On the eve of World War II in Montmartre, Paris, the ghost of existentialism shook in the green ripples of absinthe. The dual identity of a young female painter and novelist makes her a arena of art and commerce, soul and flesh. The director sketched her life with impressionist brushwork: in the cafe where lilacs were in full bloom, the left hand held the check handed by the gold owner, and the right hand sketched the nude sketch on the napkin; In the lover’s attic bed, the other person’s body temperature is transformed into erotic paragraphs in the novel, but at the climax, he stares at the unfinished abstract painting on the wall.
Those symbolic scenes constitute the survival fable of the female creator: the publisher asked her to change the “philosophical speculation” in the novel into “forbidden love between maid and master”, just like the castration of art by capital; The gold owner exchanged Modigliani’s paintings for her company, which is a metaphor for the possession of beauty by power. The sharpest thing is her monologue in the salon: “When I sell my body for survival, at least my brush still belongs to me”-this sentence pierced the hearts of all idealists who compromised in reality.
At the end of the film, she torched her finished Pulp Fiction, revealing unfinished war paintings in the ashes. This ritual action is not only a betrayal of the market, but also a real sacrifice to art. In the shadow of the German army’s coming to Paris, she carried the picture box to an unknown distance-the figure swaying in the twilight is the epitome of every soul struggling between compromise and persistence.