Christopher Nolan新片< 盗梦空间> 评论----纽约客

Christopher Nolan, the British-born director of “Memento” and of the two most recent Batman movies, appears to believe that if he can do certain things in cinema—especially very complicated things—then he has to do them. But why? To what end? His new movie, “Inception,” is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.

Christopher Nolan（克里斯多夫.诺兰)，Memento(记忆碎片）和最近两部蝙蝠侠系列电影的英国导演，似乎坚信只要能在电影里实现的即使异常复杂也必须去做。这么做却是为何？又会带领他走向何方呢？他的最新作品"盗梦空间"确实是一个令人惊叹的作品，是一个浩大的工程，然而最终，变成一个愚蠢的行为。

Nolan has devoted his extraordinary talents not to some weighty, epic theme or terrific comic idea but to a science-fiction thriller that exploits dreams as a vehicle for doubling and redoubling action sequences. He has been contemplating the movie for ten years, and as movie technology changed he must have realized that he could do more and more complex things. He wound up overcooking the idea.

诺兰把他异常的天份奉献给了科幻惊悚类而不是那些场景浩大的史诗类主题或是炫目华丽的漫画构思场景，这类影片带给我们如同汽车掉头再加速那样的一系列感受的探梦经历。他已经研究这个电影10年了，再加上电影技术的不断创新，他可能已经意识到他可以设计更加复杂的因素在里，然而却使这个想法过了头。

Nolan gives us dreams within dreams (people dream that they’re dreaming); he also stages action within different levels of dreaming—deep, deeper, and deepest, with matching physical movements played out at each level—all of it cut together with trombone-heavy music by Hans Zimmer, which pounds us into near-deafness, if not quite submission. Now and then, you may discover that the effort to keep up with the multilevel tumult kills your pleasure in the movie. “Inception” is a stunning-looking film that gets lost in fabulous intricacies, a movie devoted to its own workings and to little else.

诺兰给我们带来了梦中梦这个概念（人们梦到他们正在做梦）；他还在电影中呈现了不同阶段的梦境---深度，次深度，最深度，再在不同梦境深度配合展开一些情节---然而伴随这些情节的是Hans Zimmer的那厚重的配乐，如果承受力不强的话，几乎都能把耳朵震聋。 迟早你可能会发现，当你为了能跟的上各个梦境阶段的喧闹打杀情节而随时绷紧神经时，影片的乐趣已荡然无存。“盗梦空间”是一部以单纯追求错综复杂的绝妙情节从而使人印象深刻的影片，它把大部分精力放在关注于影片自身的制作而忽略了其它很多东西。

The outer shell of the story is an elaborate caper. Leonardo DiCaprio, with a full head of golden hair and a touch of goatee, plays Cobb, an international thief. Not a common thief, but an “extractor”: he puts himself to sleep, enters the dreams of another person, then rummages around and steals something important that pops out of the sleeper’s unconscious—an industrial secret, say. Saito (Ken Watanabe), the head of an enormous Japanese energy company, hires Cobb to go beyond extraction to inception; that is, not to steal an idea but to plant one that the dreamer will think is his own.

故事的大框架讲述的是一个精心设计的阴谋。满头金发留着山羊胡子的莱昂纳多·迪卡普里奥扮演的是Cobb, 一个国际逃犯,也是一个“盗梦人” ：他使自己沉睡，进入另外一个人的梦境，然后翻寻并窃取那些在沉睡者的无意识中出现的重要信息--例如，商业机密。日本能源大亨齐藤（渡边谦扮演）雇佣Cobb采取一些比提取记忆更极端的行为，即在沉睡者脑里植入一些意识并让他们认为那就是他们自己的想法。

Just like Danny Ocean preparing to crack a safe, Cobb assembles a larcenous crew, who will enter the mark’s dreams with him. There’s a dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), who can create convincing interior worlds, so that the dreamer will think that everything is real. There’s a forger, Eames (Tom Hardy), who, in the dreams, can embody any person known to the dreamer. There’s a chemist, Yusuf (Dileep Rao), to drop both the team and the target into deeper layers of sleep with a super-sedative. And there’s a kind of dream manager, a demanding, unimaginative sourpuss named Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), to insure that the fantastic sting comes off.

就像十二罗汉里的Danny Ocean准备去搞定那个保险箱一样，Cobb集结了一帮一块进入到Mark梦境中的“能人”。这之中包括“筑梦师”，Ariadne (Ellen Page扮演），她可以创造出一个逼真的虚幻内在世界使得那些沉睡者可以坚信这一切都是真实的。还有梦境伪装者，Eames（Tom Hardy饰演），他可以伪装成任何一个沉睡者认识的人。药剂师Yusuf (Dileep Rao扮演) ，他能使用某种超级镇静剂带领目标人物和整个团队成员进入到更深层的梦境中。当然还需要有一个类似于头牌助手的人物，一个叫Arthur的成员（Joseph Gordon-Levitt），他要求苛刻又乏味刻板，但是却总能确保整个行动能按时有效地进行。

There’s also a wild card. Cobb’s dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), keeps jumping out of the lower reaches of his mind bearing a knife or a gun and crashing into the created dreams. Cobb is still in love with her, and feels guilty about something he did to her. Occasionally, he takes a rusty old elevator down to his subconscious and visits her. Cotillard, with her amber coloring, is ravishing and tear-stained, and, if you don’t pinch yourself too hard, you might be convinced that this science-fiction conceit is a modern Orpheus-and-Eurydice story of doomed love, complete with visits to the underworld.

当然还不能缺一个迷之人物,Cobb的死去的妻子。Mal(Marion Cotillard扮演)  一直在Cobb的“下游”意识中时不时的破坏他的行动，并且也闯入了那个被创造的梦境中。Cobb仍然爱着自己的妻子，对于她的死也一直感到很内疚。一次偶然的机会，他搭上一架锈迹斑斑的老旧电梯来到了自己的潜意识中并见到了他的妻子。有着一头棕发的Cotillard（歌迪亚），泪眼婆娑样子真的很销魂啊。当然，如果您的主观意识不是很强的话，你很可能还认为那段地狱拜访寓意的是现代版的“俄耳甫斯与欧律狄刻的生死恋”(故事说的是阿波罗的儿子俄尔普斯为了找寻他死去的爱人欧律狄克,排除万难,来到地狱,恳求冥王让他的新娘回到人间)。

As it is, these scenes are the only humanly involving elements in the movie. The rest is strenuous process. Shaking off his wife problem, Cobb leads his fellows into the dreams of a suave executive named Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and convinces him that his dying father (Pete Postlethwaite), the ornery head of another giant energy company, wants him to break up the firm. This will benefit Saito and also prevent world domination by Fischer (or something of that sort—the point is glossed over). Cobb agrees to attempt inception for one reason: Saito has promised to pull some strings that will allow him to return to his two young children in America, where he is wanted as a fugitive, charged with the crime of killing Mal.

当然，上面说的那些只是涉及到和各个人物有关的故事梗概 。剩下的可就是繁琐的过程了。甩开了妻子的干扰，Cobb带领他的小组成员进入了儒雅的某公司高层Robert Fischer（Cillian Murphy扮演)的梦境，并且试图植入“我死去的那个暴脾气能源大亨爸爸(Pete Postlethwaite扮演)希望我拆分掉公司。”这个信息进入他的大脑。这样齐藤就能受益，并且也能防止Fischer对于整个行业的统治。（关于这一点，电影里也没细说下去）。可Cobb同意执行这项“植入”行动却只是为了一个原因：齐藤答应可以做一些协调，让他回到以谋杀Mal为由而一直通缉他的美国，回到他两个孩子身边。

Summarizing the movie makes it sound saner than it is. For long stretches, you’re not sure whether you’re in dream or reality, which isn’t nearly as much fun as Nolan must have imagined it to be. Bizarre oddities, which complicate the puzzle but are meaningless in themselves, flash by in an instant. The actors, trying to suggest familiarity with the task of dream invasion, spin off gibberish in the most casual way. Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube. And the theologians of pop culture, taking a break from “The Matrix,” will analyze the over-articulate structure of “Inception” for mighty significances. Dreams, of course, are a fertile subject for moviemakers.

总结一下，这样看来这部影片的情节听上去还是比事实上要清晰的多。在一层层的情节展开过程中，你自己都不清楚那到底是在梦里还是在现实中。

那些怪异以及奇特的情节，使得这个谜题更加的错综复杂却又显得自身更加的无意义，一闪而过而已。演员们尽力的表现出对于侵入梦境这项任务的熟练度，加上必须特别自然的说出那些隐晦的莫名其妙的话语。我相信Youtube上马上会出现类似的恶搞。流行文化的理论家们，终于可以放下《骇客帝国》，转而把《盗梦空间》解读出种种夸大其辞的伟大意义了.梦，当然只是电影里惯用的一个噱头。

Buñuel created dream sequences in the teasing masterpieces “Belle de Jour” (1967) and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), but he was not making a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar thriller. He hardly needed to bother with car chases and gun battles; he was free to give his work the peculiar malign intensity of actual dreams. Buñuel was a surrealist— Nolan is a literal-minded man. Cobb’s intercranial adventures aren’t like dreams at all—they’re like different kinds of action movies jammed together.

关于梦境系列描述早在布努艾尔1967年的名片《白日美人》和1972年的《资产阶级的审慎魅力》中就出现过，但是他绝对不会耗资一亿六千万美元去拍摄一部电影。他都不需要去用到那些枪战和飞车场面，他的作品很自如的表现出现实梦境中那些怪异的邪恶程度。不容置疑，布努艾尔是一个超现实主义者--而诺兰只是一个缺乏想象力的人。Cobb脑海里的那些经历不像是梦境---倒像是那些各式动作电影被揉合在一块的产物。

Buildings explode or collapse, anonymous goons shoot at the dreammakers. Buñuel silently pushed us into reveries and left us alone to enjoy our wonderment, but Nolan is working on so many levels of representation at once that he has to lay in pages of dialogue just to explain what’s going on. At one point, Ariadne asks, “Wait—whose subconscious are we going into, exactly?,” and the audience laughs. It’s the only moment when Nolan acknowledges the nuttiness of his movie.

这边厢高楼爆炸或是倒塌，匪徒们追杀着那些“造梦者”。而那边布努艾尔只需静静的带领我们进入到遐思，然后让我们独自沉浸在那些惊叹中。然而诺兰需要同时拍摄如此之多层段的情节，以至于他在现场不得不做一些笔记来提醒自己。在某一场景，Ariadne说：“等等，我们现在到底是在谁的潜意识中？”然后观众大笑。而这一刻，诺兰不得不承认这部片确实很疯狂。

Nolan has always played games with time and sequence.

诺兰一直都善于玩时间游戏。这是他电影中常用的因素。

In his best movie, “Memento” (2000), Leonard, the traumatized hero (Guy Pearce), has lost his short-term memory. Each section of the movie moves further back in time, in sympathy with Leonard, until all the mysteries tormenting him are revealed. Working in shabby, closed spaces, Nolan created tense and powerful passages. Then he hit the open air. “Insomnia” (2002), a murder story with another haunted hero (Al Pacino), was shot in Alaska, and was filled with one ravishing white, pale-blue, and silver ice field after another. Nolan had developed a taste for grandeur, violence, and shock.

在他最为著名的作品“记忆碎片”（2000年）中，剧中的主角莱奥纳多（Guy Pearce）患有"短期失忆症"。电影的每小段都是已经发生过的事件回放，和主角一样，直到影片结束那些困扰并折磨他的谜团才被一一解开。在简陋而密闭的环境中工作，使得诺兰善于制造紧张和强大有张力的电影情节。随后他的"失眠症"（2002年），这是一个关于谋杀的故事，男主角（阿尔帕西诺饰演）一直受抑郁困扰，最终在阿拉斯加被杀，整部影片笼罩着一个接一个的令人陶醉的白色，浅蓝色，和银色色调的场景。诺兰一直以来就偏爱宏大的场景，充斥着暴力和令人震惊的情节。

In “The Dark Knight” (2008), Batman’s flights into the chasms of the nighttime city took your breath away, but the movie was perverse, almost nihilistic in its indifference to story logic. The Nolan who revelled in stunning imagery was becoming a magical manipulator—something that he celebrated in “The Prestige” (2006), which turned prestidigitation into an end in itself. “Inception” is nominally humanist in its sentiments, but you can’t help feeling that, for Nolan, character quirks are just fungible elements in a comprehensive visual scheme.

在2008年的影片黑暗骑士中，蝙蝠侠飞往夜间的城市裂缝的场景让我们都屏住了呼吸，但是整部电影确实有悖常理，他似乎丝毫不关注故事的逻辑性。当诺兰陶醉在那些令人眼花缭乱的影像中时，他已渐渐成为了一个幻术操控师----如同他在"致命魔术"（2006年）中宣扬的那些一样，但最终把这些魔法伎俩带入深渊。“盗梦空间”表面上看起来像是一部人文主义片，但是你却能渐渐的意识到，对于诺兰来说，影片内人物遇到的那些怪诞经历只是众多情节设计中的某一个可代替的噱头。     

Working with the cinematographer Wally Pfister, Nolan does pull off some classic sequences in “Inception.” When Cobb is teaching Ariadne what to do, he takes her into a dream (she thinks it’s reality), and, as they sit in a Paris café, the city begins popping and exploding around them—the brioches fly through the air in taunting slow motion. Later, Cobb lifts an entire Paris neighborhood like a drawbridge, and he and Ariadne, reaching the hinge where the streets turn upward, walk on the perpendicular right into the next arrondissement.

与摄像师 Wally Pfister合作，诺兰在“盗梦空间”中顺利的完成了经典的''sequences"方式（即电影中表现同一主题或场面的一组镜头）拍摄。其中有一个场景是，为了告诉Ariadne她的职责是什么，Cobb带她进入到了梦境（她认为这是现实），然后当他们在巴黎的一家咖啡馆坐下，周围的城市开始不停的爆开---牛角面包在空中以滑稽的慢动作飞转着。随后，整个街区像活动的吊桥那样被拉起，然后他们来到折叠处，朝垂直的方向走向另外一个区。

Nolan uses C.G.I. freely, but some of the most crazily beautiful things are achieved without it. At the climax of the movie, a van carrying dreamers falls off a bridge in a prolonged slow-motion shot, while, a level down, in a deeper dream, the same characters, in physical imitation, float weightlessly in a hotel room. Nolan suspended the actors with invisible wires, as Ang Lee did in the magnificent fighting-on-treetops scenes in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and the solidity of the floating and falling bodies is oddly moving. Pushed to its limits, the human body has a dignity that it loses in computer-generated fantasy. In another sequence linked to the falling van, Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a tumbling, weightless fight with a thug in a spinning hotel corridor. This may be the giddiest movie moment since Fred Astaire climbed the walls in “Royal Wedding.”

诺兰已经很自如的运用电脑特效，但其实一些异乎美妙的东西是不需要通过这些来实现的。在电影的高潮部分，通过拉长了的慢镜头我们看到载着这些“造梦者”的卡车从桥上坠落，同时，这群人进入到了更深层的梦境，在宾馆房间的空中中模拟无重力的漂浮着。这些演员都用隐形威亚吊在空中，就像李安的卧虎藏龙中在树枝上那场华丽的打斗场景一样。然而浮着的和坠落下的那部分身体却很怪异的在动。限于一些身体构造的限制，人类的身体是有自重的，但这一切却在电脑制作的幻象中全然消失。而在另外一组和卡车坠落结合的镜头中，Joseph Gordon-Levitt在宾馆走道有一场和暴徒的无重力状态翻转打斗场景。这恐怕得是自 Fred Astaire在"皇家婚礼"中在天花板上跳舞那之后最让人眩晕的电影了。

But who cares if Cobb gets back to two kids we don’t know? And why would we root for one energy company over another? There’s no spiritual meaning or social resonance to any of this, no critique of power in the dream-world struggle between C.E.O.s. It can’t be a coincidence that Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” (2009), which was also about industrial espionage, played time games, too.

但是谁在乎Cobb是不是和他的两个孩子团聚了呢？我们犯得着一会儿支持这个能源公司一会儿又站在另外一个公司那边嘛？这根本没有一点人文精神意义，或是引起社会的共鸣。也没有任何对梦境世界中CEO之间斗争的那些权力欲望的批判。2009年Tony Gilroy的"口是心非"已经拍过类似的商业间谍战了，同样也是时间游戏，这不可能仅仅是一个巧合吧！

两部电影中的这种过度设计的叙事方式其实都间接暗示我们导演很清楚他们的故事没有一个核心，所以必须得靠那些来吸引观众。假如有可能的话，我真想在诺兰的脑子植入一些想法，这样下回他就不用这么闹心了。对于他这种在电影中尽力避开一些强烈的情感的做法越来越像一个出题者痴迷于用那些复杂难懂的细节和一些隐喻的方式来晃点我们，只不过这个谜题是放大版而已。

The over-elaboration of narrative devices in both movies suggests that the directors sensed that there was nothing at the heart of their stories to stir the audience. In any case, I would like to plant in Christopher Nolan’s head the thought that he might consider working more simply next time. His way of dodging powerful emotion is beginning to look like a grand-scale version of a puzzle-maker’s obsession with mazes and tropes.

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