A few years ago, I had the experience of rushing to buy a bunch of tickets, and in the end I bought soy milk for various reasons, drinking one bowl after another, not caring whether I really wanted to sit in the small dark room, I just grabbed it, tried to show my ticket stubs, and watched it while snoring if it was not good, and I had to do it again. Suddenly one day, the idea of going with the flow and picking up a bargain came, and I couldn't stop it. Since last year, I have been wandering to the cinema, watching whatever I can catch, trying to break my stubbornness, and supported by a sense of destiny. Sometimes the inner drama is more exciting than the movie!
To be honest, the movies you want to watch are closely related to your recent mood. Last year, the movies that really got me going were Closed Eyes (2023) directed by Spanish director Victor Erice and Beasts (2024) directed by French director Bertrand Bonello. They seem to have nothing to do with each other, but they are actually about time and forgetting. This year, I went through the movies that I didn't want to watch or couldn't finish watching in previous years, but I suddenly became interested in them this year. For example, Ms. Straight (1985) directed by French director Agnès Varda and Brief Encounter (1945) directed by British director David Lean are even more interesting when you watch them together.
A girl who wanders on her own initiative and a housewife who is mentally unfaithful, the female characters in the two films with different trajectories seem to be telling a story of a dilemma: we are afraid of rootless wandering and loneliness, yet we cannot tolerate the constraints and alienation brought by traditional roots.
I guess this kind of movie-watching experience of fighting between the left and right sides must be very exciting.
"Wandering Girl" directed by French director Agnès Varda
There are many excellent works on the theme of wanderers in the history of movies, whether it is "The Kid" or "Paris, Texas", they all carry the subjective compassion of the creators. In "Wandering Girl", the godmother of the New Wave, Varda, used a documentary-style approach, and the filming was more like a large-scale social experiment.
Varda only provided the outline of the scenes, and the actors improvised the lines. The most interesting thing is that non-professional actors broke into the camera and improvised the "creation". The female lead Sandrine Bonnelle's performance can be called "self-destructive". She experienced homeless life a month in advance, sleeping under bridges, picking up trash, hitchhiking, and was even driven away by the police for spending the night in a garbage bin.
Sandrine Bonnaire as Mona the Wanderer
Sandrine almost turned the "likeness" of the street woman into "isness". During the filming, she also wrote 40,000 words of notes, recording hunger, cold and discrimination from passers-by, which later became the basis for Varda to modify the script.
The three-minute long shot of Mona dragging her sleeping bag across the wilderness also emphasizes Varda's thoughts: Is true freedom just an illusion?
"Wandering Girl" was once selected as one of the "100 Bad Movies" by "Watching Movies" magazine. "Bad" is not a stain but a medal, and it is even more destructive after watching it! Maybe after watching it, you will be like the heroine: "The sense of nothingness permeated my life, and I once questioned all social relationships."
Actress Sandrine Bonnaire and director Agnès Varda
The 1945 film Brief Encounter was adapted from Noel Coward's one-act play Still Life, which tells the story of a forbidden love between a middle-class housewife, Laura, and a doctor, Alec, on a train platform.
Poster of "It's a pity to meet you earlier"
The extramarital affair caused by a grain of coal dust is very cool and refreshing, but this kind of spiritual infidelity was a challenge to the moral bottom line in the 1940s. Some people compare it to the British version of "Spring in a Small Town". "Brief Encounter" won the "Golden Palm" award at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946. It seems almost the same now, and many abstinence-themed love movies have borrowed from it.
Neither the heroine nor the hero is handsome. The director did it on purpose. It is said that the director was afraid that the actor was too masculine and asked him to shave his eyebrows thinner. The two leading actors, from their physical features to their detailed performances, make people feel like ordinary people. I watched it once more than ten years ago. At that time, I thought the hero was a liar. Now it seems that he was just a touchstone.
Housewife Laura and doctor Alec develop a forbidden love
In this single closed-loop scene, the director took great pains to use precise "visibility of 1.5 meters" of artificial smoke (imitating the steam locomotive smoke at Milford Railway Station), and bought the copyrighted music of the second movement of Rachmaninoff's "Piano Concerto No. 2" at a huge price as the theme music. Photographer Robert Kraske used a soft-focus lens to make the smoke diffuse into an emotional barrier, giving this emotional escape the temperament of a suspense film.
Director David Lean
Oscar-winning British director David Lean is a young literary man who started out as an editor. He has loved reading since he was a child, especially classical literature, and his favorite is Charles Dickens. If you haven't seen Brief Encounter, you must have seen Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago directed by him.
Monologue movies are the most novel-like movie genre, and you feel like you are being dragged into the torrent of fate by the protagonist. When the male and female protagonists fall into each other's eyes, they are also seriously discussing pneumoconiosis and preventive medicine... Many dialogues in the movie can be used as teaching materials for actors' lines.
If it weren't for that chattering lady, the two of them might have naturally come to the apartment and had a fight, and the story would have had a different ending, coal ashes to coal ashes, tears to tears, or to use today's words: falling from one pit into another, but this struggle ultimately lost in the cage of the "other".
The heroine's desire for her true self can only appear and disappear from time to time, just like her forehead wrinkles.
Mona is like a fallen leaf drifting in the winter wilderness, and eventually freezes to death in the wilderness; Lola's soul is like a rudderless ship in her routine life... The two movies are separated by time and space, and ask the same question:
Are humans rooted beings or rootless wanderers?
【Video Introduction】
The Wandering Girl (1985)
Director: Agnès Varda
One winter in the south of France, a young woman was found frozen to death in a ditch. Her name was Mona, and she was a wanderer. Through flashbacks and brief interviews, the film peels back the last few weeks of her life. Varda uses different people's views of Mona to paint an impossible portrait of Mona - no one fully understands her, and no one can fully understand her, including the director herself.
In order to write the script for this film, Varda picked up various hitchhikers in her car and went to train stations and homeless shelters to collect materials. She defines it as a real fictional film that she cultivated with the lives of real people: the way of collecting materials is documentary, but the script and filming are artificial and fictional.
Sandrine Bonnaire, who played Mona, also won the French Cesar Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film. The film won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice International Film Festival and many other international film festival awards. The 2K restored version is shown this time.
It's a pity that we met too late (1945)
Director: David Lean
Director Robert Altman's wife Catherine once said: "One day many years ago, shortly after the war ended, Altman had nothing to do, so he went to the cinema to watch a movie in the afternoon. It was not a Hollywood movie, but a British movie. He said that the heroine was neither glamorous nor sexy. At first he didn't understand why he wanted to watch this movie. But twenty minutes later, he burst into tears and fell in love with her. This made him feel that this was more than just a movie."
The film is Brief Encounter, a simple story with such moving power. Many critics, historians and scholars consider Brief Encounter to be one of the greatest films of all time. In 1999, the British Film Institute ranked it as the second greatest British film of all time. The film was nominated for Best Director, Best Actress and Best Screenplay at the 19th Academy Awards in 1947, and was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946.
Note: The film introduction comes from the Shanghai International Film Festival