In Paris, France, a single mother takes care of her son and daughter alone. She lives in the suburbs but works in the city center. She had to get up early and stay up until late at night to catch the train every day. Before the movie ended, she was not crazy yet, but the audience was already crazy!
"Full Time" is a French film that has recently attracted attention in the international film community. Everything conveyed in the film is the result of careful design by the creator. If you are as breathless as me when watching it, it is because the director uses audio-visual language to strangle the audience's neck, allowing the audience to follow the heroine in an immersive run. , unable to breathe.
"Mom is Superman" plus "Extreme Challenge"
At the beginning of the film, the heroine Julie appears with a huge close-up of her face, and the alarm interrupts her deep sleep. After the two shots, the audio and video began to narrate separately. The sound source comes from the morning news broadcast on the radio, describing the traffic conditions during the morning rush hour in Paris. At the same time, a nervous high-frequency melody is faintly lining the screen, participating in shaping the characters. The opening shot of the film is cut to pieces, showing the anxiety, urgency and multi-tasking ability of a single mother in the early morning hours. She had to make breakfast for the children, pay attention to the traffic conditions, chat with her daughter, and prepare a lunch box for herself. One scene outputs a large amount of information and captures the hustle and bustle of the protagonist's life in an orderly manner. The narrative efficiency is very high.
She entrusted the two children to the care of the neighbor's wife. It was still dark at this time; she ran with all her strength and jumped on the train at the last moment when it was about to close. However, something went wrong with the train halfway, so she took a bus instead. After getting off the bus, she changed to rail transit and finally arrived at the station. Her job is the foreman of the cleaning department at a five-star hotel in the city center. It is an intensive labor that counts against every second and leaves no room for false claims. The director very patiently shows the work content of the heroine, allowing the audience to see that the heroine is not only rushing to and from get off work, but also the work itself. The design of this career deepens the character's anxiety.
In order to maximize this anxiety, the director also designed a difficult living situation for the character: the ex-husband is an unreliable man, defaults on alimony, the loan for the family house has been paid out, and the bank keeps calling to urge him. Debt, my youngest son has a birthday on the weekend, so he’s a mother I have to prepare a birthday gift for him in my busy schedule...
It's just the first paragraph of the film. The director shows in detail the heroine's nervousness throughout the whole day. At this time, the drama intensifies, the strike movement in Paris begins, and people's lives It has been severely affected, with traffic bearing the brunt. The audience gradually felt suffocated. This movie is "Mom is Superman" plus "Extreme Challenge"!
Three major techniques of audio-visual language to oppress the audience
Starting from the first scene, the director used a lot of medium and close shots to shoot single shots of the heroine, so that the camera was always stuck on the character's chest or above. If the audience is watching in a theater, this scene will make the heroine's face very big, which is one of the sources of oppression. Of course, this also tests the actor's performance. The actress must express her expressions, recite her lines, and be in a good mood, but she cannot have too much movement above her chest. If the movement is slightly larger, the camera may lose focus and she will have to start over. The more nervous the heroine is in the play and the greater the crisis, the smaller the scene gap will be. There was a scene in which she was almost fired by her supervisor for leaving her post without permission. The director pushed the scene to a close-up to emphasize the protagonist's desperate move. In another scene, the heroine is revealed to be dishonest by the interviewer when interviewing for a new job, and Jingbie is once again pushed to a close-up. Even if the audience does not notice the use of shooting techniques, they will be instinctively affected by the audio-visual language.
The second technique at the audio-visual language level is documentary continuous tracking combined with fractured editing. Follow forward, follow backward, follow sideways, move the camera to the street, and use a seemingly rough texture to simulate the reality of life. Close-up tracking shots will amplify the movement of characters within the frame, which is another reason why the audience feels oppressed.The shots of this film are relatively fragmented, the shot duration is short, and the number of shots is definitely larger than that of ordinary films. The narrative rhythm is emphasized. This shooting and editing method is the continuation of a group of French film production techniques in the 1990s. . There will be certain breaks in the editing, and there will be jumps between scenes, but there will not be too much interference or tampering with time and space, and the watchability will be taken care of.
The last skill is of course music, which is another important source of the audience's sense of oppression. Halfway through the movie, I couldn't breathe because of the anxiety caused by empathizing with the heroine . The director chose electronic music, a high-frequency, mechanical repetitive melody that constantly stimulates the audience's auditory nerves, tortures the audience, and makes us involuntarily follow the protagonist. The music creates the feeling of hurried footsteps, the feeling of pounding heartbeat, and the feeling of countdown to a time bomb.
Throughout the work, this woman is on the edge of a cliff, her life hanging by a thread. She has to rush, is exhausted from work, has to take care of her baby after get off work, not only has to deal with the neighbor's wife, but also has to deal with the workers' strike movement, buy gifts for her baby, move heavy objects, install a trampoline, hold a birthday party, and make phone calls despite her busy schedule. Despite scolding her ex-husband, she still had time to stay up late preparing interview questions and interviewing for a new job. The music matched the ambition of the heroine, running wildly on the streets of Paris, and the director captured the words "exhausted from running".
Upgraded version of Nora and upgraded version of the monster
If in 1998 Tom Tykwer 's " Fast Lola " was still a woman saving a man, then in "Full Time", this "Swift Nora" seems to have No need for men anymore.
In 1879, when human civilization entered "modern times", there was a famous woman in drama literature who ran away from home. Her name was Nora. 143 years ago, Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama in Norway, wrote "A Doll's House". In that era when the patriarchal society deeply oppressed women, Nora's escape It caused an uproar. The great teacher Engels said that Nora was a representative of "Norwegian petty bourgeois women" with free will and independent spirit. It was Nora who was the first to shout the "Declaration of Independence" for bourgeois housewives to demand liberation.
Where did Nora go? She traveled around the world for more than a century. In the 2014 Japanese film "Paper Moon", the heroine Umezawa Rika played by Rie Miyazawa is also a Nora. She left home and entered the workplace. Soon, she saw clearly capitalism The truth about the huge bubble of financial games. At the end of the film, this woman who ran away from her family strengthened her spiritual beliefs and once again ran away from society, an enlarged version of her "home". Therefore, until 2014, Nora's whereabouts after running away was still an unsolved case.
Nowadays, the heroine in "Full Time" is another French upgraded version "Nora". Compared to the previous Noras, this version of Nora seems to be stronger and more independent. The heroine in the film seems to have endless energy in her small body. Although the film does not explain it directly, you can feel the strength of this woman from the details. She is courageous, domineering, and independent. You may even secretly guess that her ex-husband It was probably because he couldn't stand her so much that the two of them couldn't get along. Even though her family was in trouble, she still maxed out her credit card because she had to dress up for an interview. She obviously didn't have the ability to raise two children by herself like this, but she persisted. The most direct source of her anxiety seems to be the workers' strike in Paris. In fact, this is just an accident that triggered her crisis. The real source of her anxiety is actually her own desire. Several times in the film, she explained through lines that she could have found a job closer to home, or settled her home in the city, but she didn't want to, saying she didn't want her children to live in a doghouse. She earns a working-class salary and wants to live a middle-class life. She wants a spacious place to live in the suburbs, and she wants a backyard to hold birthday parties for her children. Of course you can say that everything is to satisfy the child, but isn't it also to satisfy herself?
The crisis of Nora who ran away in 1879 was that in the early stage of capitalism, women had no jobs and were not financially independent, so there was no possibility of survival.In 2014, "Nora" in "Paper Moon" only needs to satisfy her material desires and does not have to support a family. "Nala" who ran away in the third decade of the 21st century has education, income, ambition, and ability, and has worked hard to support a family, but it is in danger. For a century and a half, Nora has been like Ultraman fighting little monsters, constantly upgrading herself and the monsters. And this monster, today, is Nora's own inner demon. Just like, coming from infinitely expanding desires, the developed Western capitalist society in its late stage is devouring one poor Nora after another.
Under the lens of director Eric Gravel, the protagonist Julie is in such an environment: although women are no longer the dolls and slaves of their husbands, they are dolls of commodities and slaves of money. Women are no longer dispatched and controlled by men, but are dispatched and controlled by the trap of consumerism. At the end of "Full Time", the heroine received the job notice she was looking forward to, and her crisis was finally temporarily alleviated. But what next? We can already see the devastation this new job is about to bring to her and her family. Where should contemporary Noras go? This is a question that neither the director nor the audience in front of the screen can answer until the end of the movie.
Author: Chen Daixi
Editor: Guo Chaohao
