Eyes Wide Shut, Part 2

The most memorable sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ was certainly the ritual orgy sequence. While it is sexually charged, and can be offensive for certain viewers, it is one of Kubrick’s most atmospheric and beautiful scenes in all his films. The only unfortunate flaw is that there some CGI-generated images were inserted into the scenes by the studio in fear of the award of a NC-17 rating. For this sequence, which I would call ‘1999: A Sex Odyssey’, it was seen through Bill’s subjective viewpoint. Through the use of a steadicam-style tracking shot and a wide-angle lens, the audience, just like Bill, was like observers when they were penetrating and exploring the dangerous world of sex.  During this sequence, all sort of sexual acts have been seen, yet what was rather ironic was these sexual ‘scenes’ were more like artifices – it would generate awe rather than any sensational emotions from the audience (and probably Bill too). The sexual acts were detached, and they were almost devoid of emotion. It would not be too ridiculous to say that these actions were almost mechanical, as if there were some ‘sex robots’ carrying out their assigned programs (see later). I can think of Lars von Trier’s recent film, ‘Nymphomaniac’, to this end. In the film, the female protagonist, Joe, had an unstoppable impulse for sex, yet she could not find any true love or relationships from any of her encounters with other men – which many of them were scumbags in the first place. Sex was always detached in Joe’s scenario. She would have to be subservient to the power of Eros, and the destructive power this impersonal energy would exert on her. Joe’s tragedy was that she could not transform Eros into a more positive element to her life, such as a fulfilling relationship.

While the orgy scene is atmospheric, it is also a very chilling scene, as the viewers are experiencing the entanglement of two powerful and impersonal forces – that of Eros and the mechanical dehumanization of institutions. In the lushly-colored rooms, filled with books and nicely designed furniture, powerful patrons and the ‘sex slaves’ – the poor naked ladies, all masked to ensure anonymity, were engaging in decadence and all forms of perverse sexual acts. The power of Eros, like Schopenhauer’s Will, was penetrating the room like a great and destructive force. Kubrick, being a brilliant satirist, made the sex acts so sterile and unattractive that the audience members were more than certain that that was nothing enjoyable from the ladies’ perspective. They have been dehumanized by the institutions, and they were nothing more than tools to fulfill the big brasses’ thirst for sexual perversions and exploitations. No matter how many books – the symbol for knowledge of human wisdom – and how clean and well-decorated the room was, with paintings and expensive furniture, very much like ‘Barry Lyndon’, this ‘high culture’ failed to conceal the monstrous and dark side of humanity.

The theme of mechanical dehumanization has been explored in almost every Kubrick film since ‘2001’, and like in ‘Barry Lyndon’, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ employed a very similar strategy to explore this rather chilling reality. Kubrick has been heavily influenced by Freud’s ideas, not only in terms of dreams, the unconscious and the Oedipal theme, but also on civilization. Freud, in his famous work ‘Civilizations and its Discontents’, has stated that repression was required by civilization on its members so that all the members could serve a peaceful and non-chaotic co-existence. However, this control would certainly be against one’s instinctual urge and impulse, which was often irrational, dangerous, and could cause harm and destruction to others. Kubrick expanded on Freud’s ideas, yet he did not totally agree to Freud’s conclusions. While Kubrick appreciated the contribution of civilization to human intelligence, he felt that the instinctual urge demanded by humans would continue to threaten and destabilize civilization. He did not serve the optimism that civilization could win out the battle of barbarism at the end. The two forces will continue to battle and intimidate each other, and it is what Kubrick’s work is often about.

The development of institutions, which is an important element of a civilized world, will inevitably lead to mechanical dehumanization. Many people are not aware of the power of the social machine and the cultural machine, and they accept these values without questioning or thinking about them. In a number of Kubrick’s films, most notably ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’, he showed that humans could be conditioned and programmed to serve instrumental purposes. Many viewers have noticed the weirdness of certain characters in EWS, as if they were some sort of programmed or brain-washed individuals. While it cannot be accurately verified, there has often been conspiracy theories (mostly in fiction, bad news if in reality) that has used brain-washing or programming techniques to condition human individuals, to control them, and they become tools for whatever selfish purposes, be it political, exploitative, and so on.

Now, while the idea of turning humans into automatons can be a bit outlandish, we cannot underestimate the impact caused by mechanical dehumanization, which individuals are employed as instruments rather than respectable human beings. The mask is an important motif in the film, most obviously during the ritual orgy scene. The mask is used to conceal the identity, on the rich patron’s side that is because they do not want to take any responsibilities in all these perverse sexual acts. Obviously, these rich guys have no reservations about helping themselves to exploit those lower on the social ladder than themselves, who are the masked and naked ladies for the sacrifice. For these sex slaves, they are masked because the authority wanted to eliminate any forms of identity or subjectivity from them, and they became instruments to provide sexual pleasures to the patrons, and to comply with the ritualized movement they have to do during the ceremony. In a sense, they are very much like the soldiers in ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket’, which all of them are branded together like a machine or instrument to do the job, only this time we have a sex machine in this decadent mansion. The use of masks not only alienate the poor ladies, it also served a constitutive power to brand them up, so that all of them became selfless and participated in this hideous acts.

When we speak of mask, we can also associate to the idea of performance. When I start to think more about Kubrick’s cinema in general, I start to appreciate the flip side of the coin – if his films are not merely about mechanical dehumanization, then it is also about performance, and the two concepts do go hand in hand.   

Aren’t we all wearing mask, after all? In a sense, we take on different personas to perform well in a certain role. These are all demanded by the cultural and social machines that govern our lives. Being a doctor, Bill believed that he could quench all sorts of sexual desire even when he was inspecting a naked woman during practice, because he felt all these things were very impersonal and objective. Victor, the billionaire who invited Bill and Alice to the party, believed well in a polite society by praising whatever women he has encountered, even if the statement had absolutely no significance to him. Through the family institution, Alice did every duties a normal housewife had to perform, even if her psyche was rift with discontents. Even in the orgy, all these powerful patrons, the ‘best people out there’ in the society if we recalled ‘The Shining’, was of a lower rank to the master of the ceremony, and they all stood there silently, all wearing masks to ensure an impersonal presence. The characters led the appropriate performance because they wanted to fit into the picture, just like the various aristocrats trying to fit into the painterly 18^th century Europe in ‘Barry Lyndon’. If you were not a good enough actor to fit into the narrative, you were doomed to be marginalized by the others. Yet, Kubrick questioned, did all these performances really fit nicely into the perfect system humans claimed to have created, and could things go wrong?

If we have a civilized world, if we can develop instruments to lead to a better control of our lives, and if we can pull performance to fit into the setting, then why do the battle between barbarism and civility never seize? Kubrick’s films often remind us the reason. It is the sad fact that our higher cognitive abilities - which have led us to our ego and hubris, has also caused us to be oblivious of our limitations - our animalistic and mechanistic nature. Though we might be more intelligent than most of the organisms, we can never escape from our animal instincts, and the mechanistic designs that define homo sapiens. Instinctive urge is uncontrollable and potentially destructive, because it cannot be explained in a rational manner. It is a part of us, which is intuitive and is ingrained into our genetic design. Such is the case for the need of sex, violence and the carving for power and control. In Kubrick’s cinema, many scenes remind us of our true nature. The presence of bathrooms, in one occasion a hideous act or exploitation has almost led to the death of a woman in EWS; all the eating scenes, reflecting our biological needs, and also the constant threat to corporeality. Disturbingly, it is often the bodily aspect of humanity that has led to our limits, and through a perverse sense of creativity, that has also led to many approach to control others - as we can especially see in ‘A Clockwork Orange’. The bodies in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ have been exploited - prostitution and sexual beta kittens in the orgy, and even the costumer’s daughter, whom he was willing to pimp her out to an unwilling Bill. Humanity is nothing more than the mannequins that are neatly organized in the costumer’s shop. The powerful ones wanted these people to have their eyes wide shut. They did not want them to question the motivations behind these acts. They wanted them to be docile to do what they were conditioned to (think of the Stepford Wives). They also wanted the observers to have their eyes wide shut, too, so that no one would challenge their actions and they would continue be benefitted from their advantaged position. Culture, customs and other rituals are merely tools to divert our visions to something else – so that these horrendous legacies of our dark sides will not be confronted by our glaring visions.

When a mask is fallen off, a dress down is inevitable. Throughout the film, Bill has been dressed down in a number of occasions. To put it anther way, masculinity, embodied by Bill in this film, has been challenged by various parties just like many of the male characters in Kubrick’s film. Not only he was forced to take his mask off and exposed his true identity to every one during the orgy, he was also forced to take his clothes to serve as a humiliation. He was harassed by a bunch of college boys, who accused him of being homosexual. Throughout his night of Odyssey and the morning after, he was challenged by people from the different parts of the sex spectrum, to see whether he was brave to take them on. For a number of times, he had to resort to his professional social status to get what he wanted and continued his journey. Even Alice taunted him an challenged his claim that he had no desire on the various women he saw during work. But for our Dr. Bill, rational as he was, was just a human. He showed all the human attributes of jealousy, desire, and emotion as anyone was. After Alice’s confession, Bill has imagined again and again, also like replaying a scene in a film, the scenario between Alice and the naval officer, as if a sort of self-punishment. Even in his imagination, the naval officer looked strong and handsome – a celebration of masculinity.

When Bill was asked to take off his mask, another individual was also willing to do this metaphorically. At the point Bill was about to take off his clothes and subject to some forms of punishment, one of the masked woman stood on the balcony and declared that she was willing to accept the punishment incited on Bill. This woman has already warned Bill some time ago that he should leave the place as soon as possible, and although her identity was ambiguous, many audience members believed her to be Mandy, the prostitute saved by Bill from an overdose in Victor’s bathroom at the start of the film.  When Mandy expressed her will to sacrifice for Bill, this action served as a tremendous challenge to the system where these powerful people they have firmly established. Her action was devastating because by singling herself out   Kubrick made this visually by having her standing alone at the center of the balcony, she asserted her individuality. The other members, by contrast, were forming a circle to signal a sort of unity for the private club, with no intention to assert any form of singular identity. The subjectivity that the institution has tried to undermine has been retrieved and brought up by her. It was clear that Mandy has been the protector of Bill at the point he entered the Somerton mansion, first asking him to run away. Yet, controlled by his desire and curiosity, Bill decided to penetrate further into this dangerous horizon until he was being caught. Remembering that Bill has served her life once, she did all this out of compassion. Through the selfless sacrifice, Mandy transformed herself from a pre-assigned function of erotic flesh to a compassionate love. To me, Mandy is probably one of the most courageous characters in the film, and probably in the whole Kubrick cinema. We had no idea about how harsh the punishment would turn out to be, we only knew that eventually Mandy died from an alleged overdose. While the middle man, Victor, tried his very best to deny the secret organization responsibility and said Mandy died circumstantially from another overdose, and said all that happened in the orgy was merely a charade to scare the hell out of him . he audience and Bill had no final answer offered to them. Apparently to blackmail Bill further, the mask that Bill has somehow misplaced was mysteriously appeared on his bed, and Bill broke down and decided to tell Alice everything. Or, it could be a signification of the end of the dream...

I have said in the previous passages the barbarism and civility were forever locked in a struggle at war with each other.  There is another dueling pair, also attributed to Freud s ideas. It is the battle between the 2 forces that define human existence .Eros and Thanatos. Eros and Thanatos are situated closer than one may ever imagine – they are entangled like an organic unity, locked in a Viennese waltz. In Eyes Wide Shut, sexual desire (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos) was intertwined, and the threat of death was always lurking from behind. The satiric aspect of the film was that Bill s erotic encounter to the female characters, imaginary t not, would eventually lead to their destruction. Bill has encountered 3 times, and curiously, she was naked all 3 times. As Alice has questioned Bill in their bedroom, a force of desire should have most likely to be arisen from Bill’s psyche. What was rather tragic was that all 3 incidents were tied to death  the first time Mandy was at a near death from overdose, the second time would like to lead to her punishment and eventual sacrifice, the third time Bill was watching her corpse in the morgue. When Bill rejected the call girl Domino s sexual advance due to Alice s interrupting phone call, he knew the next day that Domino was diagnosed HIV positive. Has the sexual intercourse been taking place, it would certainly lead to Bill’s destruction. Bill, with the audience, would be thrilled to learn that that death has always been lurking behind the sex drive and pleasure fulfillment. 

It may seem absurd to imagine that, if our instincts demand us to survive and preserve the life drive, why would we be obsessed with its arch-nemesis, the death instinct? Upon much thinking and experiencing of the unprecedented First World War, which was unprecedented in history  in terms of scale, fire power and casualties, this tragedy of  human history motivated Freud (he even did a correspondence with Einstein) to make sense of all these human aberrations. Freud thus proposed the existence of the death instinct, which was a manifestation of our violent side, reflecting the dark side of us. Since no one wants to harm himself, the death instinct is exerted by harming others. Freud believed that the battle between Eros and Thanatos, and more sophisticated ways and technologies to execute things in the modern world, Thanatos stood a higher chance to win out. He believed that many people had a sense of despair or felt unhappy in modern life, because in their minds they were starting to be aware of thus awful truth. Kubrick, by showing these truths in a visual term, asked us not to be discouraged. He did not offer us a simple and happy ending to cheer us up, he motivated us to think about these questions, which would generate self knowledge, which are insights that will enrich us, and may eventually lead us to have a fundamental change.

What can we learn from ‘Eyes Wide Shut’? For Kubrick, Eros and desire are not something wrong per se. He disagreed to the fact that ‘true love’ – or those banal phrases like ‘I love everyone’ - was normal, and as some humanists would have said, Eros and desire were dirty, obscene or aberrant. If someone claims that he/she does not have desire, then he/she is either defective or hypocritical. Yet, Kubrick asked us to contemplate the fact that, even if Eros is part of human nature, it is an impersonal force and can be destructive. It is very much like his view on violence, if we cannot get away from our true nature, we can at least divert it to cause less destruction to ourselves and others. What we need to do with Eros is to channel and transform this energy to a more positive direction, that of romantic love or relationship based on compassion and mutual respect. Then, no matter how banal or mundane our existences are, it will lead to a road of happiness and fulfillment.  

by Ed Law

27/8/2017

Film Analysis

Eyes Wide Shut, Part 1

Is life merely a dream? Can our dreams and imaginations be transformed to shape the reality of our existences, and to define what we are or what we can be? Can the impersonal power of desire lead us to self-knowledge, and have a constructive contribution to our happiness? Above all, are dream and reality, or their metamorphic cousins, Eros and Thanatos, so entangled that there is no point to distinguish between them? All these questions have been explored in Stanley Kubrick’s final achievement – ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)!

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (henceforth EWS) proved to be the final words from the visionary director, when Kubrick died a few days after he has submitted the final version of the film to the distributors. Just like almost any other of his films, EWS was initially received poorly among the public, only to be re-evaluated and risen in status throughout the past 15 years or so. Personally, I first regarded EWS as a lesser work of Kubrick, when we compared it to films like ‘2001’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Barry Lyndon’. Yet, I soon realized I was wrong. Just like most of Kubrick’s later efforts, EWS is so visual that you will discover more and more when you repeatedly watch the film, and you start to generate more and more insights throughout the process. After all these, I would say EWS is no less in terms of achievement to his greatest films, and it can be compared to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – rather it is a sexual odyssey for EWS. Thus, ‘2001’, ‘Barry Lyndon’, and ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ can be considered an ‘Odyssey’ trilogy, encompassing the past, present and future, from psychological to cosmological.

Why was EWS so poorly received when it was first released in 1999? I guess it can be summarized by 3 reasons: wrong expectations from the audience, ambiguous genre categorizations, and its deliberate pacing. Many members of audience were expecting to watch a film with the then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to engage in some naughty, hard-core sex, and other forms of sexual perversions. If that was the case, then these viewers were doomed to be disappointed. ‘Obscene’ is the last word I would use to describe EWS – while there are full-frontal nudities and the film is primarily concerned with sexual issues, the film is very un-erotic and un-sensational when it comes to the treatment of sex. We can say the film is more psychological – or psychosexual in a Freudian sense. EWS is not merely a film about sex. The reason why many people have started to appreciate the film is because it encapsulates the consistent philosophical vision Kubrick has been delivered in his films since ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. EWS, like the other Kubrickian films, is multi-layered and it should be understood in many different perspectives, be it psychologically, culturally and sociologically.

EWS is one of Kubrick’s most ambitious film, because he always felt that the most difficult challenge in cinema is to make a film that represented his own era. Of course, it sounds like a weird idea at first sight because who is not often making films about their own times, except one is making a sci-fi, fantasy or period film? What Kubrick meant was that if you were making a film about your own times, then it was too easy for one to be subjective and sentimental, and all you would get was a view-point which was narrow in scope. Kubrick, ambitious as he was, wanted to inspire his audience and viewed his era in a more clinical and anthropological viewpoint when he was making his films, because that would certainly benefit the audience in long term. He loved the project – when he has secured the right to the novel ‘Dream Story’ by Schnitzler in the late 1960s, he originally planned to make the film in the 1970s, after ‘2001’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Has Kubrick made EWS during the 1970s, I am sure his approach would be far more daring and the result would certainly be a modern masterpiece.

What sort of genre can EWS be categorized into? One of the issues many audience and critics were confused initially was that they found it challenging to categorize EWS into any conventional genres. Kubrick’s films often defied genre expectations, and revealed the malleability of a traditional genre. While EWS can be rightfully considered as an erotic thriller or psychological thriller, the very formalized and ritualized style can make it a chamber play; the fact that the male protagonist, Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), was exploring around the darkest labyrinth of New York City can make it an adventure film; and, I would even say it is a war film – as it is about the struggle and ‘rebellion’ between Bill Harford and the world around him. On the other hand, many critics were not only unhappy with the lack of sex scenes, but also the slow pace of the film. Upon repeated viewing, I feel that the film is justified to have a running time of 2.5 hours, as Kubrick would likely want the intricately connected episodes to unfold slowly, and the result was a nice internal rhythm, almost like ‘Barry Lyndon’.

An aspect that is worth mentioning regarding Eyes Wide Shut is that the female characters seem to take a more significant narrative importance as compared to his previous films. Kubrick has often been criticized as a sexist filmmaker, because many of his films seemed to be concerned with men or viewed from a male perspective, and the female characters tended to be undermined and not narrative important. In Eyes Wide Shut, though many of the female characters were exploited and subject to mechanical dehumanization, a few of them were highly imaginative and courageous, and were far more charismatic and likeable than the other male characters in the film. Though we are still valid to say that EWS is a male-oriented film, because we are looking from Bill’s point of view and inaccessible to the female characters’ perspectives, the female characters are not like Lady Lyndon or Wendy Torrance – they are seen with more significance to the story.

  

A brief sketch on the story. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and Alice Harford (Nicole Kidman), with a daughter, were living in an upper-class area in New York. One evening, after attending a party the other day, the couple got into an argument regarding their sexual desires, and Alice admitted that, at some point during a trip the year before, she saw a handsome naval officer and contemplated cheating on Bill, and she was willing to sacrifice her whole future and relationship to sleep with the naval officer for only one night. While we had no way to verify whether it was the truth or only Alice’s imagination, the story devastated Bill, and after visiting a dying patient, he embarked on a nocturnal Odyssey in the streets of the New York City, meeting various people, including a number of women which his actions would have led to (mostly negative) outcomes for themselves. His adventure climaxed in his party-crashing a private masked ball in Somerton, where a number of secret ritual orgies and sacrifice ceremony were taking place. After being spotted out as an intruder, Bill’s life was being endangered by veiled threats and more uncanny incidents taking place around him. Will he get out alive, and can he be able to mend fences with Alice at the end?

  

In ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, the boundary between dream and reality was a thin one. Certain critics and viewers even pointed out that, there was absolutely no point to distinguish which part of the film was a dream or fantasy or which part was really happening, like the endless debates in films like ‘Inception’. Because, Kubrick, like in Schnitzler’s treatment, has placed an elliptical narrative and made the story so ambiguous that it would make the film more appropriately as ‘dream-like’ rather than asking for a ‘dream/reality dichotomy’. Indeed, the style of the film can be considered Modernist, as Schnitzler and Freud, who has influenced Kubrick and his ideas are explored in the film, are also part of the Modernist movements in the early 20^th century. Indeed, one may identify EWS with James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, a Modernist masterpiece and a similar scenario regarding some sort of an Odyssey was illustrated in the book. The Modernist movement has also influenced early cinema, especially the silent cinema. It is evident that Kubrick has adopted Imagist or silent movie approaches in many of his films, as these approaches tend to rely on a visual mean to convey the message. The visualization of thoughts has been employed in EWS, most notably in Bill Harford’s imagination of his wife Alice making love with the naval officer, even shown in black-and-white. Of course, recently Christopher Nolan has also used silent film approaches to generate suspense and atmosphere in his latest film ‘Dunkirk’, as he was attempting to use a visual mean to tell the story.

What is rather ironic, however, is that Kubrick has committed a sort of anti-realism in Eyes Wide Shut. Thus, there is a form of artifice in the film, where the apparently ‘real’ New York did not resemble the real New York; the dialogues were banal and stylized; and the story followed a formalized structure which some people would criticize as a bad example of narrative cinema. The philosopher Zizek has pointed out that these apparent inaccuracies might be deliberate – to show that Bill was dreaming and therefore having these wish-fulfilling scenarios and co-incidences taking place. Certain attentive viewers have also discovered spatial inconsistencies or uncanny observations throughout the film, as in the case for ‘The Shining’, suggesting that certain parts of the films likely took place in the dream or imaginary space.

  

Eyes Wide Shut has a dream-like quality, and it seemed to be playing with a number of psychological ideas, most notably from those of Freud’s. The idea of the unconscious part of the mind has been demonstrated through the imagination of Alice’s fantasy with the naval officer. When she was delivering the story, it was as if she was doing a free association exercise from a psychoanalytic session. And, I believe there is a reason why her narrative concerned a naval officer, because it symbolized exploration, which was wish-fulfilling because she might want to escape from the grip of the domestic environment and identity she situated in. I can think of a further wordplay here with the naval officer. It would be an ‘oceanic’ feeling for her if her dream has really come true.

There are numerous wordplays in the film. Not only many of the character’s names may have symbolic meanings, the dialogues are also stylized. Some of the dialogues were deliberately made to be banal, and also it was evident that characters often repeated one another’s quote or had a similar structure when they were talking. The formalized style here was fascinating, because it was very non-naturalistic when we looked at films that were concerned to enhance the realism. Some critics believed that these dialogues contributed to the dream-like quality of the film, it was like the characters (possibly Bill) were thinking out the dialogues himself to generate a wish-fulfilling result. The dream-like quality was enhanced by the presence of co-incidences, which incidents seemed to parallel each other at various parts of the films.

  

Certain critics have also pointed out that, Kubrick has deliberated used some rather strange editing techniques to generate an uncanny feeling in the audience and made them question themselves about what they have really seen. For example, traditional films seem to use a classical continuity editing approach, so that the spatial relations between 2 characters can become clearly defined and enhance the narrative consistently. In EWS, while Kubrick has painstaking ensured a rhythm of fluid style – almost like an Ophuls film – through the use of steadicam long takes and tracking shots, the general approach seemed to be violated in a number of times, when that involved 2 interacting characters, an 180 degree cut that crossed the axis were used instead. This seems awkward because the sudden ‘bumps’ in terms of style will attract audience attention. Yet some critics feel that these are more than visual gimmicks, because Kubrick might be providing clues that the images were only imaginary projections from Bill’s point or view. Thus, that was Bill’s dream-space we were situating in. After all, as the Chinese philosopher Zhuang Tzu has questioned in the Butterfly Dream scenario: can we really distinguish between dreaming and the waking life, and are subjectivity and objectivity really that clearly defined?   

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by Ed Law

26/8/2017

Film Analysis

侍

我在之前介紹過岡本喜八的’大菩薩嶺’ 。 最近, 香港重映了’大菩薩嶺’和另一部岡本的作品 – ‘侍’ (1965, 又名’大刺客’) 。 今次我就談談’侍’這部值得一看的作品!

‘侍’可以說是反武士式(Anti-Samurai)的電影。 岡本在片中控訴武士道規條的虛無, 和封建社會對個人的殘害。電影的視角甚為悲觀, 而且為強烈的宿命論所主宰。故事模仿充滿佛洛依德意味的神話, 加上頗為強烈的暴力場面, 交織出一個被虛無主義主宰的荒誕世界!

三船敏郎飾演的主角鶴千代, 是一位充滿雄心而又武藝精湛的浪人。 他加入一個暗殺組織, 可惜在一次行動中有叛徒通風報信, 首領誓要揪出叛徒!  由於眾成員對鶴千代認識不深, 所以他與其朋友便被懷疑為叛徒。 導演倒有讓觀眾了解鶴千代的背景:  原來他是一個幕府的大將與其妾侍所生的, 機緣巧合下, 他在小時與父分開, 所以從來都不知道其生父是誰。鶴千代奮力希望立下大功,  以爭取武士席位, 終在一次慘烈的暗殺行動中, 拔刀斬殺’井伊’ 。 不過井伊與他的關係, 相信必然會令他抱撼終生!

電影風格方面, 岡本採納了客觀抽離的角度去敍述故事。 片中採用了不少深焦的鏡頭,  仿如古典美國電影的風格, 像約翰福特(John Ford), 奥森威爾斯(Orson Welles)的影片一樣。 深焦的攝影手法, 令所有角色都處於對等的地位, 突顯了他們作出互動時的張力。同時間片中加插了不少回憶和跳接, 令觀眾時有時空錯亂的感受, 這亦切合 六七十年代 流行的電影風格!

時代の悲歌

鶴千代可說是一位徹頭徹尾的悲劇英雄。 其一, 是鶴千代的際遇, 完全受宿命所主宰。當鶴千代決心要成為一位武士時, 他看到海上有幾艘外國的商船正向岸邊駛來。 鶴千代根本就是處於一個錯誤的年代: 他不知道武士的階級其實已經是夕陽工業。 不過, 鶴千代加入暗殺組織, 並不是為了任何政治信念, 而只是視為其生命棋局中的一步棋。 這就像在’大菩薩嶺’中, 龍之助加入新選組的目的, 只是為了滿足其渴望殺 人的意欲。 不過, 鶴千代在組織的眼中, 何嘗又不是 一件微不足道的殺人工具?! 就如幕府的武士受到儀式化的武 士道規條所約束着, 組織對其成員一 樣加以控制, 視這些人命為工具。 更荒謬的是, 當成員被錯手殺死時, 組織為了掩飾真相, 會把死者在名册上除名, 假裝這些人沒有存在過!  這就像小林正樹的’切腹’裏,  井伊家在主角半四郎死後, 企圖篡寫覺書裏的紀錄一樣。 巧合的是, 兩部片子的編劇都是橋本忍先生, 或者這是他對所謂的’客觀歷史’的質疑, 是歷史相對主義的視角!

'被'消失の殺人工具

說到底, 鶴千代只是殺手組織的一顆棋子。 組織根本沒有興趣去理會鶴千代的志氣, 因為組織認為鶴千代難以控制 (就如’大菩薩嶺’的情節一樣), 不但企圖暗殺他, 更決定將鶴千代在組織名册上除名, 等於將鶴千代’被消失’!  組織更捏造事實, 在紀錄上指是井伊被首領的兒子所殺掉。這意味着鶴千代不但殺死了自己的父親, 即使他永遠都不知道這個殘酷的事實, 他在不能因為暗殺立功而輔助自己成為武士階級。 除名, 就會使鶴千代在歷史上永遠消失! 這可謂多重諷刺, 是一個極為晦暗的結局。

宿命の死鬥

其實鶴千代是否完全沒有選擇, 要為宿命所馴服? 即使鶴千代無法戰勝宿命, 他仍然有 不少選擇, 令自己的一生過得更有意義。 例如, 喜愛他的女人甘於和他一起過平凡的生活,  不希望他去強求武士的席位。 縱使岡本喜八看通了人性的黑暗, 他亦相信這個世界真的是有好人的存在。 而鶴千代在組織中亦有一位真正關心自己的朋友。可惜, 鶴千代只顧自己的目的,  漠視和唾棄了這些人。 而且當組織懷疑他和其朋友是叛徒時, 鶴千代不但嫁禍其朋友, 更將其殺掉!  鶴千代此舉不但不是基於事實, 更不算是對其組織的愚忠。鶴千代這樣做,  只是因為他單純地相信組織會視此為功勞, 增加他成為武士的籌碼。當然, 最後組織發覺原來叛徒是另有其人, 是何其諷刺!

三月, 真是很少會下雪

最後, 盲目的鶴千代以為自己立下了大功, 卻不知道原來自己犯了倫理的死罪。 不過, 那又如何?  鶴千代已經陷入完全瘋狂的狀態。說好了的武士席位呢? 沒有了。正如旁述所言:  陪伴着鶴千代的, 可能只有無盡的瘋狂, 和那突兀的三月飛霜。

by Ed Law

20/8/2017

Film Analysis