The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。如果中年人生是一场修行,该期待的是顿悟,还是在矇眼的黑暗中放慢呼吸?模范主妇严太太在买菜煮饭、带狗看医生的琐碎日常中,持续过着灵修人生;上班无趣,下班无处可去的严先生,也日复一日地过着“修行”般敬而远之的婚姻生活。直到严太太意外接到一通电话,得知多年前丈夫短暂出轨的对象住进了疗养院的消息,原本凝固的日子便开始掀起波澜⋯⋯ 《修行》改编自作家王定国的短篇小说《妖精》。导演钱翔再次携手金马影后陈湘琪,搭配金马影帝陈以文饰演一对感情零温度的夫妻,全片探讨中年婚姻危机与难解的人生课题,以细腻而诗意的影像语言,对情感与人性层层剖析。如果无爱的婚姻是一场修行,该盼望的是回应,还是在无声的日子里得过且过?。