This is a green movie.
The water is green. The car is green. Many places of work are green.
Del Toro obviously did it on purpose.
The scene at the beginning of the movie, from floating in a dream to waking up, shows the subtlety of green. When it comes to water and floating, green seems so poetic and gentle; when it comes back to reality, green is gloomy, even lonely.
In fact, everyone in the movie is lonely. It was American loneliness in the 1960s.
The heroine is dumb and lonely-working the night shift, living the same life, the fun is masturbating in the bathtub.
The illustrator is lonely-the painting has never been accepted, and he is a homosexual, always accompanied by the cat.
Zelda is lonely-she is a black man in an era of rampant racism, and has a husband who is unable to move with a backache and obviously has different interests. Her only friend is a dumb.
The Soviets are lonely-they don't trust him, the Americans don't trust him, and even his name Dmitri is like a secret and cannot be easily exported.
Even the big villain Strickland is lonely-home and work, he is out of place, and the fun can only be found in the abusive male protagonist. He even became a standard American successful man in the 1960s by buying a luxury car: of course he finally failed to achieve his wish.
The male protagonist is lonely, so it goes without saying-he is like a beautiful little pet adopted by the female protagonist.
So the story is nothing more than the redemption of the lonely.
But it doesn't stop there.
Del Toro is a Mexican. According to the legend of many old people in Mexico, the real world is barren and the other world—or the world of the dead, the ghostly world—is lively and poetic.
And: Mexicans like green very much-their national team jerseys are all green.
He is a dead house that has collected 7,000 video tapes. He experienced the typical loneliness of Mexican immigration in the United States. In the movie, it is the loneliness of the heroine: dumb, midnight loneliness.
The only way to relieve loneliness is to transform the barrenness of the real world into a lively other world-so the happy part of the movie is related to water, the cinema downstairs, and the music, dance dramas and posters of the 1960s. I can almost imagine that Del Toro also experienced the long loneliness before the heroine meets the heroine.
In the whole movie, there are two kinds of shots at most: one is the static situation where a single person faces the camera and looking at the camera; The lens is very close. Very few prospects. Very few outdoor scenes. The long shot basically comes from the performance of the American street scene in the 1960s.
Del Toro clearly hopes that you will stop in the loneliness of all the characters and feel their depression and loneliness up close.
Because this kind of loneliness is so suffocating, the heroine later, the romantic to the extreme Shui Man Jinshan Hug, and the stage duet, are not so obtrusive, and even satisfying: Since I can't escape the green eyes, then Let the water make the green poetic!
The ending is also like a solace to the lonely. The villain is over. The illustrator was cured. The scars on the heroine's neck turned into fish gills, allowing her to breathe continuously in the water.
So this ending is more perfect than "ET": ET is the children sending away aliens, but the ending of this film is so beautiful. Those deficiencies in the human world-dumb, scars, loneliness-in the aquatic world, are extremely perfect.
I always feel that the female protagonist will turn a little bit younger, and she will be Del Toro when she was young, the Mexican who came to the United States. In the 1960s and 70s, she hoped that there would be something from a different world to embrace herself in this way. To save his loneliness, tell him: I like all your disabilities.
That little salvation is like the egg that the heroine gave to the hero in the film, like the stone man in "Pan's Labyrinth".
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