The new work The Shape of Water by Ji Na Yu Dai Tuo Lu , the two translations of China and Hong Kong have their own confession. The mainland translation of "The Shape of Water" reveals the connection between this work and the genre of fairy tales. The Hong Kong translation of "Forget Shape Water" is more mysterious. Forget the love of time, we call it year-end love. Give you a cup of ecstasy water, what else can we forget in love?
Yesterday's me speaks for today's me
Once upon a time, in 1962, the Cold War was unprecedented. A dumb woman named Qi Lisha works as a night cleaning lady in a highly fortified laboratory in the United States. She is dedicated to her duties, but always lives without loss. Until one day, the murlocs picked up from the Amazon happened to pass by, bringing ebb and flow. It was locked in a laboratory, and scientists regarded it as a weird; military officers regarded it as a servant; but Qi Lisha regarded it as a person, even a lover. Yu Yan has become this alternative monster movie that combines fairy tales, love, horror, and fantasy.
Qi Lisha's obstacles made her a marginal person in society, and the movie let her go with the flow and arranged some fellow travelers for her. Her neighbor, who is also a father and friend, is an outdated advertising painter and a comrade who was born out of time. Her co-worker at the institute is a black woman. They also naturally became accomplices of Qi Lisha's forbidden love. I wonder if this politically correct setting has moved you? Dai Tuolu bluntly said that although the time of this movie is set in the 1960s, it is very specific to the present and also talked about his feelings as an immigrant and an alien. After all, the wall Trump wants to build is aimed at Mexico, the motherland of Dai Tuolu.
This is probably the first time that Dai Tuolu has directed a "love story", but it is still full of authorship: because the object of his love is a monster. Monsters have always worked closely with Dai Tuolu, and it is not difficult to catch a glimpse of them in his previous works. Even though the main line of the story aims to eliminate monsters that threaten humans, he never forgets to add a small character who is close to the monsters, intending to open a back door in the big narrative, leading to a back garden where humans and animals are in harmony. For example, in "Pacific Rim" (Pacific Rim), the scientists who are obsessed with sea beasts are willing to take risks and connect with their brains, which will eventually become the key to saving mankind. Another example is the little boy in "Mimic" (Mimic) who knocks with a silver spoon. After listening, the giant insects imitated again and again, and brought the little boy into the nest without eating or killing. The boy respected them as friends. And "Forget" is the first time, these little supporting characters with great love finally take up the role and become the protagonist who can call the wind and rain.
In addition to monsters, Dai Tuolu also has an unusual fascination with water. His previous works are very "high juicy". His movie world is often raining, and special emphasis is placed on the sound effects of mud, mucus, and plasma. The ghost in the previous work "The Devil's Backbone" (The Devil's Backbone) is buried in the water. Whenever it appears, the blood is flowing upwards, always in the water. Water ensures life and freshness, even the lives of dead people. Water is also a mystery to Dai Tuo Lu. There is a monologue in "Fighting Pacific": "When I was a kid, whenever I felt small or lonely, I would look up at the stars. I wondered if there was life on it. As a result, I looked in the wrong direction. Astral beings want to enter our world, they pass through the depths of the Pacific Ocean." Qi Lisha nodded, and her murlocs obviously did not descend from the sky.
The high-speed child talk smooths everything
Dai Tuolu mentioned in many interviews that "Forget" is another version of "Beauty and the Beast" (in fact, the 2017 new version of the movie was originally decided to be directed by him). These words alleviated the disharmony of human and animal love. After all, in the world of fairy tales or myths, humans and beasts transform into each other, and occasionally they fit together, and they are not regarded as daily life. There are many derivative works of "Beauty and the Beast", what are the inheritance and updates of this work? Whether it is morality or appearance, usually beasts must be transformed in order to receive the love of beauties and the blessings of others. A beast that fails to meet the standard is destined to die well. However, the murlocs in "Forget" don't need any transformation or domestication, and they can be beautiful as they are. In order to highlight its wildness, the movie arranges the murloc to meet the provocative domestic cat, and the murloc chews on its face without saying a word. Witnessing the bloody scene, the characters didn't look too sad. It takes less than a second to digest the fact: it is it.
In addition to blood and gore, there is also lust. This is an adult version of a fairy tale. At the beginning of the movie, Qi Lisha bathed herself in the water, appearing in a delicate and refined image. Then she drifted down to the ground slowly in her dream, the water faded, and Sleeping Beauty began her day, boiling her sexually boiled eggs. Not only the meaning, she also routinely soaks in the bathtub to masturbate. She is a woman of flesh and blood, and she knows how to please herself. In order to get close to the murloc, she presented a large amount of boiled eggs as food (this courtship method may excite many viewers who pay attention to sexual symbols). And when she succeeded in saving the murloc home, they had sex soon after. It is supposed to be an apostate sexual affair, but the movie has innocence about it. When Qi Lisha shared sex with her girlfriends, the girlfriends did not make any moral condemnation or show any physical discomfort. She also digested the fact in a second: Oh, wow.
Everything is so swift and light, which leads to another common ill of fairy tales, which is that the villains are too treacherous and the villains cannot come. The story always focuses on the adventure and growth of the protagonist. The image on the other side is often flat and boring, and its background is completely ignored. This is also a problem with most of Dai Tuolu's previous works. This time, this shortcoming has been slightly corrected. The "bad guy" in "Forget" has his own little theater. The director spends his pen and ink to manage his vain American dream-a wife in the suburbs, well worthy of his knees, and his Cadillac goes straight back to the future, but begs the mission... and then destroys it for you to see. Although we shouldn’t forget that rather stereotyped bad guy-when Qi Lisha’s neighbor failed to woo a man in the restaurant, the man in the restaurant quickly turned back and shouted homophobia, the director immediately forgot to give him two black customers. , To reveal to the audience that his discrimination is far-reaching. The turning point is blunt, there is a kind of ridiculous ridicule, only to think of him as a functional role in a fairy tale can pass.
The non-my race is more moving
Qi Lisha's role seems to be a combination of several famous fairy princesses. She turned into a Cinderella to clean up the dung and blood at the research institute, and eventually became Snow White who was waiting for the prince to kiss her. The most obvious incarnation is Andersen's mermaid princess. At the beginning of the movie, Qi Lisha's neighbor said in a voice-over that Qi Lisha is "the princess who lost her voice." Just as the mermaid princess in the fairy tale is willing to give up her sweet voice in order to get close to her love, her love is speechless, and finally turned into broken foam.
In addition to being both dumb, the movie also laid the groundwork for Qi Lisha's identity as a "mermaid princess". Qi Lisha was abandoned by the river when she was a baby, and when she was found there were three parallel scars on her neck. At the end of the movie, the murloc dragged the shot Qi Lisha into the water and kissed her. Her three scars cracked into gills, making it possible to survive through the water. This ending is quite open. Is this the fantasy of Qi Lisha's neighbor (the narrator set in the movie) to mourn the deceased friend? Or is it something that actually happened? If it is the latter, did the murloc use its unclearly defined "resilience" to "resurrect her"? Or is Qi Lisa actually the offspring of a certain kind of murloc, who has this potential when she is born, and is therefore naturally attracted to murlocs?
If this is the case, I can't help but ask, is it true that love is moving because it is not my race? As this movie promotes. Leaping over is risky and scary, and only then can you have the pleasure of arriving, even if that pleasure comes with death. "Fall in love with someone you shouldn't love." A classic analogy is Lobisang's "The Big Blue" (The Big Blue), a young diver who loves the sea, in order to dive deep in it, all he has to lose is everything. Or in "Cabin in the Wood" (Cabin in the Wood), the employee of the drunken murloc encounters it in the monster melee and says happily: Come on. All of them can't love more vigorously. Compared with them, Qi Lisha can be described as retiring.
Complete and incomplete are relatively speaking
The exact moment of the movie. "Be yourself" has become the most powerful religion, and your lack will one day make your "true man" fall in love with it. You are now perfect. It’s like Qi Lisha explained their love in the movie: “When he looked at me, he didn’t know how incomplete I was. I was what he saw.”
Indeed, today, many of the traits that we previously defined as "disability" have gradually become an ethnic group and an identity. In Andrew. Solomon's book "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity" discusses many families with hearing-impaired members. Although there are differences between deaf and dumb, it is not difficult to make an analogy: "Most people who hear hearing assume that hearing impaired means hearing "no", but the hearing impaired that many deaf people feel is not "no", but "yes". Hearing impaired is a culture It is language and aesthetics, it is a real existence, and it is also a unique intimacy.” In some cases, parents ask the doctor to retain the child’s deafness and dumb genes before the child is born, without intervention, because they deny that the child will be lost because of this. The opportunity to experience the deaf-mute culture. Some parents also refuse to allow them to implant cochlear implants after their children are born, describing it as an attempt to destroy and eliminate the deaf population. All these propositions have provoked great controversy in the society. But what we cannot deny is that the world without sound is not as we thought, only loss and lack. That is the life experience that we "sound people" cannot easily criticize. (Furthermore, our "soundness" can only be incomplete in some species.)
The film could have handed over this powerful statement, but it may not be what the director wanted, so it showed its "legs." Qi Lisha is about to say goodbye to the murloc, feeling overwhelmed, and sings You'll Never Know hoarsely in sign language . Suddenly the movie turned black and white, silent to sound, and the murloc and Kirisa sang and danced in a magnificent background. At the critical moment, disability has become a stumbling block to love. The feelings that surpass the world are also rarely crowned with sound and pictures, hoping that love will become mainstream. At that moment, Qi Lisha was very lonely. The farthest distance was not caring for people, but when she screamed for her integrity, she was sentenced to be incomplete by the director.
You may also be wondering why the parting is just around the corner, and the murlocs still only focus on eating, ignorant of the situation? If the Murloc does not come with legends (it is repeatedly mentioned in the movie that it is worshiped as a god in Amazon) and has no superpowers, wouldn't it be like an innocent child or even a demented adult? Especially in the director’s previous work "Hellboy" (Hellboy), there is a murloc Abe Sapien played by Doug Jones. His style is similar to the murloc of "Forget" (and also likes to eat eggs), but he can read and also Can speak human words. Compared with him, our male protagonist can't help but seem to be wise and lacking in inner drama.
Those that should not be forgotten if
The only distant relative of the Murloc that the director talked about was the classic "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (Creature from the Black Lagoon) in 1954. Dai Tuolu has always been a tribute to his addiction. Movies often have a long list of subjects, who cast his eyebrows in secret words. Is "Forget" a tribute to Dutch independent film director Marc S. Nollkaemper's The Space Between Us ? The two plots are similar. Both silent cleaning ladies rescue the murlocs in the well-guarded research institute. The colors are similar, and several shots are also mirror images in comparison, but it is two years earlier than "Forget". This matter has been controversial online, but Dai Tuolu and the film company did not respond, and the other side did not come out to speak. This matter will probably fall into the sea like Qi Lisha.
Many viewers moved that the love in the movie is extraordinary: knowing love is the soul of love. Then, arranging an ugly human to fall in love with the heroine can also bring out the same message? It is a murloc, but it is also a "human" after all. What if it is not a human form at all? Even if this is a movie of beautiful men and beasts? Will we suffer so much? The movie succeeded in keeping us in a safe range, but at the same time tasted the excitement of danger. Sometimes in love, I forget the form and the criticism.
(Original 01 Weekly Report 5/2/2018)
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