本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛I'm Not There by Todd Haynes
Bob Dylan – icon, musical genius, poet, voice of a generation – is the subject of a second major film in two years. Whereas Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home was a conventional – albeit monumental – documentary, Todd Haynes’s remarkable revisiting of Dylan’s career is a fictional re-imagining of the great troubadour’s life. This dazzling and dizzying traversal of one of the most elusive and gifted songwriters of a generation follows Dylan’s path from callow youth to superstar extraordinaire. Never comfortable playing one role in his life, Dylan assumed multiple personalities. Haynes fully understands the chameleon-like nature of his subject, and has made a lyrical, poetic, highly stylized portrait of a man determined to possess his own identity and not let anyone – media, public, industry – control that image.
The film begins with the famous motorcycle accident in 1966 and from this defining moment moves effortlessly backward and forward through the most seminal moments in Dylan’s life. The film’s great genius and its overarching conceit is having Dylan played by six different actors. As a young boy (Marcus Carl Franklin), Dylan is black, setting out under the name Woody Guthrie to meet the great folk artist as he lies sick in hospital. Already we are dealing with the conscious invention of a personality. Haynes goes on to highlight key episodes in the singer’s fabled career, and Dylan assumes many personas and names: the endlessly touring, womanizing Robbie (Heath Ledger); the folk idol Jack (Christian Bale), who reinvents himself as an evangelist; Arthur (Ben Whishaw), the youthful, defiant, chain-smoking poet; Billy (Richard Gere), the famous Western outlaw; and Jude (the astonishing Cate Blanchett), the troubled, confused and androgynous rock star.
As these various strands are woven together, the film also calls upon such stellar performers as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore and David Cross to play wife, muse and a fellow poet respectively. I’m Not There succeeds brilliantly in portraying the kaleidoscopic complexity of this genius’s world. Its recreations of the well-documented iconic moments – concerts, press conferences – are juxtaposed with the filmmaker’s re-imagining of Dylan’s interior and exterior universe. In Haynes’s fabulous reshaping of his life, Dylan has found a fellow traveller.
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Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine
Two parallel stories examine contrasting sides of this idea. In the first and most dominant narrative, a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris (tenderly played by Diego Luna) leads a painfully lonely existence when not moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. One day a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) approaches him. They soon become friends and she describes a utopian retreat in the Scottish Highlands where “people like them” can gather in their second skins without the sting of society’s rebuke. When he arrives, however, the social dynamics of this celebrity-impersonator commune and the burning need to perform threaten to undermine the precarious psychological lives they maintain.
At the same time, in a kind of poetic expression of divine devotion, Herzog’s nuns prepare to meet their maker by jumping without parachutes from airplanes over Central America.
Korine is asking us to reflect on people who hold seemingly irrational beliefs, inscribing his celebrity impersonators into a long tradition of existentialist leaps of faith and the history of miracles. His take on the human condition may be far from conventional, but it certainly yields important truths about what motivates our least logical actions.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
Bob Dylan – icon, musical genius, poet, voice of a generation – is the subject of a second major film in two years. Whereas Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home was a conventional – albeit monumental – documentary, Todd Haynes’s remarkable revisiting of Dylan’s career is a fictional re-imagining of the great troubadour’s life. This dazzling and dizzying traversal of one of the most elusive and gifted songwriters of a generation follows Dylan’s path from callow youth to superstar extraordinaire. Never comfortable playing one role in his life, Dylan assumed multiple personalities. Haynes fully understands the chameleon-like nature of his subject, and has made a lyrical, poetic, highly stylized portrait of a man determined to possess his own identity and not let anyone – media, public, industry – control that image.
The film begins with the famous motorcycle accident in 1966 and from this defining moment moves effortlessly backward and forward through the most seminal moments in Dylan’s life. The film’s great genius and its overarching conceit is having Dylan played by six different actors. As a young boy (Marcus Carl Franklin), Dylan is black, setting out under the name Woody Guthrie to meet the great folk artist as he lies sick in hospital. Already we are dealing with the conscious invention of a personality. Haynes goes on to highlight key episodes in the singer’s fabled career, and Dylan assumes many personas and names: the endlessly touring, womanizing Robbie (Heath Ledger); the folk idol Jack (Christian Bale), who reinvents himself as an evangelist; Arthur (Ben Whishaw), the youthful, defiant, chain-smoking poet; Billy (Richard Gere), the famous Western outlaw; and Jude (the astonishing Cate Blanchett), the troubled, confused and androgynous rock star.
As these various strands are woven together, the film also calls upon such stellar performers as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore and David Cross to play wife, muse and a fellow poet respectively. I’m Not There succeeds brilliantly in portraying the kaleidoscopic complexity of this genius’s world. Its recreations of the well-documented iconic moments – concerts, press conferences – are juxtaposed with the filmmaker’s re-imagining of Dylan’s interior and exterior universe. In Haynes’s fabulous reshaping of his life, Dylan has found a fellow traveller.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine
Two parallel stories examine contrasting sides of this idea. In the first and most dominant narrative, a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris (tenderly played by Diego Luna) leads a painfully lonely existence when not moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. One day a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) approaches him. They soon become friends and she describes a utopian retreat in the Scottish Highlands where “people like them” can gather in their second skins without the sting of society’s rebuke. When he arrives, however, the social dynamics of this celebrity-impersonator commune and the burning need to perform threaten to undermine the precarious psychological lives they maintain.
At the same time, in a kind of poetic expression of divine devotion, Herzog’s nuns prepare to meet their maker by jumping without parachutes from airplanes over Central America.
Korine is asking us to reflect on people who hold seemingly irrational beliefs, inscribing his celebrity impersonators into a long tradition of existentialist leaps of faith and the history of miracles. His take on the human condition may be far from conventional, but it certainly yields important truths about what motivates our least logical actions.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net