Noah Baumbach: an analytical filmmaker who always viewed life as material for a film.
Throughout history, there are few people who were capable of serving as a director, a screenwriter, a producer and an actor at the same time in film industry. Noah Baumbach is one of them. After being nominated and awarded by the Venice International Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, he went back to the spotlight with his new film Marriage Story at the BFI London Film Festival. It has attracted much interest since it is the European premiere of the film and fortunately, Noah showed up and shared the creative experience with the audiences.
What would you do if you are going to get divorced? It’s really hard to protect what is true and sanctity about a past love. But Nicole and Charlie tried, who are a couple in Noah Baumbach’s new film Marriage Story. The film describes a pioneering theatre director who is living in New York, and his wife who is filming a TV series in Los Angeles, having to divorce for various reasons. They all tried to keep the separation in a friendly context, but the involvement of lawyers made that hope hard to achieve. As an attentive director, Noah shows the trivial marriage life incisively and vividly. As Rolling Stone’s David Fear (https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/adam-driver-scarlett-johansen-noah-baumbach-marriage-story-trailer-900541/) described, this film is kind of a “map of the ever-shifting terrain between negotiating a goodbye that goes from amicably chilly to Chernobyl-level disaster.” There are always ups and downs in a close relationship and there are no winners in a failed relationship.
Noah Baumbach was born in a family of senior intellectuals in Brooklyn. His father was a novelist and commentator, and his mother was a commentator of The Village Voice magazine. The edification of literature makes him became an exquisite person, which may be the cornerstone of his entry into the film industry. In 1995, he first came into public view with the film he severed as director and writer, Kicking and Screaming, which started his career in film industry. And he was premiered in 1995 at the New York Film Festival. Baumbach was chosen as one of Newsweek’s “Ten New Faces of 1996”. Later on, his film The Squid and the Whale produced in 2005 was a great success, earning Baumbach two awards at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It also received six Independent Spirit Award nominations, three Golden Globe nominations and the New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review all voted it the year’s best screenplay. In 2013, he also tried to be a producer of the comedy film “the romance of Broadway.” He showed a great talent and seems to be gifted in film industry.
Noah seems to have a special preference for observing people’s emotion. This time, he explored a divorce again. Although he described the divorce of his parents in his previous film The Squid and the Whale which was introduced previously, this time, he shows some new idea by discussing both divorce and law. Except himself, he found that a lot of his friends got divorced as well. So, as an analytical person in life, he began to record the story of divorce. He interviewed many people who had divorce experience, including lawyers. He said what surprised him most was that everyone had the same thorough pain, which has changed their life and reality in many ways. No matter how good the intention at the beginning, the divorce system will definitely make the process of breaking up very difficult. What interested him was not only their stories, but also their emotions, however, the commonality of these emotions was hard to describe. It’s no exaggeration to say that Marriage Story is Noah’s own divorce experience emotionally — a memory shared in a gentle but failed relationship.
It is a thought-provoking and inner heavy story, deeply discusses the complex emotional changes in marriage life, or divorce life, and has a high sense of emotional stimulation. The film has a kind of abstract collage style, showing the audience all kinds of complex emotions such as depression, anger and contradiction, but also with some sense of humour and human care. In American independent films, there are lots of people who can tell attractive stories and are good at creating atmosphere. Noah’s story is not so amazing, and most of the characters are not so pleasant, but their natural and real performance can be cleverly eroded in the trivial life. Marriage story does including some “personal nature” of Noah and it can be regarded as a concentrated display of Noah’s advantages to a large extent. Of course, when someone have something to do with a subject, he will always produce something touching.
Although it’s a film produced by Netflix, it is very accessible for film fans in Europe. Not only since the content and emotion of the film can resonate with people all over the world, but also because it is about to be released. In November this year, the film is going to be released in America and Europe and then it will be accessible online, which is worth all fans’ expectation.
