Love triangle, betrayal and infidelity, these contents are placed in this "Zu and Zhan", some people will sigh the beauty and grandeur of love when they watch it, and some people will seriously spurn the three people's violations of morality and ethics in the film.
In any case, the film's delicate treatment of feelings still arouses thousands of ripples in people's hearts, and they dare not judge the love in the film. The film is based on a literary work and is also directed by Truffaut, a leading figure in the New Wave of French cinema. With a solid foundation in literature and a strong personal touch with Director Truffaut, the film became an immortal depiction of the "threesome" theme in film history, so much so that many later films were inspired by it.
François Truffaut
"Zu and Zhan" is also known as "Jule and Jim", the name of the movie is also the name of the two male protagonists, they are very close friends. However, catherine, the heroine not mentioned in the title, is the most important character in the film, and she has a strong desire to control the two men.
From today's public perspective, the relationship between the three of them is full of blindness, infidelity, and immorality: Catherine and Zu marry and have children, while maintaining an excessively intimate relationship with Zhan, and the husband knows all this but still chooses to tolerate and share this "love" together. Catherine has always been a destabilizing factor in the relationship between the three, and she has maintained an idealized pursuit of external feelings after marrying Her ancestors. She is not in a strong dominant side in her relationship with Zhan, and she has a serious self-destructive tendency in order to get love, which eventually makes her and Zhan's life buried by Zu.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > audiovisual analysis of Zu and Zhan</h1>
Based on the solid depiction of the text novel, the film has a meticulous audiovisual design and adaptation by Director Truffaut, which makes the film full of details and metaphors.
Time in the film is not only the movement of the picture and the motivation of the story, but also the clue that secretly dominates the fate of the characters. Time always reminds the characters of their situation and changes, the huge hourglass close-ups always make people feel the spur of time behind them; the archaeological pictures that appear at the beginning and the female statues appear on the slides are also hinting at the dialectical relationship between eternity and moments; before and after the First World War, as a watershed in the film's story, it became an important catalyst to change the overall rhythm and tone of the film.
Looking at Catherine putting on her glasses and her daughter putting on her glasses, we can clearly feel the node of time: Catherine began to grow old and the next generation grew. A daughter imitating her mother rather than her father is a continuation of her mother. The director always puts Catherine as the center of the audience's line of sight and the center of the characters in the play, and the appearance of the daughter is also to continue the mother's position in the center.
The anarchists scribble on the wall at the beginning of the film: Death belongs to other people. The woman didn't have enough paint to fill in the plural form of the last word, and the man next to her slapped her and scolded: people would say that these anarchists had made spelling mistakes again. We can argue that a woman who doesn't paint him enough to write "people" amounts to murdering someone. Thinking of the later references to Zu and Catherine as "someone else", the greeting between them refers to the other person in the three. In the end, Catherine pulled the funeral, which also echoed why the man slapped the woman next to him, suggesting an act of revenge.
The years in which the war took place were smoothly navigated by the director's artistic treatment, and turned to another stage of the film. Letters full of words spread out on the pictures, and they flew out of the trenches to present the thoughts of both sides in a dynamic way. The texts of both sides also contain explanations of the war. In the harsh environment of the war, romantic feelings cannot be mentioned, and zu misses Catherine's body rather than the stirring of the soul.
The structure and rhythm of the film also seem to hint at the fate of the characters. In the first act of the film, the three people first meet and everything is full of cheerful vitality, and in the second act, it is as calm as life, and the third act is as slow as Sisyphus pushing a stone up the mountain, and finally as the vehicle rushes into the river, the stone finally falls from the mountain. The relationship and fate of the three people are like the rhythm of the whole film, from the soaring all the way to the later unsustainable, and finally falling into a rock and falling off a cliff.
It is worth mentioning the shot of the three people greeting each other in the beach house, the different positions, orientations, compositions of the three people, and the intersection of the three people's lines and lines, which are very worthy of scrutiny. In this one shot, many hidden things are revealed, that is, the complex relationship between the three people can be seen in this shot.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > ii. What is love in Zu and Zhan</h1>
The love presented in this film may not be accepted by people's moral and value judgments, but the true emotions of three of them are strongly displayed in the film, which makes people have to be moved. We may understand the face of love in usual film and television works, but for this work, after watching it, it is still in a cloud of fog. Overall, the love in this film is revealed as the personality of each character, the extreme desire for control, and the resistance of women to take over the sovereignty.
Zu is from Germany, and when he lived in France, he met Zhan, he met many people of the opposite sex, is a "friend of women", but was abandoned by the object at the beginning of the movie. He was also in a weak position in his later relationship with Catherine. He was conquered and attracted by Catherine's enigmatic temperament, his love for Catherine was unconditional, and in order to keep Catherine he could not care that she had an affair with other men.
Cham is French, he is emotionally uninhibited, and he loves Catherine and has an ambiguous relationship with Gilbert. He knew that Catherine was a free-spirited person, and when Zu asked him if he could accept marrying Catherine, he asked, "Do you think she will be the kind of good wife and mother, she is afraid that she will never be happy in the world." She is like a ghost, not a woman who can make a man have it for a long time. In fact, Cham is more similar to Catherine, both want their partners to be loyal and have another intimate relationship on the outside.
Catherine is very extraordinary from the moment she appears, she is a person full of ideals, and she hopes that her freedom will not be constrained. At first, she showed pessimism and distrust of love, but she was very eager for love, and she could not survive without love. Her intense desire for love filled her with a desire to control and wanted everyone to bow down to her. She finds herself not in a strong position in her relationship with Zhan, who is someone she can't control, so she shows an extreme side in the end.
The film has a strong feminist color, and the director put Catherine in a position of confrontation with two men, so that she also has the freedom and initiative to occupy that kind of. In the film, Catherine shows a strong will that ordinary women do not have, forming a confrontation between the forces of the sexes.
For example, the scene where the three of them walk down the street after watching the movie and discuss it. Zu and Zhan disparage women's power in their discourse, and instead take the position that Catherine is no match for Zu's tirade, she throws out a sentence of "Protest" and jumps into the cold water without hesitation. This kind of action is more powerful than any argument, and this single act makes the momentum and vitality of Catherine's character manifest from the soul.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
To borrow the words of "History of World Cinema", the entire film of "Zu and Zhan" is filled with a youthful but helpless sad atmosphere. The story of a love triangle is so delicate and moving under Truffaut's lens, and it does not fall into the cliché of the dog's blood plot, which is worthy of being an outstanding work in the New Wave.
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