Poetic Perspective Of Endless Human Life

A man and his daughter were going to a birthday party. The man squatted down to tie his shoelace for his daughter. On the empty lawn of the golf course, the pool formed an obvious diagonal line. The father and daughter at the center of the lens gradually walked away along the water mark. There was no dialogue, only movement. Two.

This is a short mirror from the new work of Roy Anderson, the Swedish director. Through the simulation and reconstruction of life, thirty scenes that seem mediocre and unrelated constitute the movie less than eighty minutes, splicing into a phase of life that can be indefinitely renewed for human existence.

All the fragments do not have a clear start and end. The history and personality of all characters are vague. The voice over these fragments comes from a woman who has never known her identity. She is like a omniscient witness. She even knows the motives and secret feelings of characters in the frame. Anderson said that the inspiration of the film came from the Arabian Nights. The fair and intelligent female voice in the film, like Sean Lou Zod, who told one thousand and one folk stories to the king, is giving audiences a reinterpretation of the world she saw.

Although the lens is always fixed, the time and space of each scene are changed. A pair of lovers can break the limit of gravity, as in the painter Chagall's paintings, flying over the city, overlooking the ruins of the post-war era; Hitler, who wants to conquer the world, walks into an office, officials are muddled, furniture furnishings are crooked; Reality and illusion exist at the same time. History is mixed with the present. There is no boundary between the sacred and the secular, the opposition is cancelled, the dramatic moment is smoothed out, and everything is reconciled in the unique aesthetic style of Anderson. Actors are like props. They lack expression. Even in public spaces such as bazaars, they only move on fixed lines and maintain a certain distance. Even if the three girls suddenly dance on the road, the customers in the side restaurant are just watching quietly.

A consistent and gray tone has strengthened the sense of alienation between people. Death often occurs in the fragments of life shown in films. Only when babies appear, can adults have a rare smile on their faces. But only young people have yearning for love. Compared with their positive appearance, the middle-aged and elderly people are more melancholy and sad. Perhaps, in nearly eight years of Anderson's view, anyone sooner or later must face up to the life of his failure, and regret and regret will not come early in his youth.

The low yield Swedish master has so far launched only 6 films, and has won the respect of the world cinema with his unique style and profound grasp of the human condition. Last year's Venice International Film Festival has won the best director award for Roy Anderson. His last work, "Han Zhi Jing Jing", won the seventy-first Golden Lion Award in Venice.

The repeated appreciation of the festival also brought doubt to him. "Endless" is the first time he uses voiceover and is the shortest in his works. Besides, it is hard to say that he is not self repeating. But the skill of a movie director can not explain a film director's laziness in creation. Like the title of the new film, the metaphysical reflection on the display of human life experience and the perception of this existence is worthy of being carried on forever. The reason why Anderson abandoned realism and chose to adhere to a formalism close to reality is that he can always inspire the infinite perception with concentrated scenes, and he can continue to explore the flashing ordinary moments to remind people who are deeply trapped in their lives and become increasingly numb.

"Endless" ends in a scene often seen in film and television works: on the unmanned Wilderness Road, a man's car has something wrong, he immediately gets off the car and opens the front cover to repair it. In other films, such accidents often lead to a series of follow-up events, and people who are in a sudden situation are inevitably emotional and confused. But Anderson's treatment was to put the camera far away and watch him fix the car, and then let the film stop. The movie, which has no close-up and telescopic lenses, did not bring the audience's distance to the characters until the end. It seems that it is not our business to remove the plight of the man, but for him, these are just another life trifles that need to be faced and endured alone.

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