pain. I don't wanna die in pain.

  • Victoire: If you fall in love, you're the loser.