I Want To End It All: Warmth In Disorder

Liu Ying / Wen

Charlie Kaufman is an extremely stylized ghost director. No matter his real life or animation works, he explores the intricate emotions of contemporary people with the way of opening his brain. He has both the joy of facing the world and the loneliness of being born. No matter in which stage of creation, he wrote notes for the world around him with childlike eyes. The same is true of the new book I want to end it all.

In the poster of the movie, a thoughtful character sits in front of the wall pasted with dark green wallpaper. In front of her is a table of family dinner. Her hand holding a glass of wine seems to be hesitating whether to continue to import the wine. The man, with curly hair and a loose striped sweater, had to look closer to identify a woman. The poster seems to want to create a strong family atmosphere, but the characters show a little stiff expression and dark tone, and also show some kind of uneasiness.

Entering the positive, the atmosphere becomes more and more obvious. The film begins with a road trip, where Jack and his new girlfriend, Louise, drive to a farm on the outskirts of the city for a home visit to his parents. It's a cold winter, snowflakes are already floating in the city, and the more we go to the countryside, the weather becomes more extreme. The car is not in the center. In order to rush back to the city before the end of the night, she wanted to go back to the city early to tell the audience. In the face of her boyfriend who is driving, she is not completely moved, and even has some thoughts of breaking up.

In the first 30 minutes of the movie, the camera is aimed at the two people in the car. The conversation tells them their background and hobbies. Although it is a little dull, it paves the way for the development of the plot. The audience, who are familiar with Kaufman's style, should be fidgety by now. As a director, he is never willing to be bored. Such a long plot must be brewing some explosive bridge. Sure enough, after arriving at Jack's parents' farm, the plot began to become increasingly fierce. It was a runaway dinner. The characters kept changing their ages, and their way of speaking and their emotions changed with different spaces.

It has to be admitted that Kaufman is a good hand in creating atmosphere. Only through the changes of light and clothing, can the audience realize the difference. The 20 minute dinner drama is full of wonderful transitions and surprise (or fright) at any time. For a time, the atmosphere reached a climax in a confined space. The most amazing thing is that Kaufman integrates the loneliness and excitement of one's life into this scene - the estrangement between parents and children, the unspeakable secrets within the family, the pain and sweetness in growing up, all of which are presented in a magic way that is separated from reality. The audience with the "intruder" Louise examines the jack family, but inadvertently found that she is not entirely self consistent. Louise's identity gradually appears in the narration. She is a painter, a restaurant waiter, and a poet Is there a deviation in her memory, or is there something wrong with the visit? Kaufman constructed unreliable but charming narrative between the hands of the audience, sparing no effort to increase the curiosity of the audience.

Louise, who wants to leave Jack's parents' house, keeps urging her boyfriend, and finally gets her wish. The road is full of snow. The ice cream shops, which are still open along the road, exude Kaufman's iconic fantasy. It is like a habitat in children's dreams, providing sweet comfort, but also a little uneasy. The director constantly provides the audience with fragmented jigsaw puzzles and leads them to deduce the whole picture of the story. It was not until the end of the film that the game of peeping through the leopard was over. But it is a pity that the director used a very dramatic dance and stage play to reveal the mystery to the audience. It turns out that all the previous narratives in the film are the thoughts and thoughts of a patient with multiple personality disorder before he dies, half dreaming and half awake, and coexistence of reality and fiction. He spent his whole life missing (or constructing) the lovers and parents floating in his life, and used the logic of romance to end his journey in the world.

"I want to end all this" is adapted from the novel of the same name by Ian reed, a Canadian post-80s writer. It has a strong literary quality. The film version also explores human's perception of time through the mouth of characters, from Wordsworth's poetry to guy Debo's theory of landscape society, from cassaveti's masterpiece the drunken woman to the musical classic Oklahoma. This kind of dialogue full of intellectual spirit makes the film viewing process interesting. The disadvantage is that some transitions of the film are quite hasty, and the style transition also appears to be broken. As a director with strong personal emotions, Kaufman finally added a touch of hard warm color to the film, which is also a pity of icing on the cake.