(Text/Yang Shiyang)
An undisguised fairy tale with a shimmering childlike heart, paying tribute to innocence, singing love and kindness with great fanfare, interspersed with old-school singing and dancing, and setting off the interpersonal relationship of mutual affection, all of this in "The Shape of Water" Every adult knows that it can’t happen, but everyone is willing to believe that all this has happened. Because it stands firmly on the opposite side of reality and confidently praises a miracle. Everyone who walks alone in the gray reality, who is not willing to witness the flashing moment?
The Cold War background, the evil experiment, the US-Soviet struggle for hegemony, the old days were really serious, but now I look back, leaving a place of meaningless wreckage, like a cruel and grand joke, but the gloomy background of that era contributed uniquely to later artistic creation. The aesthetic dimension of, the closed laboratory has spawned many horror-themed works, but this time, a cross-species love has evolved in the cold tones, repressive space and secret spy warfare. Eliza, a mute girl who works as a cleaner in the laboratory, accidentally discovered a mermaid monster caught in the laboratory. They became friends and then lovers. When the mermaid was about to be killed, the woman decided to die. Rescue. This is almost the kind of fairy tale that is straight to the prototype, unmodified to the pure and true, and straightforwardly told to every adult. Director Gilmour Del Toro believes that every adult has a childlike innocence, no matter how much they pretend. Deep and mundane, just like the scientist Dr. Hofsdler in the story-a Soviet spy who penetrated into the United States, a cold war machine that should have been ruthless, but still retains the most instinctive innocence for many years. Discipline did not completely obliterate kindness. I would rather die by myself than let the fish escape. He left his destroyed body in the dunya, allowing his nowhere to tell good soul to follow the mermaid back to the bottom of the sea. A helpless person trapped in reality during the Cold War, this is the only way for him to ascend himself.
Like all fairy tales, "The Shape of Water" extols love, but it's actually written in terrible form. It is more like a march and a strong needle in the self-rescue of abnormal people, a lonely mute girl, an unemployed "comrade" Giles, a black female worker with a lazy husband, Zelda, they exist as insignificant as dust. They mirrored each other's loneliness, and unexpectedly became the support of each other.
Who can understand their loneliness? The mute girl Eliza hopes to get a hug, but after all she can only comfort herself with her hand; Giles goes to the restaurant again and again and buys pieces of pie that are hard to swallow, just to have a few minutes with the owner. In the end, he was reprimanded that he could no longer step into the shop; Zelda worked hard and performed housework to maintain a mere marriage, but it was still invalid after all. These characters are deliberately facialized, and each person is characterized by a "scar". Disability, homosexuality, and black people. These problems that have been diluted by political correctness and affirmation movements in the past were difficult to escape from blatant bullying. These weak people huddled in their respective corners, united to achieve almost superhero-like feats. The director turns the frustrated into gods in the fairy tale. In fact, the mermaid monster that serves as the background and inspires everything and pushes everything is also an oddball, even the loneliest of all the characters. It is isolated from the entire human world. As a life form, it is regarded as a strategic material. It has been studied and studied. Fight and be executed. In this sense, this is an epic of the lonely saving the lonely, and an anthem for the lonely person to the lonely person.
The abnormal ones in the story are all kind, and the confident, powerful, and controlling power-holders are all bad people-it is so unabashedly black and white that it is a fairy tale in the standard sense. Woolen cloth? Both the United States and the Soviet Union wanted the monster to die, but humanity triumphed, surpassing the ideological and political barriers, and protecting it back into the deep sea. This ending makes the fairy tale halo gleaming even more.
The agent Dr. Hofsdler talked about Eliza and Zelda before his death, they just clean, they talked in many ways. He talked about their profession as a cleaner, and talked about their state of being invisible, even more. Said the clarity of their souls. The dirty people paid the price, and the clear people are still alive. Including himself, even if he finally awakened, he was still stuck in the mud before, and he still paid the price for it.
In that narrow bathroom, Alyssa plugged the door and filled it with water. The room became an ocean with only two people. That was the most romantic scene in "The Shape of Water", and it was also an unfinished scene. At the end , They dived into the deep sea and continued that scene to make everything happen. Yes, even at the end, there is no tail leading to the astray. Everything upholds the perfection of fairy tales. Let the dumb woman speak, let the bald old man grow hair, and let the wicked be punished. They are far away from the world, perhaps, they can live together happily ever after.
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