Author: Ma Lixin (Professor and doctoral supervisor at the Digital Art Philosophy Research Center of Shandong Normal University)
In the past ten years, a new female director has become particularly prominent in the French film industry. With her stylized and iconic lens language, she depicts a series of magnificent and colorful images of French professional women; she opens up a unique narrative space and reveals the hidden spiritual world of women to the public. She is French auteur film director Justine Trier, who won the Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes International Film Festival and the 2024 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
“Sibyl” poster file picture
Ⅰ. From Weakness to Progress: Create an Iconic Character Image
Audiences who have watched Trier’s debut film “The Battle of Solferreno” will definitely remember its rich New Wave film style. The movie starts with a man talking and laughing while coaxing a little girl who is crying loudly, and there is an older little girl amusing herself next to her; the protagonist Leticia flashes across the camera from time to time. Smoking a cigarette while hurriedly packing things in the room, these scenes are accompanied by fast-moving and switching shots. Isn’t this the iconic documentary style of New Wave cinema? The only difference is that the typical characters here are no longer marginalized figures or people at the bottom of society, but French career women like Leticia. However, if you have just watched Terry’s new film “The Fall”, which is currently being released in domestic theaters, you will find that this movie is not only clearly far away from the New Wave style, but also has the flavor of a Hollywood type movie. Of course, one thing remains consistent, and that is the image of professional women and their distinct female consciousness. This is Trier’s film, which represents what the industry calls “French New New Wave Cinema.”
If the New Wave films that emerged in France in the 1950s and 1960s were mainly characterized by underlying narrative, subjective expression and documentary style, then the current French New Wave films represented by Triet films are first of all characterized by the depiction of complex and diverse people. The image of a professional woman is eye-catching. Among the series of images of French professional women portrayed by Triet, Leticia is the first to take the lead. This is an image of a woman in multiple social relationships such as family, workplace and love. As a mother, she needs to take care of two young girls; as a reporter, she fights on the front line of news reports; as a single woman, she bravely pursues her love. However, the reality is so cruel. Her ex-husband has violent tendencies, and every visit he has to the children makes her uneasy, and many conflicts arise from this, but we see that she always firmly defends her rights. In Solferreno Street, which was crowded with people and had a strong smell of gunpowder, she withstood all kinds of pressure and reported on the spot calmly and calmly at the forefront of the election. Her outstanding professionalism left us in awe. When the smoke cleared, she took a break from her busy schedule to enjoy the sweet love given by her pursuer. This is the brave and independent, tired and happy Leticia, the first female flower that Triye presented to the audience.
Victoria, the protagonist of the movie “Victoria”, is the second image of a professional woman portrayed by Terry Ye. She is a practicing lawyer who strives for personal liberation and workplace competition. In court, she was thoughtful and eloquent. She defended the client in danger with her extraordinary wisdom and silenced the male lawyer, winning rounds of applause from the judge and the audience. She also had her own troubles. Her agent, Gonzalez, made her private novels public to the public without permission. As a plaintiff, she faced the agent’s strong arguments in court but was powerless, and in the end she had to settle. But she once turned a blind eye to her admirer Sam, who loved her deeply, cared for her, and regarded her as a professional mentor, and she didn’t wake up until she was about to lose him.
“Victoria” stills file pictures
Compared with Leticia and Victoria, the character of Sybil (the protagonist of the movie “Sybil”) is more complex. She was once a writer with rich imagination and strong creativity. She sought help from psychoanalytic treatment due to emotional entanglements with her boyfriend Gabe. She actually became a professional psychoanalyst because of this special experience. She saved many patients, but these achievements still could not suppress her literary dream. Especially when she met the new patient Margo, the drama that happened to the actress inspired her stronger desire to create. For this reason, she did not follow the advice of the professional doctor and deeply intervened in Marge’s professional and emotional life with an indescribable mentality in order to obtain the life experience needed for literary creation. In the process, Sybil endured dual pressure and torture on and off the screen, and finally completed the mental transformation of a writer and a doctor.
Perhaps Trier has a special liking for the professional identity of a female writer. Her new work “The Falling Trial” depicts the image of Sandra, a professional female writer who is deeply involved in the vortex of murder. However, compared to Sybil and other heroines, Sandra has more perseverance and wisdom in dealing with things. In the new narrative framework preset by Trier, first of all, Sandra is a successful writer, which is highlighted in two dimensions: first, she has a higher reputation and a larger audience; second, she has a higher reputation and a larger audience; She was more outstanding and successful than her husband, who was also a writer, so much so that this excellence and success probably led to the latter’s tragedy. Secondly, Sandra showed a high degree of control and calmness after her husband’s accident. She did not panic like other women. Instead, she comforted her son and called the police to deal with the aftermath. Finally, and most importantly, in many court trials, when faced with unfavorable accusations, she was always able to appeal and defend herself with strong rationality and a high degree of self-confidence, and she never made any mistakes. Even during the most difficult moment, when her son asked her to stay overnight before his final court hearing, she accommodated her son with great tolerance and understanding. From here we can see the excellence of a successful professional woman – if Sandra complains about her son because of this, she is likely to put herself in an even more unfavorable court predicament. Even in the emotional moment of being finally acquitted by the court, Sandra remained calm and graceful.
Examined individually, the heroines created by Triye have very different personalities, but they also share some common inner character traits. They are both strong men in the workplace and have won proud social status through their own efforts; they are all full of love for their children and do everything possible to create the most favorable growth environment for them; they all firmly pursue and defend themselves. The independence, freedom and rights brought to the audience are positive, enterprising, healthy and optimistic spiritual power. This is a prominent feature that makes the current French New New Wave films completely different from the New Wave films.
Justin Trier file photo
Ⅱ. From family to workplace: creating an iconic narrative space
To portray the image of a professional woman with a distinctive personality, of course, it is inseparable from the two narrative spaces of family and workplace. However, it is a well-known common sense that both the family and the workplace are banal environments that are neither easy to produce visual spectacle effects nor dramatic for film art, because these places are too familiar to us. However, when we watch Trier’s movies, we never feel dull. Not only that, we understand the artistic images of Sandra, Sybil, Victoria and Leticia precisely from these familiar scenes. Charming style.
This should first be attributed to her unconventional design of family and workplace environments. Let’s first look at how she handles her family environment. The beginning of “The Battle of Solferreno” is just a scene where the protagonist wakes up in the morning and prepares to rush to Solferreno Street for live reporting. But why is this narrative paragraph filled with the sounds of children crying so firmly attracting the audience and making it so popular? Do you feel nervous? Arthur, who is in the center of the camera, is holding the little girl while laughing and letting the child kiss him. The little girl he is holding is crying loudly and really trying to kiss him. The little girl next to him is holding her hand Holding a toy inside, his eyes were attracted by his sister’s movements of kissing Arthur. This was a dramatic scene full of life. It was accurately captured by Terry’s lens and presented vividly in front of the audience, which immediately created a feeling of excitement. Strong aesthetic effect of spectacle. Look again at the opening of “Judgment of the Fall” – the protagonist Sandra is being interviewed by an admirer at home. Sandra’s conversation with the interviewer was completely contrary to the normal interview order. Here, Sandra transformed into an interviewer, and the interviewer became the interviewee, which made the interviewer feel deeply uncomfortable. At the same time, a deafening piano sound like metal friction sounded upstairs, and Repeated over and over again, this not only caused serious obstacles to the interview, but also brought an ominous omen to the audience. Seeing this, the audience could not help but guess the story that was about to happen. In this way, an ordinary family scene was transformed into an aesthetic space with dramatic tension by Triye.
If Triet’s family rhetoric focuses on creating a certain spectacle effect, then the workplace in her films becomes the best stage to peek into the heroine’s hidden spiritual world. In Solferreno Street, which was crowded with voters, Leticia faced Vincent’s wanton interference and still reported on the spot calmly. We will immediately have a better understanding of Leticia’s heart, because her This mature and steady workplace image is completely different from the strong, casual, and uninhibited Leticia she displayed at home. This is what Terry is so good at. She knows that the more high-pressure the environment, the more likely it is that the protagonist will be forced to reveal his most secret personality.
“The Battle of Solferreno” movie poster file photo
In this regard, she believes that there is no narrative space that is more conducive to deeply revealing the hidden spiritual world of women and more conducive to fully displaying the true character of the characters than the courtroom. So, we saw that it was in the court hearing Victoria’s privacy infringement case that Victoria, as the plaintiff, had to defend her right to privacy when faced with the questioning of the defendant, her agent Gonzalez and her lawyer. Telling the judge her privacy is very embarrassing for a professional woman with a strong self-esteem.
In the same sense, Sandra undergoes a similar mental purgatory as Victoria. We saw that at the beginning of the trial, Sandra was still able to deal with the murder accusation made by the prosecutor’s lawyer relatively calmly, because she was confident that the evidence at the scene would be enough to prove her innocence. However, as the prosecutor’s lawyer’s increasingly aggressive but legal cross-examination, her suspicion of murder suddenly increased. In this case, she was forced to reluctantly tell the judge some of her highly private emotional past with her husband, and the further she went on, the more personal details she had to reveal, and the consequences that arose. The more she talked about the conflicts she had with her husband, the more unfavorable the trial situation seemed to be for her. It is the unique narrative space of the courtroom that comprehensively displays the most secret spiritual world and the most complex and three-dimensional thoughts and characters of the heroines, which greatly satisfies the audience’s curiosity about human nature.
It is in this way that Trier transforms ordinary real-life environments such as family and workplace into highly dramatic aesthetic spaces, which perfectly interprets the rich, complex and diverse social character of French professional women.
Ⅲ. From lens to props: building an iconic image language
If every film director’s aesthetic style has more or less its own characteristics, then auteur film directors are more prominent in this aspect. Triet, an explorer of French New New Wave cinema, is no exception.
Trier’s most iconic lens language is undoubtedly her original and tried-and-tested psychological lens. The so-called psychological shot is not a dream scene or a memory shot as a flashback in a movie in the general sense, nor is it the stream of consciousness shot pioneered by Bergman, the father of modern philosophical films, but a shot of Terry inspired by Hitchcock’s movies. , exploring and constructing a logical lens in film practice that is in parallel with and serves the current narrative lens.
For example, “Victoria”, this film unfolds the narrative around Victoria’s defense of Vincent’s sexual harassment case. We saw that at the key trial scene, when Victoria was fully prepared to defend Vincent righteously in court, the scene alternated with trial scenes in which she, as the plaintiff, accused her agent Gonzalez of violating her privacy rights. . In the camera, she sits on the plaintiff’s table and appears helpless in the face of Gonzalez’s witty defense, which is in sharp contrast to the scene where she defended Vincent. These two sets of shots are presented crosswise and advance in parallel. It should be pointed out that the real-life scenes corresponding to the two sets of shots were not synchronized, and the trial plot of her accusation against Gonzalez came first. This group of antecedent shots implanted in the current narrative shot sequence is not Victoria’s imagination or memory in the current shot, nor is it a subjective shot or objective shot in the general sense, but is an important narrative device inserted by the director according to a specific narrative logic. Yes, but from the viewing effect, it looks very much like the protagonist’s current psychological state. The reason why Trier created such a logical lens is obviously to highlight the particularity of the workplace environment in which the protagonist lives and to portray Victoria’s complex character in a more three-dimensional way.
Beginning with Victoria, this emphatic, logical shot would appear repeatedly in Triet’s two subsequent films. For example, in “Sibyl”, when Sybil was undergoing psychoanalytic treatment for a little boy and when she was receiving psychoanalytic treatment from a male doctor, two different narrative sequences included shots of her and her boyfriend Gabe. , this is obviously not Sybil’s current recollection, but Trie’s deliberate move to emphasize the importance of Sybil and Gabe’s love to her career, which also paved the way for her subsequent willingness to take risks Deep intervention patient Margo laid the groundwork. Similar psychological shots also appear repeatedly in “Judgement of the Fall”, becoming an important aesthetic feature of Triye’s mirror language.
In addition to the psychological lens, Trier also constructed a narrative mechanism with its own characteristics. Her films are always accustomed to starting with children’s narratives. “The Battle of Solferreno” starts with two crying little girls, “Victoria” changes to two unrestrained girls, and “Sybil” presents A heartwarming scene of a pair of little girls celebrating Sybil’s birthday, and “The Fall” of a brave and strong blind boy. The plot of children in Triet’s films is deliberate in order to fully portray the healthy character of the workplace heroine. We see that these children born in special families, regardless of size, gender and physical condition, are all mentally healthy and well-rounded in their inner characters. This is obviously due to the good education and influence of the heroines.
Trier is also good at using different styles of piano music to enhance the lyricism of the film. The entire work of “The Battle of Solferreno” makes people feel tense and depressed because of the ubiquitous quarrels. Only a piano sonata played by the amateur lawyer during the quarrel between the hero and heroine greatly calmed down all the tension inside and outside the camera. People’s nervousness; in “Victoria”, as Sam leaves, Victoria suddenly becomes restless, accompanied by a harsh and low piano music, which ends abruptly with Sam’s return, highlighting It shows the importance of Sam to Victoria; in “The Fall of Judgment”, whenever the little boy Daniel is depressed, he repeatedly plays a piano piece that sounds like metal friction; “Sybil” also appears in many places like crying. Rusu Piano Concerto. Trier blended these different styles of piano music with different narrative contents, which not only greatly aroused the audience’s emotions, but also constituted a major feature of his films.
Trier’s construction of the reunion ending is also very distinctive. Most of the scenes in “Battle of Solferreno” are filled with quarrels, depression and dull atmosphere. What is unexpected is that at the end, all the conflicts between Leticia and her ex-husband are reconciled with humanity and human beauty. And gratifying. In “Victoria”, Sam has been pursuing Victoria but failed to do so, but he took a turn for the worse when he decided to give up. In “Sibyl”, out of her love for literary creation, Sybil did not hesitate to cross-border experiences, but she became addicted to alcohol and could not return home. However, her painstaking efforts were not in vain. The story ended with the publication of her work and the reunion of her family. And draw a happy ending. Sandra, who is as resolute as steel, also cleared her name in the final trial and regained her son’s trust. This kind of ending is both unexpected and reasonable. Compared with the open endings commonly used in new wave movies, it is more healing and easier to win the favor of the audience.
It should be pointed out that the images of French professional women carefully portrayed by Triet are by no means tall and stereotyped characters, and her film aesthetics are not limited to the characteristics revealed in this article. Nonetheless, Trier’s films demonstrate a distinct sense of femininity. As she emphasized in the interview: “I wanted to try to show how women hold things together, try to reveal their destinies, try to figure themselves out. I’m looking for their little flaws and the way they falter.”
“Guangming Daily” (page 13, April 25, 2024)
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责编：孙宗鹤 ]
Tags: Wave Landscape Triets Films_Guangming .com
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