Wen 丨 West Parker
The 13 new films in the May 1st show are being screened in theaters, the box office war is inseparable, and the word-of-mouth war is also bloody.
Just when the audience was hesitant to go to the theater to see which movie, an obscure Spanish drama suddenly reached the second place in the Douban real-time popular book video list, and with a super high score of 9.0, it became the first word-of-mouth drama in May. This is the new drama "The Best of Innocence" directed by Spanish suspense director Oriol Paolo.
The Best of Innocence
"The Best of Innocence" is a Spanish series produced by Netflix, an eight-episode miniseries that tells a complete story and can also be seen as an eight-hour long movie.
The story unfolds in many ways, and Matt is sentenced to four years in prison for accidentally killing the boy Danny at a party. After being released from prison, he met Olivia, a woman who had a one-night stand, and married her, and Olivia soon became pregnant. One day, Olivia is on a business trip to Berlin, but Matt receives a video on her phone of Olivia sleeping from a strange man. Matt is also threatened with death by a stranger, and he doesn't know if it all started because of his past in prison.
Meanwhile, The Nun Maria committed suicide by jumping from a building in the convent, and the police officer Lorena is ordered to investigate and discovers that Maria is actually a false identity. However, such a mediocre suicide case was closely watched by the special case team and ordered her to abandon the investigation. Lorena, who insists on investigating, discovers that the last phone call Maria received was actually made by Matt...
Although Spanish dramas have little domestic fan attention, the director of this work is oriol Paul, a popular fried chicken that everyone in today's film fan circles knows.
Oriole Paul
Born in 1975, the director has swept a wave of Spanish suspense films around the world with three works: "The Invisible Guest", "Mirage" and "The Mystery of the Female Corpse". His works rely on extremely solid scripts, as well as reversals and reversals of super brain holes, to create a strong sense of decryption for the audience. These films have also been remade in multiple languages and entered the markets of different countries.
For example, "The Mystery of the Female Corpse" has an Indian version and a Korean version, and "The Invisible Guest" has also been filmed as an Indian and Italian version. The Korean version of "Confessions of the Invisible Guest" will also be released this year. Paul's success has led to a wave of Spanish suspense films, including "The End of the Tunnel", "Train Travel", "Family Grudge" and other works have also become the favorite of many genre film lovers, making Spanish god films completely out of the circle.
"Invisible Guest" "Invisible Guest"
It may be that I gradually discovered that the two-hour film could no longer exert its carefully laid out suspense and narrative ambitions. Paul set his sights on miniseries this year, with screenwriters directing his first episodic work. This drama has also become another blockbuster Spanish drama after "Narcos", "Banknote House" and "Famous School Storm", and once again successfully promoted small language content to the world.
In addition, the show once again brings together the male and female protagonists of "The Invisible Guest", Mario Casas and Ana Wagner, and the key dead boy in both works is called "Danny". It also makes Paul's two works have a connection in the dark.
"The Best of Innocence" is rigorously structured, the story is detailed, the layers are clear, each character has a history and extremely strong motivations, and the entire series is interlocked, which can be called a model for the play.
At the beginning of each episode, Paul uses a second-person narration to tell the story of a major character's past, how he was involved in the dispute, and what role he played in it. Eight characters, each of whom actually only sees a small side of the story, and each episode of targeted narration and complementing the character story allows the audience to gradually know the whole picture of the matter in the big web that Paul has woven.
The central characters in episodes one or two, namely the male and female protagonists Matt and Lorena, are the only two of the eight protagonists in the entire series who have nothing directly related to the core events. From their point of view, the audience can enter the whole story from a completely unknown point of view.
The plot begins with two eerie events, one is the inexplicable "cheating" of the newlywed wife, and the other is the nun's unprovoked suicide. Two seemingly unrelated events, which finally intersect at the end of the second episode, suggest that the viewer is only part of a larger conspiracy. This time, Paul chose to use the full two episodes to build up his suspense.
As the show's official poster suggests, four hands without bodies hold guns, necklaces, videotapes, and short videos on their phones. The representatives of McGuffin in these events symbolize different suspense and connect the whole story.
Poster of The Best of Innocence
The gun represents crime, the necklace represents affection, the video represents extortion, and the short video in the mobile phone represents betrayal, which is also the beginning of suspense. However, for fans of suspense dramas, especially Paul's hardcore fans, the biggest MacGuffin of this drama is actually the "truth" that cannot be touched and cannot be seen.
In fact, in the first two episodes, the wife cheats and the nun commits suicide, and there is no crime in it, and there is no case to solve. But from the first moment the audience enters the plot, they are looking for clues to the "truth". In the desire to cover up again and again, slowly approaching, and finally reaching the ultimate goal of decryption.
"The Best of Innocence" does not raise a definite "who is the murderer" at the beginning, as "Twin Peaks" or "Murder" does, but only relies on various details to tell the audience, "All this is fraudulent"! And where the "deception" is, it is McGuffin who attracts the audience to continue to follow the drama.
In other words, after having the presets of "The Invisible Guest" and "Mirage", the audience is actually expecting the final reversal, and only with such a reversal can their expectations be satisfied. Paul, as a master of suspense, uses this MacGuffin more purely in the series.
Each episode solves a small problem, just when the audience feels that they have spied the whole plot, they will throw a new suspense at the end, and finally accumulate into a big reversal. Until the last minute of the last episode, it is still reversed. By relying on the chapters between episodes, Paul is doing what maximizes suspense.
Compared with the super reversal of the last scene of "The Invisible Guest", it directly subverts the audience's cognition. The reversal of "The Best of Innocence" is much softer, completely relying on different character perspectives to bring out, and there are not too many surprises and surprises, but what really amazes the series is that it digs deep into the characters, making the whole story incomparably complicated and huge.
In the play, these things that happen before the story takes place, called "character history" or "character biography", are the details of the characters that the screenwriter and actors must master when making the script to construct the characters. For example, the "Zhang Songwen's "Sweeping Black Showdown" video, which is very popular on social media in the May Day file, is the actor Zhang Songwen's completion of his previous history of playing a role in the movie "Sweeping Black".
In most films, the prehistory forms the character's personality and mode of doing things, but it does not really appear in the main film, and it does not directly interfere with the plot. But "The Best of Innocence" chooses another way, that is, these previous histories and interrogations, and the past of the characters is also an important part of the story, sometimes even more important than the present. What we complete when watching the film is actually the puzzle of the past.
As film noir often shows, you can never escape your past, and the past will eventually find you, which is the core of the series. The two events in the first two episodes are actually the final consequences of years of enmity and feud hidden under the iceberg, and the real story actually happened before all this.
As the story progresses, we begin to uncover the past of Maria and Oliveira, and find that they are the core of the whole event, and all the suspense and conspiracy begin when these two girls who were prostitutes help each other, escape the control of pimps, and hide their names.
At the same time, such a deeply buried history also leads to a deeper problem in the play, the suspense comes from deception and distrust, then the ultimate distrust is the distrust of the family and the closest relationship. This is also the biggest "suspense" that the choreographer emphasizes in this play, which is actually the "suspiciousness" of the other half.
In the play, Olivia deceives Matt, hiding her entire past, causing a series of events to take place. Detective Theo of the Special Case Team, in order to save his family, will stop at nothing to pursue the video. Kimmi is convinced of her gay friend Kandia, but eventually breaks down after being betrayed and launches the most terrible revenge. The parents of the dead boy, Danny, each hid their own secrets until the last shot was scattered.
The series uses "Innocence" as the title, and the final foothold is actually that everyone is guilty. Theo can't control her desires; Olivia betrays her friends; Kimmi is blinded by revenge; and even impartial law enforcement like Lorena eventually has to face the tragic end of another girl like herself who loses her father. Matt, who has experienced misunderstandings, prejudices, and wanted people, also shows his past guilt in the last-minute reversal.
As the lines in the film suggest, the people who oppose Matt do not have a good ending, and the most "innocent" person is the most ruthless character in the whole series. It is also with this kind of "human nature is inherently evil" premise that there is the soil that constitutes the suspense drama we love, and from this point of view, "The Best of Innocence" truly returns to the origin of the suspense genre.