天知道

曾经某刻，在谈及美国电影的意识形态之时，我指出了三个国家的电影人未曾拍出真实影像。但此处的“真实”仅就电影还原现实这一新现实主义所标示出的道路而言；因而招致了大家的误解，将我认定为一位口不择言之人。实则是冤枉。

此时此刻，《天知道》给了我一个辩白的机会，同时也提醒读者作者在尝试文学化表达之时，是不该作实证主义理解的。我想尤其指出的是《天知道》这部电影看似反驳了我在前面提出的观点，也即美国电影人未曾拍出过真实影像；实则是提供了观察这一问题的新方式。

《天知道》给予我们的就是一种异乎寻常的真实，已经脱离了新现实主义所开辟的语境。这种真实质感的获得不只在于电影聚集的是社会边缘人物的生活主题，这是通过对这些人物恋爱、吸毒、犯罪等一系列生活常态的刻画；还在于导演为获致这一真实质感所采用的方式。

借用一个比拟，我们可以将这部电影的镜头称为“望远镜式”的。它们是这样的镜头：深焦，近景（特写），背景的模糊化，以及晃动。因而观众如同举着一架望远镜将目光投向远方，看到了这些社会边缘的弱势群体挣扎的身影；会因为刀刃划开血管而不敢直视，会因为吸毒场面而坐立不安，会因为其自由地反抗着这个荒诞社会而欢欣鼓舞……

这是一类直接作用于我们感知的影像，如同那个在片名出来之后的长镜头，其伴随着配乐和镜头的自如移转导致的不可思议的观感，无不在提醒我们：我们需要这样的电影。

萨弗迪兄弟似乎摆脱了最初两部影片里的新浪潮影响：粗砺画面与晃动的摄影几乎消失，取而代之却是流畅的剪辑与声音技术，越来越有商业电影的味道。开头和结尾两场的耸动配乐最为明显，无对白的影像/画面具有先声夺人的力量，一种不安而可怖的气氛笼罩在这个边缘人故事的开端，而这种声音处理方式跟沙尔茨在《克利夏》的开篇有着相同的效果，不能不说是一种惊人的巧合。

这对兄弟导演依然钟情拍摄纽约边缘人题材，继之前的女贼和电影放映员，这部奠定影坛地位的作者电影将目光聚焦在瘾君子身上。要用“触目惊心”来形容拍摄对象才足以概括我的直观感受。尽管此前看过不少因吸毒而自甘堕落的题材，但这部现实主义色彩浓烈的作品更让人沮丧和慨叹。影片的阴暗基调跟阿伦诺夫斯基的《迷上瘾》不相伯仲，而跟《迷上瘾》里依靠眼花缭乱的（剪辑、摄影与配乐）技巧营造悲怆的手法不同，这部完全是依赖演员不加修饰的演绎。换个准确的说法，纯属角色自然流露的性格与气质所致。

女主角Arielle Holmes有过吸毒史，她后来写的《纽约疯狂爱情》讲的就是亲身经历，同时也是本片的改编来源。另外剧中不少演员或多或少有过不光彩的经历，如小偷小摸，进过监狱等。导演选用非职业演员给这个悲剧故事增添了难以置信的真实感，很多细节是职业演员难以演出来的，比如吸毒时的手部颤抖，脸部的抽搐表情等。而这种传统似乎可以追溯拉里·克拉克（Larry Clark），甚至是格斯·范·桑特早前部分作品。

除此之外，萨弗迪继续此前惯用的偷拍手段，演员的即兴台词也为影片增色不少，尤其是在大街上争吵，及女主角跟毒贩争执的场景。然而，相比前两部作品，这部缺少了一些奇思妙想的段落，也许导演认为类似的“幼稚”手法（巨型蚊子与漂浮在河面上的白熊）跟本片的论调格格不入。另一方面，剧本似乎要着力刻画的是这个依赖嗑药的边缘群体的日常现实，而非他们进入飘飘欲仙的幻觉世界。

为了细致刻画这个特殊群体的日常生活，导演不惜采用大量特写镜头来展示人物的脸部与身体，捕捉他们空洞呆滞的眼神，口齿不清的对白，进而增强故事的真实感。最令我意外的是，剧本里安排了女主角的一条爱情线，尽管最后以悲剧告终，但是这种处理手法一方面带来些许商业类型片的味道，另一方面，却也轻松打破观众心目中对瘾君子一直以来的刻板单调印象，有助于凸现这个边缘群体的实在感与悲剧本质。

很多时候，我们正常人感觉离这个边缘群体挺遥远的，即使在路上见到也会敬而远之。但看过影片后，又渐渐觉得他们其实跟正常人没太多分别。他们也是有七情六欲的真实个体，也会有正常的喜怒哀乐，只不过是个人选择生活方式不同而已。我认为，萨弗迪兄弟透过这个悲伤的爱情故事并非要揭示或批判什么社会现象，他们只是想展示纽约这个特殊人群的真实面貌，让更多观众了解到纽约最深刻的一面，远非是游客观光时见到的靓丽风景。

VENICE – The days of The Panic in Needle Park, to name one iconic New York City drug movie, seem long gone, now that most of Manhattan’s one-time junkie hangouts have been gentrified to within an inch of their lives. But in Heaven Knows What, Josh and Benny Safdie rescue that subculture from the invisible margins. They weave a small group of young heroin addicts into the fabric of the city streets with a grubby lyricism that’s visually intoxicating even if its emotional impact remains somewhat muted.
Following their detour into unconventional sports documentary with Lenny Cooke, the sibling filmmaker team returns to the scruffy aesthetic, raw authenticity and unstrung characters of their first feature, Daddy Longlegs.
Their new slice of life on the fringes is often hard to watch due to the pain, self-destructiveness and even the numbing Warholian monotony of the existences it depicts with a verite candor that owes much to John Cassavetes. But the film, which at times also recalls the lo-fi work of Gus Van Sant, is laced with moments of surprising poignancy, goofy low-key farce and even a weird kind of charm. It’s also distinguished by an intense screen-acting debut from Arielle Holmes, playing an unflinching version of herself and her own experience.
While the movie’s theatrical prospects are slim, the triple showcase of Venice, Toronto and New York Film Festival slots should help build a platform for VOD exposure.
Ronald Bronstein, memorable as the less-than-model parent in Daddy Longlegs, wrote the screenplay with Josh Safdie, based on Holmes’ unpublished memoir, Mad Love in New York City. She plays Harley, a homeless drug addict in an obsessive on-off relationship with Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), whose nihilistic indifference extends to encouraging her suicidal impulses. That results in Harley slashing her wrist and landing in Bellevue in a mesmerizing sequence, played without dialogue and flooded with unsettling synth scoring.
Among the film’s most impressive qualities is the Safdie brothers’ boldly textural use of music — predominantly Isao Tomita‘s electronica versions of Debussy, but also a little Tangerine Dream and James Dashow, as well as some hardstyle and black metal.
The other standout element is Sean Price Williams‘ woozy cinematography, which hugs in close to the characters or sits back from a detached p.o.v., often shooting them in a bleached haze of light. They bleed into the visual field of sidewalks, storefronts, cars and pedestrians. This is not a portrait of New York’s junkie street subculture conveniently tucked into some skeevy pocket of the city. Instead they move freely, sometimes chafing against their surroundings, through libraries, Internet cafes, bookstores and fast-food joints.
The loose narrative tracks Harley’s half-hearted attempts to get by without Ilya. She brushes off the advances of abrasive Skully (rapper Necro) and slips into a friendship with Mike (Buddy Duress), an amusingly verbose dealer and fellow addict; he keeps her in smack but bristles when she can’t pay, his tenderness shifting to hostility.
While there’s a suggestion of a romantic triangle in Harley’s oscillations between Ilya and Mike, the Safdies are less interested in story or character than in immersing us in a milieu that most people would prefer to ignore. The film observes Harley and her cohorts “spanging,” street vernacular for begging, be it for spare change or subway entry; or stealing from a mailman’s bag, sifting through the contents for gift cards or cash.
A joyride on the motorcycle of Mike’s drug supplier Antoine (Benjamin Antoine Hampton) hints at momentary escape. But when the possibility of real deliverance surfaces via a hastily planned bus journey to Florida with the unpredictable Ilya, that notion is revealed to be an empty hope.
Heaven Knows What is a strange film, at once distancing and transfixing. If it’s not as impactful as it might have been considering the experiences portrayed, it has potent atmosphere and an admirable refusal to put any kind of gloss on the bleak reality of its limbo world. It also helps that Holmes, Jones and Duress, as well as the mainly non-actors in secondary roles, all inhabit their characters with real conviction.
Production companies: Iconoclast, Elara Pictures
Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress, Necro, Eleonore Hendricks, Yuri Pleskun, Benjamin Antoine Hampton, Diana Singh
Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie
Screenwriters: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, based on the novel, “Mad Love in New York City,” by Arielle Holmes
Producers: Oscar Boyson, Sebastian Bear-McClard
Executive producers: Charles-Marie Anthonioz, Mourad Belkeddar, Jean Duhamel, Nicolas Lhermitte
Director of photography: Sean Price Williams
Production designer: Audrey Tanner
Editors: Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Sales: ICM
No rating, 94 minutes.

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/3264279263

Another film about junkies? That question almost inevitably follows one’s learning the subject of Josh and Benny Safdie’s New York-set drama “Heaven Knows What,” and its main implication is clear: heroin addiction is at once so limited and so overdone as a narrative premise that filmmakers approaching it need to have something new to say, or to show.



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Unfortunately, the Safdies don’t. Their film is the latest in a long line of movies that seem to assume the milieu of addiction is justification enough for its existence. The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

No doubt the film’s surface attractions and its core weaknesses both owe to its origins. Reportedly, the Safdies were researching a project in New York’s diamond district when they spotted a pretty young blonde who they assumed might be a Russian diamond worker. Turns out she was a heroin addict from New Jersey named Arielle Holmes who had a troubled romantic relationship with another addict named Ilya.

Fascinated by Holmes’ stories of her street life, the Safdies persuaded her to write an account of it, a manuscript that became the basis for their screenplay (co-written by Ronald Bronstein). With Holmes playing Harley, a character who apparently differs from herself in name only, the filmmakers shot in the neighborhoods she frequented using people she knew as secondary characters and hidden cameras to disguise their presence (a technique also employed in Oren Moverman’s forthcoming “Time Out of Mind,” about a New York homeless man).

The look, of course, is very close to that of a documentary, which raises the question: Why isn’t “Heaven Knows What” a documentary? If conveying the reality of junkie life was the main objective, that course might have been more productive. As in many other cases, turning real-life material into drama can produce an awkward hybrid: a film in which the reality is diluted by fictionalization, while the fiction is rendered thin and sometimes clichéd due to being shackled to its real-life origins.

So it is here. When we first see Harley, she’s in full hyperactive mode, threatening suicide to the long-haired, plainly doped-up Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones), who’s far more interested in the public computer he’s staring at. She’s so desperately in love that she wants to sacrifice her life for him. His groggy response: If you want to prove your love, go ahead and off yourself.

One gets the feeling this pathetic little melodrama among the drug-addled has been having a long run. Soon enough, though, Harley makes good on her morbid proposal, buying a razor at a bodega and cutting her wrist in a park with Ilya looking on. Whisked to a hospital, she’s left with only some nasty-looking stitches as proof of her love.

For a while thereafter, thankfully, Ilya disappears from her life and two other guys take his place. Skully (rapper Necro) is a burly dude in a baseball cap who offers to treat her well and help her out, though it seems like he might have other agendas as well. She, in any case, isn’t interested in being courted with kind behavior and rebuffs him.

Far more important is the relationship with Mike (Buddy Duress), who also seems to want to help her but is constantly exasperated by her neediness, unreliability and demands for both dope and credit. Unlike Skully, he evidences no romantic feelings for Harley—though he plainly despises Ilya, a point that becomes more important later in the story—but is nevertheless bound to her by their never-ending rounds of scoring, shooting up and finding places to crash.

Though the protagonists here end up in hospitals repeatedly, there are no doctors, therapists or social workers as characters. Nor are there parents, family members, non-junkie friends, police officers or similar. The film keeps its characters in a tightly circumscribed bubble of junkie-dom, and that’s one thing that makes it feel a bit phony, less a probing, realistic view of a complex milieu than one that partakes of the junkies’ own gauzy self-involvement as well as previous fictions’ oblique romanticizing of them.

Given the film’s relative weakness on the narrative level, its performances become all the more important, and here the news is largely good. For a first-timer, Holmes is amazingly assured and precise. Landry Jones’ mopey, narcissistic Ilya, meanwhile, is solid and convincing, though not as extraordinary as his turn in John Boorman’s “Queen and Country” earlier this year. The stand-out, though, is Buddy Duress’ Mike. Though it’s clear the reputed “street legend” is not an experienced actor, his work has a force and rough authenticity that make it edgily compelling, his mannerisms and vocal intonations sometimes recalling the young Elliott Gould.

A stand-out of another sort is the camerawork of Sean Price Williams. Using understated lighting, long lenses both outdoors and in close-quartered interiors, and near-constant re-framings, this gifted cinematographer turns in a bravura performance that fully realizes the naturalistic intent of the Safdies’ stylistic approach. That such verité-like verisimilitude can’t substitute for dramatic truth is an obvious truism, but Willliams’ sharp work offers its own elegant justifications.


http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/heaven-knows-what-2015