Among the most important Mexican directors in Hollywood, the most important are the three greats-Alessandro Gonzalez, Alfonso Cuarón and Gilmo del Toro, and of these three, the most important The weird one is Toro.
Toro has never belonged to Spielberg, Scorsese, or Coppola, but like Quentin, Tim Bird and Wes Anderson. He has always belonged to the minority. He is evil. The style of classic geeks, once let him control the theme of romance, love, political background, ethnic conflict, the original advantage is not interesting because of convergence, and the new theme can not go deep because it only involves the skin, and the final result is just one Unformed "amphibians".
The beginning of "The Shape of Water" is a fairy tale telling, a story about a dumb princess getting true love. But the dumb man in this reality is just a cleaner in a scientific research institute, an orphan who has been adopted since he was a child, so when an amphibian frogman, a new experimental product of the scientific research institute, appeared, they had an inexplicable affection between them. The main line of the movie is to tell the story of how the heroine Alisha broke through and rescued the frogman, and finally fell in love with her.
Under the lyrical tune of the gold medalist Alexander Dipura, the whole film is dressed in a soothing romance. Although Alissa is a silent cleaner, she has a regular and easy life and accompanies her. Old neighbors and working friends. In an encounter, you can still fall in love with the frogman at first sight, and finally, in the adventure and risky journey, fly with your lover and swim in the sea. This silly and sweet plot is absolutely no less than any domestic dog. The blood drama, however, it did get the Golden Lion Award and was nominated for 13 Oscars.
The reason is not difficult to guess. Even if the plot is so old-fashioned and naive, it is indeed admirable at the technical level. Whether it is the overall green tone, the elegant special effects during the transition, or the frogman's makeup technology, it is beautiful. . Only Toro's extraordinary imagination can do the underwater scenes in the opening of the film that have been upgraded to a long lens. But more importantly, it is the political correctness of the entire "The Shape of Water". It talks about politics, race, and themes of men and women in all the idle pens that can be inserted, so that this movie about the love between humans and animals is actually Paying for a significant ideology.
At the beginning of the movie, it showed the habit of the heroine Alisha-masturbating in the bathtub. This mute, who has been alone since she was a child and has no lover so far, has the same sexual impulses as ordinary people, but she can't find a sexual vent in the daily world. Why do you fall in love with a frogman? Why does animal love occur? The root lies in the sense of identity. The heroine never feels that the human world is a world of her own, because in this world, she has always been an incomplete existence. She is an abandoned son of human beings, so she yearns for the identity of another world. . The frogman could not speak, was rejected by humans, treated as an evil object, and could only be recognized by her black girlfriend at work, and was rejected by all other colleagues, both in the same situation.
In order to obtain the most cutting-edge science and technology, the United States and the Soviet Union did not hesitate to send spies of scientific researchers to steal technology, and they also did not hesitate to dissect living creatures in vivo, so that they could not get what they could not get. Fall into the hands of others; the white bartender in the bar treats old people seeking warmth as homosexuality and repels them, and once black customers come in, they find excuses to drive away and protect their territory; white officers insist that God is according to their own race To create human beings, and to denigrate the names of black female employees; as for the American generals, they treat the folk myth of Amazon status as a joke, scorn the frogman, use their military rank as a command arrow, interfere with scientific research projects, and have no regard for humanitarianism. .
This icy condition of the human world is particularly serious in the context of the Cold War, and the only warmth and fun that makes the heroine feel is the singing and dancing pictures shown on the TV screens and movie screens. This kind of warmth and beauty was imagined by Alyssa in the duet dance between her and the frogman. Through the exquisite scenes in classical Hollywood musicals, she is dreaming of the world of the princess and the prince.
Jazz, which represents the golden age of classical Hollywood, is precisely the most vivid symbol of this dream. Therefore, the film is full of jazz notes. However, under the background of the Cold War in the 1960s, it is always filled with the scene of the current world. Women are the only ones at home, and in the event of violent conflict, women's right to speak over black men; and the villain officer who held white-centrism eventually died in the hands of the frogman. "The Shape of Water" is like a box of contemporary American ideology, filled with an inevitable victory for the left.
And what does the core creature that the frogman has been centering on in the film symbolize? From its many cultural factors, it is not difficult to guess that it came from the pre-modern society of the third world-the Amazon tribe, a waterway amphibious creature with the same body of human beings and beasts, which can also heal injuries and have an immortal body. In a word, It is a mythical character outside the Western world. The reason why the film uses it to manipulate the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union is nothing more than to allow a "third authority" to dispel the authority of reality and to mock historical myths with illusory fairy tales.
As for the heroine, a mute man with three scars on her neck, her aphasia is a silent resistance to the chain of human discrimination, and eventually can be transformed into an amphibian, a symbol of communication between the human world and the natural world, the physical body and the gods. The connection body, the combination of her and the frogman, appears to be a simple fairy tale relationship between humans and beasts, but in fact it points to the current American society and responds to all "anti-isolation" and "anti-discrimination".
So "The Shape of Water" has become an exquisite industrial product pretending to be an innocent fairy tale, but hiding political metaphors everywhere. It is no longer Toro's reckless act, even if Shannon drops blood and makes love, even if the frogman bites Catheads and small bridges with evil tastes can still be traced, but the black cult flavor all over "Pan's Labyrinth" has long been turned into a teal filter, trying to reach every political proposition.
This article first published "China Film Index"
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