The film "The Shape of Water" directed by Gilmour del Toro continues his usual image style: grotesque in power, emotional exploration, weird romance, anti-black fairy tales, and just the right thrill and horror.
What is different from the past is that to escape from the majestic large-scale imaginary maze, Gyro only tells a simple and clichéd love story between humans and beasts this time-at least at a glance.
The mute girl meets an amphibious mermaid, and she decides to marry at first sight.
The lonely mute girl meets the captured amphibious mermaid and decides to marry at first sight.
The lonely and often bullied dumb woman meets a captured and violent amphibious mermaid. After falling in love at first sight, she joins forces with her unkind black friends, homosexual neighbors who run into walls everywhere, and a scientist with a spy identity to rescue the amphibious mermaid. , And gained a permanent union in the battle with the evil forces.
After being filled with masked characters and symbolic bad faces, I began to feel that "The Shape of Water" did not look so simple.
On the one hand, the unity and friendship of disadvantaged groups, the love of marginalized people, the humanity and emotional sustenance of monsters, the struggle against the wicked, the victory won in the dream scene.
On the one hand, a dumb girl, African-American, homosexual, Cold War background, bloody severed fingers, bizarre mermaid actor, masturbation and sex in the water.
On the one hand, the film is a story of a dumb princess and a mermaid prince who have many fairy tale shadows and work together to defeat evil forces; on the other hand, it is a story of a prudent character design under the framework of the times, and the incompleteness is used to fit the harmony. Find the fable of the present-world mapping of the complete face.
Simply put, one is a fairy tale world suitable for children, and the other is a dark scene that can only be accepted by adults.
Gyro is good at grasping the commonalities between these two different levels, and attributing the core tone of them to the simple but not simple "love".
After all, "love" applies to everything. Children can understand love, and they need love when they grow up.
Just like the film's name The Shape of Water, the director uses the shape of water to describe love, which conveys that love is tolerance.
The "love" that accommodates everything, and the innocence and imagination of the top as always, blends the two meanings together. The audience may be familiar with it, but they can still watch it easily. This is the power of fairy tales, the power brought about by emotional reality, and the most primitive and purest touch that movies can bring.
The image of the amphibious mermaid in "The Shape of Water" is not beautiful. He is not as smart and sweet as the "lu" in the "Song of Dew that Proclaims Dawn" a while ago, nor is he as overbearing as the king of the orangutans in "King Kong". The film as a whole is even less than one ten thousandth of the beautiful scenes of handsome guys and beauties and hard-covered dresses in "Beauty and the Beast".
On the contrary, he had frog-faced fish gills, turquoise human-shaped limbs, long nails and strange hair scales all over his body.
And the heroine? The setting of the low-profile version of Cinderella is no longer youthful, physically disabled, and looks not a typical beauty at first glance.
The monsters are extremely alienated, and the marginalized humans are real.
The film breaks away from the "superficial" beauty in traditional fairy tales—the beautiful face that is about to be put down by people will be destroyed and saved personally, and it has received staged sighs and applause. But directly put the theme of affirmation and respect for life on the bright side:
The equality of life should not be misplaced in the superficial sense of "beauty" and "unbeauty."
Affirming and respecting the emotional value of life is the true value of the act of "affirming and respecting".
A mute girl who loses language ability can still perfectly express her mood with her body: joy, heartbeat, love and anger-unable to speak, and can live without limits.
Amphibians who have lost their freedom can still communicate with their lovers in their own way, can still make a reversal, and win victory-by straying into a foreign race, they can also find dignity.
The two of them may not really become a prince and a princess, but their incomplete union into a complete love is more moving and convincing.
You know, no matter how beautiful the princess is, she will get old, so love and beauty still stay on the spiritual level for the longest time.
The truth of a mute girl is different from ordinary people, but the word "unlike" is used in her body, which is more commendatory.
For example, she who can't speak has more insight and courage, more courage and wisdom than normal people.
Therefore, such a mute girl who seems to be living in a depressed, dim tone is not a little pitiful. She has a lot of emotions that have nowhere to vent, she has her own excitement and joy, she longs for friends, longs for communication (physical and spiritual), longs for love.
The disabled have more power.
So everything becomes logical. She can fall in love with amphibious mermaids at first sight, she can communicate with mermaids across races, and she can make friends with mermaids in the dream fish tank she created. So she dared to save people from fire and water, so she had the courage to contend with hostility, and she could take away the mermaid under close supervision with few enemies. All these processes seem to be pediatric, simple and arbitrary, but the film processing is natural, and the success of good people is attributed to the evil of bad people and the energy of beautiful hearts.
Therefore, we believe that she, who is born with a disability, can obtain love that transcends language and all senses of the same race.
When the film comes up, it is a scene of a mute woman masturbating in a bathtub. Sally Hawkins lies in the water with her eyes closed and tells us that her silence does not mean that she has no emotions. It was the emotion she had accumulated and was eager to explode that made her look at the soul of the alien water monster behind her. And the scene of the two having sex in a room made of water and isolated from the world is the most straightforward way to show us their release of love.
The silent love in the water, the love free from the noise and prejudice of the world, belongs exclusively to the mute and the amphibious. The uniqueness of this feeling makes the love shown in the film more precious and more pitiful.
"The Shape of Water", in accordance with screenwriter practice, wants to destroy this "precious". So the power took out violent weapons such as electric batons and pistols, while the little people and ordinary people used their love as weapons to resist, and guarded the "precious" with "precious".
Water can tolerate the good, and it can eliminate the brutal evil.
It's still a fairy tale. But no matter how many times I have heard fairy tales, I still feel heartwarming.
I think there are many places to warm my heart.
The blue-green tones and the changing and dappled light make the world in the film look like a water dragon palace; the dumb girl’s home is downstairs to the cinema, and the amphibious people come to the theater to watch the movie the first time after running away; the wound on the dumb girl’s neck is the moment it enters the water. Open as gills, breathe freely...
The director uses the little romance of small people, the warmth of water, the tolerance of love, easy and simple kindness and emotion, and the poetic imagery that blooms on the screen to impress people without knowing it.
Although I feel that the details of this film are beyond scrutiny, I am willing to believe that a person who shows his love and courage to fight against power, a person with self-confidence and perseverance, and a brave pursuit of love Women with full of emotions can be happy in fairy tales and the real world. Compared with the ending of the story like "the prince and the princess finally walked together", the love in "The Shape of Water" is undoubtedly more touching and worthy of blessing. What it conveys is the impulse to explore the true meaning of beauty. It's irresistible.
Innocence is the original virtue of the movie.
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