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I have seen the 15-minute short film "The Valley of the Whales" by Icelandic director Gu Demonsson before. It is very similar to most Nordic movies, and it is cold and gloomy. Later, at the Venice Film Festival in 2016, there was "Stone of the Heart", a feature film based on "The Valley of the Whales" by the director. The films made by Nordic directors, no matter how bizarre, perverted, or pure love the theme is, they all like to use a clean style of painting.
The beginning of "Stone of the Heart" is a scene of several teenagers fishing on the pier. The blue water absorbs the rare sunlight, and the teenagers here give people a sentimental and melancholy temperament. The male protagonist Christian and Sol, who is younger than him, appear one after another. Under the director's intentional close-up, the looming ambiguous relationship between the two boys surfaced. It's clear that Christian has a crush on Sol, but Sol has a crush on Beth.
You love him, he loves her, this kind of love chain is the normal state of gay love life. This reminds me of Gui Lunmei and Chen Bolin in "The Blue Door", which are also curved and straight.
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Regarding Christian's emotions like a beast fighting, the director designed a lot of foreshadowing or metaphors. Love is not recognized.
This is also echoed in "Whale Valley". The whale stranded on the beach implies that predicament is everywhere, depression and collapse are inevitable.
Christian, who is gay, loves Saul, but he can't say it, and instead goes after Beth for him. When you love someone, you want them to be happy. Does it matter who made the happiness? unimportant. His love for Thor is pure and heartbreaking. I often feel that human beings are very strange and are keen on classification games, such as dividing love into heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, labeling them, and then treating them differently.
But no matter what type of love it is, it is a chemical reaction that constantly produces dopamine. On a scientific level, there is no essential difference. Humans always focus their energy on unimportant things, but lose their understanding of the true meaning of love.
In the film, the director carefully uses restraint to express the subtle changes of Christian's emotions, which also allows us to have a deeper understanding of the emotional world of gays. What struck me was the way Christian digested his emotions. Thor kisses him casually while playing Big Adventure, he gets angry, and for Christian, that's a disservice, if you're serious about loving someone.
He's standing on the edge of a cliff, and I understand that urge to jump off, and at that moment, that's the only way to not be sad. Christian likes to use diving to escape, like to smash cars to vent, such violence is lonely, silent, no one cares, and no one can sense it.
I thought of the whale with 52 zz sound waves, and finally died alone. Gays are like giant whales with independent channels. It may take a lifetime to find a matching partner. Compared with heterosexuals, their love-seeking process is purer and simpler, but the hard work is multiplied.
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Christian ends up trying to kill himself, and the boy in "The Valley of the Whales" also plans to kill himself at the beginning, and suicide is easier than falling into a relationship that doesn't work out.
We all laugh at people who are too timid to woo, but what if revealing their sexuality will only do more harm? We are all too self-righteous, how do we know that homosexual suicide is not just to escape, but more to protect the one we love.
Perhaps Saul finally understood what that kind of love was. But love can't be forced, so Christian chose to disappear, leaving the last bit of dignity.
Truman Capote said: "Love, because it does not know geography, has no boundaries." Same-sex love is always equal to exile love. It is not within the prescribed boundaries, and it has to crawl into the cramped space to find a chance to breathe.
The quiet and sad shots and the depressing tones seem to tear open a rift at any time. Whether it is "Brokeback Mountain" and "Carol", or "My Own Idaho" and "Heartstone", the descriptions of same-sex love are too delicate.
Any love comes with a price, but in same-sex love, the price is especially heavy.
In the last shot of the movie, the unpleasant stone fish was thrown into the sea by a teenager with disgust, and the camera was fixed on the falling stone fish for a long time.
After an unknown number of seconds, the stone fish that seemed to be dead shook its tail and swam towards the light. Two hours of repression finally ushered in a rather warm ending, and Christian was successfully rescued.
Sol sneaked into Christian's bedroom in the middle of the night and gently kissed his forehead. Some people said that Sol was bent, but I don't think it matters.
That kiss was more about sensing and receiving his emotions, with apology and understanding. The emotion between the teenagers is like the ice blue waters of Iceland, occasionally a few seagulls drift by, with sadness and purity.
The emotional rendering and the title of the film are successfully matched. The stone in the heart keeps falling. Below is the unknown territory, a desperate situation, and possibly Nirvana.
ps: My public number: filmpublic
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