TWY
Margaret Duras, who spoke through her character in Godard's film Escape, said, "If I had enough energy, I'd rather do nothing; but because I couldn't stand doing nothing, I made movies." Coincidentally, Wes Anderson gives his fictional city an equally provocative name in his new film, The French Pie, "Ennui-sur-Blasé." This may be the source of all the misunderstandings the film has suffered since its premiere in Cannes, but the film is by no means as boring, dull or emotionally deviant as its opponents claim. The French Pie is also a fictional publication based on the history of The New Yorker, a group of fictional journalists (and, again, the new Yorker contributors) who live together in a room to write, discuss, and publish texts, where they can write under the name "we"; in this city rich in René Claire's or Jacques Tati's comedy style, they are a group of outsiders, silently or earth-shatteringly observing the events that take place; of course, It was ultimately just one author's imagination of other authors, none of which ever existed—Paris was so big that he had to shrink it down into his own pocket book version, and while it still had well-developed roads and a variety of street communities, it still looked like a dollhouse, or like a croissant bread, made up of layers of dough and butter that were constantly folded and mixed and baked, and the puff pastry seemed to be wrapped in something.
Wes Anderson
About the film, or as they say, these "things", these "layers", these comic book-like movements and characters, these dazzling decorations, have caused a certain degree of misunderstanding, but Anderson's audiovisual mechanism is taken to the extreme here, which means that it may only look like some kind of image that seems to have only simple surfaces: lens design, symmetry, translational tracks, staged, star lineup; France, Paris, "May Storm"; "The New Yorker", James Baldwin, story collection, reading, Modern art, postmodern art, middle class, nothingness, fairy tales, retro, homage, food and so on, there's a lot more, but that's just the first layer. In fact, throughout the film, we always see a large group of people crowded together; in fact, throughout the film, we always see various characters crowding the whole picture, but behind this crowding, Anderson is doing a complex superposition, even provoking some kind of intentional barrier to the audience, the most important form is not just display, but a kind of "wrapping", everything is rolled up like a piece of praise bread, hiding the middle core - if any.
At the beginning of the film, we are told that the editor-in-chief of The Francis Magazine (Bill Murray) most commonly used advice to his writers is: "Try to make it clear that you wrote it on purpose." We know that he deliberately avoids the so-called sentimental things, so in the face of the seemingly dazzling "fullness" under Anderson's lens, we may wish to consider a law that belongs to loneliness: let us question the overflow of all these things, because behind this "fullness" can only be loneliness - but it is not this loneliness that creates such a collective, and in the process of building the collective, he/she gradually develops the illusion of "no longer lonely". We've all heard the old saying, or something like that, "In the middle of a sea of people, you're just one person," and so on. Perhaps the most unique and perhaps radical work of solitude in film history, French Pie can be added to this list Mariano Linas's masterpiece Flowers, David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, Jacques Riviette's Out: No Contact, and Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, all of which are a kind of simplicity achieved through "maximism", the simplest loneliness wrapped up in the most cover. But if "The Grand Budapest Hotel" clearly places the theme of loneliness in the retro vicissitudes of the image at the beginning, "French Pie" is so determined, Anderson's "package" is only there, as for wanting to see the first few layers, he chooses to stand aside and maintain a neutral attitude, he first shows a kind of creativity, even if this prosperity may only belong to the past, has long ended, the end of this history, is also the origin of "boredom (Ennui)", the origin of loneliness, But it is also the origin of writing, because writing can only happen "after" in the end. So, in this "boredom", in this kind of loneliness that cannot be reached in the face of people and things of the past, what can the author create?
But even to reveal loneliness as an important theme of the film, it is still wrapped in layers of form and content. First the magazine itself, followed by the form of reading the text, followed by five articles that occupy the pages of the magazine: the obituary of Arthur Howitzer Jr., which gives the film a "Citizen Kane" structure; A short, pithy historical travelogue by Szelac (Owen Wilson) that takes the viewer through the city's landscape, and where some of the problems are buried; Berensen's art column on the prison artist Morse Swindon. Rosenthaler's "Concrete Masterpiece" by Benicio del Toro + Tony Revololi, important figures such as his muse (Leia Saidu) and agent (Adrian Brody), etc., which are further interpreted as the main body of an "article" as a "lecture"; the political op-ed by Clements played by Francis McDormand, "On the Revision of a Manifesto", obviously based on the "May Storm" that broke out in France in 1968, and the main characters include Timothy Blanc. Challemet plays the somewhat neurotic student leader, and the young revolutionary woman Juliet (Lina Kudri, who appears to be a contemporary variant of some sort of Godard character), the former and the equally neurotic middle-aged journalist himself develop an intimate relationship during this group of times, but the two are clearly separated; the film ends with the African-American food critic White (Jeffrey White) on a police chief chef, Lieutenant Nasgarfiyer (whose surname is suspected to be taken from "Nescafe", But it's a thrilling portrait of Korean actor Steve Park, but if the chapter is a depiction of a legendary chef rather a portrayal of White himself, the film also presents the chapter as a retelling of the article by the author himself on a talk show— we are told that the author has an amazing memory of what he has written and can recite it without mistake, and then we will know that here, Anderson finally showed his hole card.
One article starts to be read aloud and stops being read aloud; another article starts to be read aloud... Each article starts with the same opening title and typewriter sound and ends with the same sudden black screen. As you can see, the above stories seem to be disconnected from each other, and seem bloated or self-motivated, but the internal themes are clearly wrapped up and infiltrated in layers, step by step, in the mysterious kitchen of Lieutenant Naskafiyer, an onion, perhaps, each of which is independent but secretly adhered, reminiscent of the experience of experimenting with tweezers in science class to remove the thin skin inside, and these humble thin skins are the key to understanding its structure. In "collections" such as Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Accident and Imagination, Linas's Flowers, or Hou Mai's Man About Paris, all the stories are brought together because of themes (Hamaguchi almost directly writes the themes on the title) and adhere to strict orderliness, and if you only look at them as separate small stories, it is difficult to grasp the ingenuity of their overall structure. Anderson's quirky audiovisual forms are also fused here, and the film's Russian matryoshka-like structure is visualized as the various "compartments", fences, fortresses, voiceovers behind windows and other deep or shallow folds in the picture, which are carefully displayed with continuous push-track shots; sometimes a simple advance, with deep changes in light and scenery; and sometimes just a fixed shot with a loud sound—everything in it, such as the first shot of Wilson's travels:" Ennui woke up suddenly on Monday morning", and as the foreground sewers gushed and the doors and windows in front of the camera opened, all kinds of life began— artificial, mechanical, but also human.
Poster of the Franco-Rite
In terms of text, a questionable "neutrality" is the key to the film's form, and Anderson not only uses the magazine as the skeleton of the film, he also discusses the writing itself, but he wants to discuss a kind of writing that avoids "autobiographicality", in White's words: "Self-analysis is a kind of evil, either in private or not necessarily", so what does the author intend to write? He is going to write about other characters, to tell the stories of others, from a "neutral" point of view, and the five "articles" in "The French Pie" will in turn clear the fog of so-called "neutrality", return to a healthy self-portrait, and at the last moment with a spiritual retrospective, pierce the only existence behind all neutrality, that is, the author himself. But we have never seen such a "sunny" obituary, nor have we heard of such a "dirty" travelogue, all of which are expressed in a relaxed gesture, and the authors only present everything in their eyes truthfully. When Tilda Swinton introduces her "starving artist" in her article/lecture (was the audience at the lecture photographed head-on?). She tried, tried to describe the whole bizarre art history event without emotion, but she occasionally showed up, such as accidentally inserting a picture of herself naked in her own lecture material (as Leia Saidu said in an interview with the Film Handbook, the sudden nakedness frightened the audience), or at the end of the film, she quietly revealed that she had been a lover with the artist, although all of this was brushed up by the author in a very relaxed and high tone. Journalists' neutral ethics must be maintained, don't they? But obviously, this could be mistaken for a lack of emotion, or a certain act of fascination with form, but let's keep some distance from these characters and keep some secrets, and Anderson slowly continues to show for the rest of the day, perhaps this critic standing alone on the podium, who is not discussing art, but reminiscing about the lost time. The most touching scene in the chapter: Tony Revololi ,the protagonist of The Grand Budapest Hotel), who plays Rosenthaler in his youth, sits in his cell, when suddenly Benicio del Toro, dressed in a larger costume, comes in and exchanges places with the young man, who hands him the dog tag hanging around his neck.
If in the previous chapter there is a conscious physical distance between the writer and the characters, the subsequent Treatise on the Revision of a Manifesto completely reverses this ethical boundary—chalmed and McDormand's brief lover relationship is more or less directly revealed, and we see the latter writing this article among the young leader's humble maid—the taboo being broken. But McDormand plays a stubborn writer who, having been single for many years, has no interest in matchmaking, and it is difficult to say whether her feelings for young revolutionaries are just derivatives of her own 10,000-word writing, but at the same time, she still hangs on her neutrality, just as the "chess revolution" weird scene scheduling: under a bridge there are winding barricades and barricades, a chess piece walking through the protester's sign, through the riot police horn and telegraph machine, passed into the ear of the mayor's secretary. Then after her high heels were dragged by the high heels dispatched by the push track camera, through the rows of filing cabinets, to the mayor's desk... Layer after layer of planning, problems and designs, how bureaucratic, is this a kind of self-deceptive self-anesthesia? In any case, what Wes Anderson is trying to deconstruct is the "May Storm", but the ending and afterword of this "storm" seems to be somewhat vague now, it seems to have come to an abrupt end, there is not much substantive work, everyone is discussing it, but few people really know what they are talking about. Anderson and the author of the article have similarly chosen to have reservations about the "May Storm" as politics – throughout the "article", we hear a lot (is pop music reactionary?). Do you want to oppose conscription? Only to hear any part of Chalmed's so-called revolutionary manifesto, which was either interrupted for various reasons or hidden in the girl's silent reading of "uh-uh-
Obviously, Anderson has a state of wanting to talk about the complexity behind political movements, and he is more interested in the art that revolves around politics, in French cinema from 1966 to 1973 during the "post-New Wave" period, from Godard's "Men and Women" to "The Chinese Girl" and a series of politicized works, to philippe Garrell or Marcel Hannon's experimental films after the "May Storm", to Levitte's "Out" after the 1970s. Like Eustash's Mother and Prostitute, these works also fail to really discuss political significance, but they undoubtedly shape the emotional journeys that belong to the younger generation—in these films we see encounters and assemblages belonging to the young, love and friendship, and strife and separation, which begin and end because of the "May Storm"; it can be said that it is about the collective, it is about loneliness, or that everything about the collective, and ultimately toward loneliness. Rivitt's 13-hour "Out" was filmed two years later, in 1970, when Jean-Pierre Lyod, a street gangster who wanted to become a journalist, was turned away by the French Evening News, and then, by some coincidence, he strayed into the planning scene of an underground magazine gang and became involved in the suspected conspiracy of a Balzac-style secret society, and the grand goals of these conspiracies and associations could not be reached by anyone... Returning to Anderson's description of the movement, we clearly see another parallel, a parallel to the concept of "collective." In this "love letter" about the print media, Anderson seems to have deliberately ignored most of the stories about the editorial board itself, and the film is not willing to spend too much ink to present the behind-the-scenes scenes of the editors when creating the magazine, Anderson only shows the text itself, the work/article itself is the key, and the different viewing laws of classical and modern are torn madly here, but can't we see the existence of this collective from the various strange noises and sophistry of the "editors" of the "Chess Revolution"? And love, which, in dealing with the demise of their political ideals, always seems to return to the love and relationships of young men and women, especially the feelings of love triangles (Erstash), where Anderson sees something — we don't understand revolution, but we see passion, otherwise why mix the chemistry of tear gas with real tears? The most beautiful thing in this chapter is that when we finally came close to reading the revised part of the "Manifesto", all we read was a love letter left by the young leader for the two women, in the beautiful man-made moonlight and the slow-motion silhouettes of men and women on motorcycles, "the last part is completely illegible because the handwriting is too sloppy." ”
Stills from "The French Pie"
The third main story of "French Mission", "Inspector Police Station's Private Kitchen", is perhaps the saddest story in the whole film, the story of a truly lonely man: originally just going to the police station to visit a legendary chef, the author is involved in a war between gangsters and police, and finally through the chef's ingenuity, they rescue the sheriff's kidnapped adopted son. But equally, the suspected sentimental emotions are wrapped in a lot of forms of protection, the secrets are transmitted only in the most secret way, the Morse code-like secrets, in the dark of the night, with the shooting and screaming that form a strange music, Anderson is about to unveil the darkest corners of the city, but also comic-style, "Don't cry", because the editor-in-chief once said. Here, all those third-person, formal, animated, "neutral", fetishistic, collective illusions are broken in turn, but together they form the whole orchestra, showing these techniques of hiding loneliness, which is the way to show loneliness itself. In the author's view, that is, the speed at which he repeats the text, sitting in the interview table, since he has spoken harshly in front of him, he must read the whole article paragraph by paragraph, evenly and full of breath, and there must be a smoothness in the tone, like drinking the velvety cocktail of the head chef floating in the cup, or like Orson Wells reciting in "Macbeth", to detach from emotion, but absolutely confident to read, we must feel a professional, a precision, And the secret behind this, we can only spy on the leopard. Jeffrey White's character is clearly the embodiment of James Baldwin, and here, once again, Anderson revolves the story around "police society"—thinking of the corrupt prison in the first story, the tear gas and riot police in the second story, which is no accident, and in an instant, some kind of conflict is awakened: "Ennui" is not a candy house, nor is it a macaron-hued paradise, the truth of the dollhouse, as Owen Wilson said in his travelogue, is the fear of a little boy when he hears gunshots in the distance in the dark, But his unique rebellious psychology has the ability to turn these into games, dangerous but exciting games.
Hence the long shot of White walking alone through the labyrinthine police headquarters building, through "cubicles", where he ends up lost in the darkness and sees only a small closed chamber (called the "chicken coop" in the film), and William Dafoe's small head with round-rimmed glasses suddenly pops out of the light, like a small puppet, and the theme of "siege" is revealed in space. But after a series of tense narratives, Anderson converts the tone into flashbacks, a 180-degree turn, this time sitting in the "chicken coop" becoming our future writer (arrested for "wrong" love), and standing in front of this cage becomes his future employer. The most beautiful moment, the most serious moment—Mr. Editor-in-Chief reviewed White's resume and asked him to write a three-hundred-word book review quickly, and suddenly uttered the line: "Try to make others see that you wrote it on purpose." The mystery was revealed, and it turned out that there was an author behind all the noise, all the group portraits, and he could only be alone in a lonely small room to complete his words, and the layers of sadness were hidden, but there was also style - he hoped to be dug out of the "authorship" by future generations. In the vivid talk of the African-American writer, we realize that this absurd event actually has little to do with him, the crazy gunfight and fight between the police station and the gang, the writer just happened to appear on the scene and recorded it truthfully, but why everything happened, he is not clear after all; and the other is only an outsider after all, is not the head chef of Naskafiyer who saved the little boy's life and bravely took the poison he developed? And the gang members who are shown one by one in another push-track shot, they are all fixed in their own "cubicles", these characters are in the middle of the whirlpool of events, but they are also their bystanders, and the only dialogue between the writer and the chef, our writer almost deleted it from the manuscript on the grounds of "too sad". So we might say that the reason why a writer has a computer-like memory is not because he can only accompany his own words, repeating it all the time, muttering to himself... These shots float throughout the film: White weeps silently in the "chicken coop"; the muse walks slowly through the ten slate paintings in slow motion, as for the "she" in the painting, hidden in the ink splashed by the painter; the two actors silently exchange positions; the boy locked in the cubicle and the blue-eyed girl sitting outside; the writer who writes with his back to the camera, and the editor-in-chief sitting two meters away reading his latest article; the one who is surrounded by his own mysterious ritual in the kitchen; the one who hides in the bathtub... White quickly recalls his sad moments and quickly returns to his performance: "At the same time...", Anderson is a creator, and all he can do is turn all this loneliness into a creative force, a form of power, and everything into a variation of tone.
(This article is a revision of the author's film review published on Douban, "Defending the French Special")
Editor-in-Charge: Wu Qin