Perhaps it is the forgotten benefit of any movie, when he whispered in the ear of the viewer through colors, lights and music, asking about the moral value against material wealth, or about the value of safety and love for money and betrayal.
Director Song presented this forgotten benefit in the movie “Maadi”, whisper, which looks as if he was releasing a friend sitting with the scenes of work in the courtyard of his home, and they meditated together the meaning of life and love.
Song was wrapped in the question in an elegant silky dress, in itself it appears a thin whisper of the eyes of those who watched it, and dreamy looks from the eyes of a confused heroine, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), through a window in the upper floor of a luxurious house in a sophisticated neighborhood. It is the features of a story that is narrated by whisper and silence about the emotion that was besieged by luxury, wealth and planning, and turned into a commodity, sold for money, and evil luxury.
Celine Song, the director of the movie “past lives” (2023), in which she explored the feelings of childhood, connection and separation under the umbrella of remorse, to be released in her new movie “The Maadi”, a different theme centered on rationalization and rational choice, in exchange for drifting behind emotion.
The heroine of the movie, “Lucy”, an elegant and educated woman, is taking two parallel experiences with two different men: the first is Charles (Chris Evans), a successful banker who believes in numbers and logic, and the second is Alejandro (Pedro Pascal), a romantic theater writer, who lacks money but has internal richness full of memories.
Tension does not arise from the comparison between the two men, but rather from Lucy’s deep awareness that the choice may have been determined in advance, before you meet either of them, as if the decisiveness was not the result of the moment but rather a reflection of a long path of convictions and experiences.
The power of what is not said
Despite the beauty of dialogue, and the use of the script for clear words and elegant sentences, the silence between those words and the camera hopes for reactions without sound is what gives the film its deeper impact, and enables the viewer to understand the real bets at work. It is the invisible influencer that the director Celine Song’s camera changled during the work and could not seize it between the boundaries of the shots, but it conveyed its impact on the business journey.
Perhaps the most obvious model, so it comes in the scene of Lucy alone in an apartment in a tall architecture overlooking the Central Park, and its back to the city’s horizon, and its phone is lit with a message that she did not send. Details of the cinematic shot were formed with a little, calm, and slow that the viewer may make a mistake.
But the sound of silence was Hardra, while the heroine thumb hovering over the screen with a dryness and frequency and a lot of reservation. Silence works as strength and not merely an absence of dialogue or music, which is the “paper” “paper” in which negotiations with power are being negotiated, which is, also, expressing rejection, and more severe, is the way in which love is rejected.
In another scene, Lucy and Alejandro sits face to face in a café in the city center, do not utter a word for about 3 minutes, no words, no memories. They are two people who are chased by the distance between them, deepening the noise of the surrounding life issued by the movement of coffee cups, gossip of the café customers in the background, their mutual separation, and the silence between them appears as if it was a recognition of the inability to continue.
Silence expresses the meaning of the opposite in an amazing eloquence in a scene in which Charles Lucy is guided by a sapphire contract after a controversy, to respond to it with polite gratitude, and he replies in turn, “It is not an apology, it is a receipt”, so that the romantic gesture turns into a financial treatment, and the silence of revealing and embarrassing or silence that announces the transformation of the relationship into a contractual agreement.
What makes the movie very painful is that no one is completely cold. Alejandro writing letters in his handwriting. Charles tells her that love, for him, means safety. Even Lucy, whose decisions are accurately making a surgeon, reveals herself a little. However, each of them learned the same lesson: to survive in this world, love must be negotiated, not to announce.
Special effects of the eternal question
Work does not depend on regular visual effects, neither explosions, nor cities created with computer programs or artificial intelligence, nor strange creatures, but the viewer finds special visual effects belonging to the elegant world of Celine Song, which are effects that work in an emotional harmony that they become invisible, and they are present to serve a philosophical goal related to choice more than the dazzling service in the movie.
These influences reflect the internal situation of the characters without drawing attention to them, as they use the light coming from the windows skillfully to change the mood and hierarchy, especially when Lucy with Charles was in their elegant modern home, to find the scenes focused and excessive light Coastified apartments, the colors and the surrounding texture to soften the world.
New York appears in the movie “The Maadi” completely different, it is very clean, and has been carefully prepared to fit Lucy’s imagination. The sky was used, and the repercussions shown in the glass of skyscrapers, and the surrounding fog, all, to build a city that appears to be designed for power, not for people.
The work makers committed to two rhythms of the two experiences that the heroine went through. During the scenes of Harry (Pedro Pascal), the rich suitor, we find a smooth and disciplined rhythm, during which the camera slides smoothly, the conversations flow smoothly as a commercial deal, and the montage creates a stable and tempting rhythm.
On the contrary, her meetings with her ex -boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), are a cardamom card, because the rhythm is intermittent and unexpected, with the sounds of the loud city’s sounds and a more rough and overlapping dialogue.
Celine Song decided to send a strongly worded message to the whole world, and to the viewers of her movie, and make her movie a mirror through which we get to know ourselves not through money or men, but when the heroine holds her breath before she chooses a path that she really knows that she will regret it, and in the way she touches the luxury as if she was going to burn her, and in which love turned into an evaluation of risks? But what is the value of love?