《敦刻尔克》：不像战争片的战争片

时间：2020-03-24 05:21:19 来源：千叶帆本文已影响人

This extraordinary film is almost as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. What it does， first of all， is to recreate the evacuation of 300，000 British troops from a beach in Nazi-occupied France in 1940 from three different perspectives.2 One section is set on and near the broad beach， where a bedraggled young soldier（Fionn Whitehead） is hoping to catch a lift back to England， and where a brisk naval officer （Kenneth Branagh） is overseeing operations.3 Again and again the soldier thinks he’s homeward bound； again and again he is flung， like Sisyphus， back to where he started.4 Another strand is set on the English Channel， where a middle-aged civilian（Mark Rylance） is steering one of Operation Dynamo’s fabled “little ships”.5 And one is set in the sky， where two unflappable RAF Spitfire pilots（Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden） maintain their cool professionalism as their fuel runs low.6

This might seem conventional enough； Dunkirk is hardly the first war drama to cut between several storylines. Christopher Nolan’s stroke of genius is to have his storylines running at different speeds.7 The beach sequence8 unfolds over a week， the sea sequence over a day and the sky sequence over an hour. And yet Mr Nolan， who wrote as well as directing Dunkirk， intertwines these strands so that they all appear to be happening at once—a time-bending trick he tried out in Inception（2010）.9 It’s only later in the film that you spot the connections； you realise that the ship that capsized10 after half an hour in one strand is the same ship that capsized after an hour in another one. As in Mr Nolan’s breakthrough film， Memento（2000）， there’s a jigsaw puzzle for the viewer to assemble.11 By the end it’s clear that he has written three seemingly separate short stories which are bound intricately12 together. While he was refining his screenplay， his office wall must have been papered with flow charts and diagrams.13

The music is nearly as radical14 as the structure. Composed by Hans Zimmer， it is， appropriately， the kind of nerve-shredding score you’d associate with a horror movie， or a Hitchcockian psychological thriller.15 It’s relentless and insistent， with ticking noises and wave after crashing wave of strings heightening the tension.16 Bursts of staccato white noise build momentum like a steam train accelerating through your skull.17 It’s impossible to ignore.

Dunkirk is blatantly18 the work of a clever filmmaker who loves to experiment with innovative techniques. But the elements that Mr Nolan leaves out are significant， too， elements which can be categorised as： “everything you might expect from a war movie.” An opening caption19 mentions that“the enemy have driven the British and French armies to the sea”， but that’s all the scene-setting we get. Mr Nolan drops the viewer straight into the frantic heart of the action—so that we are as bewildered as the protagonists—and he keeps us there without respite.20 There are no scenes in the Cabinet War Rooms or on the home front， no sign of either Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill， no stirring rhetoric or bonding conversations.21 Mr Rylance and Mr Branagh have a few on-the-nose lines which sketch in some context， but otherwise the dialogue and exposition are pared back to the bone.22

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《敦刻尔克》：不像战争片的战争片

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