更新时间:2011-04-07
半个桃李林檎 • 全是巧合:神马都是巧合，爱情、喜剧、杯具都是狗娘
甄别影片好坏的标准有很多，大家都说好的自然不容错过，骂声如潮的也可以挑战一下申丑能力；最怕是遇到小众烂片，看完了也很少找到有共鸣的人。比如我遇到没那么知名的电影，总习惯先快进看看是否有亮点（前提是在电脑或者DVD上）：要是画面色彩很老谋子（如《野花》）and/or演员很漂漂（如《美丽的人》）and/or剧情很黄很暴力（如《一部塞尔维亚电影》），还是会坚持看完并作出自己的判断（通常是短评）。《全是巧合》显然一点也不符合上述特征，一快进没准就觉着这是部大雷片，特别是一不小心跳到几个日本男淫用英语说”Fucking weather!”或者是看到一对捷克中年夫妇在房间里忘情地打灰机（别想歪了，是战斗机模型）的时候。但真正看完还是能感觉到Zelenka的妙。
有国外的影评说本片是“最马赛克式的电影”，《全是巧合》片如其名，全是巧合，巧合之间还互相关联。全片分为五节，“出租车司机”、“文明的仪式”、“最后一代体面人”、“傻瓜”和“被招魂的美国飞行员”。虽然非线性叙事日渐成为主流，但《全是巧合》胜在幽默，捷克后共时代的调侃和讽刺。
以下摘自Peter Hames所著的Czech and Slovak Cinema- Theme and Tradition。
Just as Zelenka would, with some justification, deny the direct influence of the "New Wave" on his work, his work differs from that of Jan Němec and Pavel Juráček. Whereas their films are set against no recognizable contemporary reality, Zelenka's films are immersed in it and have provided some of the sharpest commentaries on post-Communist realities. Buttoners, which won a Golden Tiger award at Rotterdam, attracted a good deal of international critical attention. On the surface, the themes of the film are merely eccentric: the Japanese learn how to say "fucking weather"; a young couple are only able to make love in a taxi; another man has an obsessive desire to remove studs from upholstery with a false teeth located in his backside; and another achieves success by lying between railway tracks and spitting at trains.
With Buttoners, Zelenka initiated what Christian Stojanova calls “the most mosaic narrative”, involving multiple characters and overlapping stories, which she regards as a defining characteristic of the new Czech cinema. It opens with black-and-white images recreating the last minutes before the first atomic bombing in 1945. Intercut with these are shots on the ground of a party of Japanese complaining about the incessant rain. In fact, since they are based in Kokura, it is only the weather than ensures that the bomb falls on Hiroshima and not, as intended, on them. In an incongruous juxtaposition, they learn to swear in English (or rather American), repeating the words “fucking weather”, with much emphasis on “w”s and “th”s. This emphasis on the unpredictable and the unexpected becomes the primary way in which the film’s various episodes interconnect.
Zelenka’s first story, Taxi Driver involves Franta, a driver on night shift (also on tranquillizers) and his various fares. The first are the aforesaid couple in search of somewhere to make love. The second turns out to be the woman’s husband, who arranges to be driven to an address where he believes his wife to be meeting her lover. He proves to be wrong- the woman is, in fact, the driver’s wife, although he remains unaware of this. In the second story, Rituals of Civilization”, a young man tells a psychiatrist that his wife has left him. The psychiatrist asserts that only “the ritual of civilization” (a synonym for his own antiseptic habits) can save him. In “The Last Decent Generation”, Franta drives a middle-aged couple to the home of another couple, whose daughter is about to marry their son. The man is the one with a peculiar obsession with the buttons in upholstery but their hosts have an equally strange private obsession- the reenactment of aerial combats. In “Fools”, a working-class couple bicker incessantly about the man’s incompetence and inadequacy while watching a TV program about a project to launch frozen human sperm into space. Finally, in The Ghost of an American Pilot”, four girls hold a séance and summon up the ghost of the American pilot whose program has been featured throughout the film, where he broadcasts a plea for forgiveness.
The radio program offers a discussion in which the significance of cause and effect is rejected and the power of contingency is asserted. Thus, while the characters act as if they are in control of their lives, their words and actions are based on misunderstandings and their consequences unforeseen. The pilot does not know that he is going to drop the bomb; the psychiatrist is unaware that he will cause the young couple who are about to be married to die in a car accident; and the Japanese do not know that the bad weather they are trying to curse is saving them from extinction. There are, of course, also significant comments on aspects of contemporary life- serial infidelity, the strange power relations that exist within marriages and the obscure fantasies and desires that lie beneath the surface of the everyday.
“Buttoners” is a kind of tour de force in the ways it weaves its connections between disparate and unlikely stories, with a veritable network of visual and verbal connections. In the end, all attempts impose unity and meaning are doomed to failure- love and relationships are temporary, illusory, and ultimately absurd. Simulated aerial combat, detaching buttons with one’s backside and spitting at trains only go slightly beyond the peculiarities of everyday. They illuminate contemporary reality in the same ways that the problems of Juráček’s cat exposed bureaucracy. But, ultimately, it is the superficially adjusted psychiatrist, with his obsessions with hair combing and teeth cleaning, who produces the most lethal effects. No doubt the Communists would have objected had such a film been produced in that era but somehow Zelenka suggests a vision of human fate lying beyond the failures of particular socio-economic systems.
有国外的影评说本片是“最马赛克式的电影”，《全是巧合》片如其名，全是巧合，巧合之间还互相关联。全片分为五节，“出租车司机”、“文明的仪式”、“最后一代体面人”、“傻瓜”和“被招魂的美国飞行员”。虽然非线性叙事日渐成为主流，但《全是巧合》胜在幽默，捷克后共时代的调侃和讽刺。
以下摘自Peter Hames所著的Czech and Slovak Cinema- Theme and Tradition。
Just as Zelenka would, with some justification, deny the direct influence of the "New Wave" on his work, his work differs from that of Jan Němec and Pavel Juráček. Whereas their films are set against no recognizable contemporary reality, Zelenka's films are immersed in it and have provided some of the sharpest commentaries on post-Communist realities. Buttoners, which won a Golden Tiger award at Rotterdam, attracted a good deal of international critical attention. On the surface, the themes of the film are merely eccentric: the Japanese learn how to say "fucking weather"; a young couple are only able to make love in a taxi; another man has an obsessive desire to remove studs from upholstery with a false teeth located in his backside; and another achieves success by lying between railway tracks and spitting at trains.
With Buttoners, Zelenka initiated what Christian Stojanova calls “the most mosaic narrative”, involving multiple characters and overlapping stories, which she regards as a defining characteristic of the new Czech cinema. It opens with black-and-white images recreating the last minutes before the first atomic bombing in 1945. Intercut with these are shots on the ground of a party of Japanese complaining about the incessant rain. In fact, since they are based in Kokura, it is only the weather than ensures that the bomb falls on Hiroshima and not, as intended, on them. In an incongruous juxtaposition, they learn to swear in English (or rather American), repeating the words “fucking weather”, with much emphasis on “w”s and “th”s. This emphasis on the unpredictable and the unexpected becomes the primary way in which the film’s various episodes interconnect.
Zelenka’s first story, Taxi Driver involves Franta, a driver on night shift (also on tranquillizers) and his various fares. The first are the aforesaid couple in search of somewhere to make love. The second turns out to be the woman’s husband, who arranges to be driven to an address where he believes his wife to be meeting her lover. He proves to be wrong- the woman is, in fact, the driver’s wife, although he remains unaware of this. In the second story, Rituals of Civilization”, a young man tells a psychiatrist that his wife has left him. The psychiatrist asserts that only “the ritual of civilization” (a synonym for his own antiseptic habits) can save him. In “The Last Decent Generation”, Franta drives a middle-aged couple to the home of another couple, whose daughter is about to marry their son. The man is the one with a peculiar obsession with the buttons in upholstery but their hosts have an equally strange private obsession- the reenactment of aerial combats. In “Fools”, a working-class couple bicker incessantly about the man’s incompetence and inadequacy while watching a TV program about a project to launch frozen human sperm into space. Finally, in The Ghost of an American Pilot”, four girls hold a séance and summon up the ghost of the American pilot whose program has been featured throughout the film, where he broadcasts a plea for forgiveness.
The radio program offers a discussion in which the significance of cause and effect is rejected and the power of contingency is asserted. Thus, while the characters act as if they are in control of their lives, their words and actions are based on misunderstandings and their consequences unforeseen. The pilot does not know that he is going to drop the bomb; the psychiatrist is unaware that he will cause the young couple who are about to be married to die in a car accident; and the Japanese do not know that the bad weather they are trying to curse is saving them from extinction. There are, of course, also significant comments on aspects of contemporary life- serial infidelity, the strange power relations that exist within marriages and the obscure fantasies and desires that lie beneath the surface of the everyday.
“Buttoners” is a kind of tour de force in the ways it weaves its connections between disparate and unlikely stories, with a veritable network of visual and verbal connections. In the end, all attempts impose unity and meaning are doomed to failure- love and relationships are temporary, illusory, and ultimately absurd. Simulated aerial combat, detaching buttons with one’s backside and spitting at trains only go slightly beyond the peculiarities of everyday. They illuminate contemporary reality in the same ways that the problems of Juráček’s cat exposed bureaucracy. But, ultimately, it is the superficially adjusted psychiatrist, with his obsessions with hair combing and teeth cleaning, who produces the most lethal effects. No doubt the Communists would have objected had such a film been produced in that era but somehow Zelenka suggests a vision of human fate lying beyond the failures of particular socio-economic systems.
