摘要：在《猎杀之后》这部新作中，导演卢卡·瓜达尼诺构筑了一座流光溢彩的纸牌屋。朱莉娅·罗伯茨饰演的耶鲁哲学教授阿尔玛，因学生指控同事性侵而陷入道德漩涡。当 #MeToo风暴席卷象牙塔 ，每个人都戴着精心雕琢的面具——脆弱的指控者、油滑的被告、深不可测的旁观者。真相在
有趣灵魂说
在《猎杀之后》这部新作中，导演卢卡·瓜达尼诺构筑了一座流光溢彩的纸牌屋。朱莉娅·罗伯茨饰演的耶鲁哲学教授阿尔玛，因学生指控同事性侵而陷入道德漩涡。当 #MeToo风暴席卷象牙塔 ，每个人都戴着精心雕琢的面具——脆弱的指控者、油滑的被告、深不可测的旁观者。真相在层层谎言中若隐若现，信任在权力博弈间分崩离析。这不仅是关于性侵指控的罗生门，更是对当代知识分子困境的犀利解剖。瓜达尼诺以令人目眩的视觉美学，邀我们共赴这场充满谎言的盛宴，在风格与实质的边界探寻人性的真相。
The New Yorker｜The Current Cinema
纽约客｜当下影院
“After the Hunt” Is a Pleasurably Ludicrous House of Cards
《猎杀之后》是一部令人愉悦且荒诞的纸牌屋
In Luca Guadagnino’s film, Julia Roberts plays a Yale professor forced to choose sides when a student accuses a colleague of sexual assault.
在卢卡·瓜达尼诺（Luca Guadagnino）的电影中，朱莉娅·罗伯茨（Julia Roberts）饰演一位耶鲁大学教授，当一名学生指控其同事性侵时，她被迫选择立场。
By Justin Chang
罗伯茨的魅力在于，当她的角色阿尔玛（Alma）面对一个日益令人忧惧的困境时，她会退缩进一个难以捉摸的茧中。直到阿尔玛采取行动，你才能完全领会她一直在默默权衡的一切。插图：拉吉·杜纳（Raj Dhunna）
如果在卢卡·瓜达尼诺电影那极其滑溜的表象之下，有什么真理坚不可摧的话，那就是：呈现方式至关重要。没有哪项服饰决定是轻率做出的，也没有哪个设计元素是偶然达成的。他的新片《猎杀之后》的开场字幕应该会让你高度警觉。它们优雅地以看似温莎轻体窄缩的字体呈现，这种字体被广泛认为是伍迪·艾伦（Woody Allen）在银幕上偏爱的字体。配乐中的一首萨德·琼斯（Thad Jones）的爵士标准曲或多或少证实了，我们正在观看的是一种近乎挑衅的致敬行为。我们是否即将进入一个如同许多艾伦电影中那样，由迷人、享有特权、无可救药地自我关注的知识分子组成的小圈子？抑或是瓜达尼诺的艺术将要模仿艾伦的生活，讲述一个关于严酷指控、坚决否认以及各执一词的辩证法的故事？
是的，以上皆是。《猎杀之后》围绕着阿尔玛·伊姆霍夫（Alma Imhoff）展开，她是耶鲁大学哲学系的教授，那里的谈话既不轻松也不紧凑。她由朱莉娅·罗伯茨（Julia Roberts）饰演，你可能还记得，她在《蒙娜丽莎的微笑》中饰演过一位1950年代的艺术史讲师，推动思想保守的韦尔斯利女性走向自我实现。阿尔玛，一个我们时代的产物，提供了一种更为棘手的女性主义启示：她令人生畏、冷漠、受人惧怕，也被人崇拜。我数到过一次她未加防备的爆发性大笑，那是当阿尔玛与一位同事喝酒放松时，发出了罗伯茨标志性的开怀大笑，但这感觉像是一次醉酒的异常——来自一个深知学术权威最好以冷峻面目示人的女性身上，一丝不合时宜的温暖微光。她大步走进教室，只需说出"福柯的全景监狱"这几个词，就足以让我们所有人都变成老师的宠儿，急切地在座位上向前探身。
在她与身为心理分析师的丈夫弗雷德里克（Frederik，迈克尔·斯图巴/Michael Stuhlbarg 饰）共同主持的一场晚宴上，阿尔玛同样如鱼得水。她拥有维罗妮卡·莱克（Veronica Lake）式的卷发，光彩照人，在雅致的木镶板背景下被柔和灯光照亮，吸引了在场所有人的目光。那个留着山羊胡、轻浮又夸夸其谈的人是位更年轻的哲学教授汉克（Hank，安德鲁·加菲尔德/Andrew Garfield 饰），他用把腿翘到沙发上的阿尔玛身边的姿势，来示意他们多年的友谊（或许不止于此）。坐在附近的是玛吉（Maggie，阿约·艾德比里/Ayo Edebiri 饰），一位据传才华横溢的博士生，尽管从她坐立不安的样子中，我们所能察觉到的只有对阿尔玛认可的焦虑渴望（或许也不止于此）。派对上的闲聊充满了高深莫测的知识分子腔调、跨代际的相互抨击以及系内竞争，所有这些，没有人能够也不应该误认为是像样的学术圈谈话。编剧诺拉·加勒特（Nora Garrett）成功地创造了一种有趣且华丽的好莱坞拟像——一种滑向心照不宣的戏仿——描绘了一个极度自恋的世界。角色们越是惹人厌烦，电影就变得越引人入胜。
故事发生在2019年秋天， #MeToo运动方兴未艾 ，而多元、公平与包容政策（DEI）的回缩及其他对社会正义的反动攻击尚未来临。但《猎杀之后》并不显得过时；正如其片名所暗示的，它是一部时代剧，并且它深知这一点。（设定在2025年初的尾声部分明确而辛酸地表明了这一点。）其效果是为故事注入了一种不可否认且心照不宣的怀旧感；在阿尔玛的派对上，发现每个人都在争论具有代表性的重大问题，是多么古怪啊。一位令人不快的客人暗示，阿尔玛是否会比汉克先获得终身教职，仅仅因为她不是一个顺性别白人直男？当下的进步风潮将如何影响尼采、海德格尔、弗洛伊德以及其他有争议的过往天才们的教学？
在这些修辞佯攻之下，加勒特为角色和观众同样设下了一个复杂的陷阱。一天晚上，阿尔玛回到家，发现玛吉等在外面，脸上带着狂乱的痛苦表情，并有一段可怕的经历要倾诉。她说，派对结束后，汉克送她回公寓，上来喝了杯睡前酒，然后不顾她的抗议，醉醺醺地侵犯了她。"他越界了，"玛吉坚持说，而她措辞中的某些东西敲响了警钟，仿佛她描述的不是性侵犯的创伤，而是一次细致记录的道德规范的违反。艾德比里，睁大眼睛，几乎像个幽灵，似乎被导演要求表演得像是在撒谎——而且撒得很糟。玛吉请求阿尔玛的支持，但我们听到的与其说是求助的呼喊，不如说更像是对忠诚度的考验。阿尔玛以多过同情的疑问作为回应，彻底搞砸了这场考验。
如果我们观众也觉得玛吉缺乏说服力，那是否意味着我们也辜负了她呢？嗯，不：她是一个虚构角色，而且，正如阿尔玛在一次研讨课上暴躁地指出的那样，虚构角色不需要被溺爱；他们存在的意义就是被仔细审视、分析，并且在需要时被拆解。瓜达尼诺鼓励我们的怀疑，用夸张的恐怖片特写镜头拍摄玛吉，配以特伦特·雷泽诺（Trent Reznor）和阿蒂克斯·罗斯（Atticus Ross）配乐中那厄运般的低音音符和尖啸的风声。关于玛吉不可信的念头早已在一个早期场景——派对中途，涉及一个浴室柜和一个碰巧装满旧新闻剪报的信封，这些剪报关乎阿尔玛过去的黑暗秘密——中被埋下。玛吉是个窥探者——而且是个笨拙的窥探者。（她长时间地翻阅剪报，以至于我以为她在扫描寻找优惠券。）她也象征着一个故事，其中没有任何事、任何人值得信任。
《猎杀之后》的几乎每一帧都在编织一个光鲜的谎言，这不仅仅是因为这部电影虽然设定在纽黑文，却是在伦敦拍摄的。它是一部奢华的常春藤联盟背景的悬疑剧和一块电影罗夏墨迹测验，被巧妙地操纵以产生层层递进的怀疑浪潮。汉克，拼命地想获得阿尔玛的信任，声称他曾当面指出玛吉存在剽窃证据，而她的强奸指控纯属报复。但是，在他油滑的魅力之下潜藏的毒性、那未加掩饰的性攻击能力又该如何解释？这些都对她的辩解没有帮助，尽管它确实拓宽了加菲尔德的戏路。作为一名以饰演良心拒服兵役者、耶稣会牧师和蜘蛛侠等角色闻名的演员，他似乎很享受能扮演一个彻头彻尾的卑鄙小人。
那么阿尔玛呢？她可能是这群人中最可疑的一个，而她的部分魅力正来自于，当她的困境变得愈加令人忧惧时，她退缩进一个难以捉摸的茧中的方式。罗伯茨，她的脸像一张面具，更多地是暗示而非戏剧化地表现角色的内心盘算。直到阿尔玛采取行动，你才能完全领会她一直在默默权衡的一切：拒绝支持玛吉——一位父母是大学主要捐助者的酷儿黑人女性——的后果，但也有可能失去汉克——一位多年的朋友，同时也恰好是职业竞争对手。此外，还有那些剪报中暗示的有罪的过去，对其的记忆经常以令人衰弱疼痛和恶心的方式击倒她。罗伯茨不是那种你常会看到对着马桶呕吐的女演员，而那景象和声音真切地令人不安，仿佛阿尔玛的五脏六腑正在从内部抵制她。唯一看起来完全透明的角色是弗雷德里克，他无法隐藏对自己二等配偶地位的怨恨，也无法掩饰对那些像藤壶一样依附于他妻子的谄媚者和庸才的蔑视。这个角色对斯图巴并不友好，但在这里，就像在瓜达尼诺的《请以你的名字呼唤我》中一样，他被很好地选角为一位边缘但洞察真相的讲述者，并且他以一种被戴绿帽的戏剧女神的俏皮机智胜任了这场表演。
弗雷德里克会对这部电影做出怎样犀利而诚实的评价？他可能会发现，《猎杀之后》表面上是一个引发热议的开端，但对其所提出的问题——无论是种族、性别、酷儿身份、多元性、抵制文化、性侵，当然还有哲学——都言之甚少。我这么说几乎是一种赞美；加勒特知道如何运用冗词作为误导。有时，你可能会感觉到电影在亮出底牌，比如当一位校园心理咨询师（由极其冷面的科洛·塞维尼/Chloë Sevigny 饰演）直言不讳地指出耶鲁学生的特权、特权意识和无休止的自我受害者心态时："这些孩子，"她嘲笑道，"他们一生下来就什么都有了。"但瓜达尼诺，享受着每一句台词演绎的乐趣，保持着相当好的扑克脸。一部应景热门剧的惯例和姿态——反射性的白眼、值得喝彩的斥责——显然让他兴奋。吸引他接触这种素材的，并非其伦理困境的重量，而是有机会观看美丽的人们试图，或假装，去理清这些困境。
《猎杀之后》将被嘲笑为不过是一种知识分子式的客厅把戏，一座脆弱的纸牌屋。我不会不同意，但很少有导演能比瓜达尼诺，无论用什么材料，建造出更奢华的房子。最具揭示性的台词来自一个边缘角色，哲学系系主任，他哀叹自己职位日益浅薄和政治化的本质："出乎意料地，我发现自己从事的是表象的行业，而非实质。"瓜达尼诺不作此区分。对他而言，风格即是实质，而表象不过是风格的各种变体。难怪罗伯茨的表演在阿尔玛的怒火最终公开爆发时达到了强度的顶峰，并且最不可抗拒地牵动着我们的同情心，那场全力的人格诋毁式的咆哮，既气势逼人，又极不明智。正如人们所说，那不是什么好形象。但它是一个绝佳的形象。 ♦
Justin Changis a film critic at The New Yorker. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
贾斯汀·张（Justin Chang）是《纽约客》的影评人。他赢得了2024年普利策批评奖。
Roberts’s magnetism comes from the way she withdraws into a cocoon of inscrutability as her character, Alma, faces an increasingly fraught dilemma. It isn’t until Alma acts that you grasp all that she’s been quietly weighing.Illustration by Raj Dhunna
If there is a truth that holds firm beneath the wickedly slippery surfaces of Luca Guadagnino’s movies, it’s that presentation counts. No sartorial decision is made lightly, and no design element is arrived at by accident. The opening titles of his new drama, “After the Hunt,” should have you on high alert. They’re elegantly rendered in what looks to be Windsor Light Condensed, widely recognizable as Woody Allen’s onscreen typeface of choice. A Thad Jones jazz standard on the soundtrack more or less confirms that we’re watching a borderline trollish act of homage. Are we about to enter an enclave of attractive, privileged, hopelessly self-involved intellectuals, as in so many Allen movies? Or will Guadagnino’s art imitate Allen’s life, with a tale of grim allegations, firm denials, and he-said-she-said dialectics?
Yes, to all of the above. “After the Hunt” revolves around Alma Imhoff, a professor in the philosophy department at Yale, where the talk is neither light nor condensed. She is played by Julia Roberts, who, you may recall, was a nineteen-fifties art-history instructor in “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003), pushing conservative-minded Wellesley women toward self-realization. Alma, a creature of our times, offers a pricklier kind of feminist inspiration: she’s formidable, aloof, feared, and adored. I counted one unguarded outburst of laughter, when Alma, unwinding over drinks with a colleague, lets out the signature full-throated Roberts cackle, but it felt like a boozy anomaly—a stray glimmer of warmth from a woman who knows that scholarly authority is best served cold. Striding into a classroom, she has only to utter the words “Foucault’s panopticon” to reduce us all to teacher’s pets, eagerly leaning forward in our seats.
At a dinner party she hosts with her psychoanalyst husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), Alma is no less in her element. Resplendent in Veronica Lake curls, and softly lighted against handsome wood panelling, she draws the attention of everyone in sight. The flirty blowhard with the goatee is a younger philosophy professor, Hank (Andrew Garfield), who signals their years of friendship (and maybe more) by propping his legs up against her on the couch. Seated nearby is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a doctoral candidate rumored to be brilliant, though all we can discern, watching her fidget, is an anxious yearning for Alma’s approval (and maybe more). The party chatter is thick with high-flown intellectualism, cross-generational sniping, and intra-department rivalry, none of which anyone could or should mistake for plausible academia-speak. The screenwriter, Nora Garrett, has achieved an amusingly florid Hollywood simulacrum—one that tilts into knowing parody—of an intensely self-regarding world. The more irritating the characters get, the more compelling the movie becomes.
It’s the fall of 2019, with #MeToo still ascendant and the rollback of D.E.I. and other reactionary assaults on social justice still far in the future. But “After the Hunt” doesn’t feel dated; as its title implies, it’s a period piece and it knows it. (An epilogue set in early 2025 makes this pointedly and poignantly clear.) The effect is to infuse the story with an undeniable and knowing nostalgia; how quaint, at Alma’s party, to find everyone debating matters of representational consequence. Will Alma earn tenure before Hank, a guest noxiously suggests, simply because she isn’t a straight, white, cisgender male? How will the progressive winds of the present affect the teaching of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and other problematic geniuses of the past?
Beneath such rhetorical feints, Garrett sets an intricate trap for characters and viewers alike. Alma returns home one evening to find Maggie waiting outside with a look of wild anguish and a terrible experience to recount. After the party, she says, Hank walked her back to her apartment, came up for a nightcap, and, against her protests, drunkenly assaulted her. “He crossed the line,” Maggie insists, and something in her phrasing sounds a warning bell, as if she were describing not the trauma of a sexual violation but a meticulously recorded breach of moral protocol. Edebiri, wide-eyed and almost wraithlike, seems to have been directed to act as if she were lying—and lying badly. Maggie asks for Alma’s support, but what we hear sounds less like a cry for help than like a test of loyalty. Alma, responding with more questions than sympathy, fails it utterly.
Have we in the audience also failed Maggie if we find her unpersuasive? Well, no: she’s a fictional character, and, as Alma peevishly points out during a seminar, fictional characters don’t need to be coddled; they’re there to be scrutinized, analyzed, and, if need be, torn down. Guadagnino encourages our doubts, shooting Maggie in exaggerated horror-movie closeups set to the doomy bass notes and shrieking winds of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score. The idea of Maggie’s untrustworthiness has already been planted in an early scene, mid-party, involving a bathroom cabinet and a hidden envelope conveniently filled with old news clippings concerning dark secrets in Alma’s past. Maggie is a snoop—and a clumsy one. (She rifles through the clippings at such length that I assumed she was scanning for coupons.) She’s also emblematic of a story in which nothing and no one can be trusted.
Nearly every frame of “After the Hunt” spins a glossy lie, and not just because the film, though set in New Haven, was shot in London. It’s a posh Ivy League whodunnit and a cinematic Rorschach blot, cleverly rigged to generate cascading waves of suspicion. Hank, desperate for Alma’s ear, claims that he had confronted Maggie with evidence of plagiarism on her part, and that her rape accusation is purely retaliatory. But what of the toxicity, the ill-disguised capacity for sexual aggression, lurking beneath his oily charm? None of it helps his case, though it does broaden Garfield’s range. As an actor whose most famous roles include a conscientious objector, a Jesuit priest, and Spider-Man, he seems liberated to be playing the part of an out-and-out sleaze.
And Alma? She may be the shadiest of the lot, and part of her magnetism comes from the way she withdraws into a cocoon of inscrutability as her dilemma becomes more fraught. Roberts, her face a mask, hints at the character’s internal calculations more than she dramatizes them. It isn’t until Alma acts that you fully grasp all that she’s been quietly weighing: the consequences of withholding support from Maggie, a queer Black woman whose parents are major donors to the university, but also the possibility of losing Hank, a longtime friend who also happens to be a professional rival. And then there is the guilty past alluded to in those clippings, the memory of which frequently strikes her down with debilitating pain and nausea. Roberts isn’t the kind of actress you often see retching into a toilet, and the sight and sounds are genuinely upsetting, as if Alma’s very guts were cancelling her from within. The only character who seems entirely transparent is Frederik, who can’t hide his resentment of his second-class spousal status or his contempt for the sycophants and mediocrities who cling to his wife like barnacles. The role is not kind to Stuhlbarg, but here, as in Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), he is well cast as a perceptive truthteller on the margins, and he rises to the occasion with the puckish wit of a cuckolded diva.
What would be Frederik’s witheringly honest assessment of this movie? He might find that “After the Hunt,” ostensibly a juicy conversation starter, has little to say about the matters it raises—not race, not gender, not queerness, not diversity, not cancel culture, not sexual assault, and certainly not philosophy. I mean this almost as a compliment; Garrett knows how to deploy verbiage as misdirection. At times, you may sense the film revealing its cards, as when a campus therapist (a supremely dry Chloë Sevigny) calls out the privilege, entitlement, and relentless self-victimization of Yale’s students: “These kids,” she scoffs, “have had everything handed to them their whole lives.” But Guadagnino, alive to the pleasure of every line reading, maintains a pretty good poker face. The conventions and gestures of a topical potboiler—reflexive eye rolls, snap-worthy tell-offs—clearly excite him. He’s drawn to this material not by the weight of its ethical conundrums but by the chance to watch beautiful people attempt, or pretend, to hash those conundrums out.
“After the Hunt” will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards. I wouldn’t disagree, but few directors build more luxurious houses than Guadagnino does, whatever the materials. The most telling line comes from a peripheral character, the dean of the philosophy department, who laments the increasingly shallow and politicized nature of his position: “Against all odds, I’ve found myself in the business of optics, not substance.” Guadagnino draws no such distinction. For him, style is substance, and optics are just variations on style. No wonder Roberts’s performance reaches a peak of intensity, and tugs most irresistibly at our sympathies, when Alma’s rage finally spills out into the open, in a full-bore character-assassination rant that’s as commanding as it is ill-advised. It’s not, as they say, a good look. It’s a great one.
来源：左右图史