Lovers save each other！

I wrote this article after reading The Shape of Water.

I didn't know it would go on to win Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director...

By the way, The Shape of Water is a green movie. The water is green. The car is green. There is also a lot of green where the heroine works. Del Toro clearly did it on purpose.

The film's opening scene, floating from dream to awakening, shows the subtleties of green: when it comes to water and floating, green seems so poetic and mellow; When it comes back to reality, green can seem grim, even lonely.

In fact, everyone in the movie is lonely, 1960s American lonely.

The heroine is dumb and lonely - night shifts, monotonous lives, the pleasure of masturbating in the bathtub.

The illustrator is lonely -- the painting is never accepted, and he is gay and always with cats.

Zelda was alone -- a black woman in an era of rampant racism, with a paralysed back and a husband whose interests were distinctly different. Her only friend is mute.

The Soviets were alone -- his own people distrusted him, the Americans distrusted him, and even his own name, Dmitri, was like a secret, not easy to export.

Even the main villain, Strickland, is lonely -- at home and at work, he can only find fun in the abuse of the hero. He even bought a luxury car to become a typical 1960s American success: he didn't, of course.

The hero is lonely, of course -- he's like a beautiful pet adopted by the heroine.

So the story is nothing more than the mutual redemption of lonely people.

But it doesn't stop there.

Del Toro is Mexican. In many ancient Mexican legends, the real world was barren, and the otherworld -- or the world of the dead, the world of the unseen -- was lively and poetic. And mexicans love green -- their national team jerseys are all green. He's a nerd with a collection of 7,000 videos. He had experienced the typical Mexican immigrant loneliness in The United States, represented in movies as the heroine's loneliness -- the dumb, midnight loneliness; It's also the loneliness of being an illustrator with nowhere to be accepted.

Loneliness can only be broken by transforming the barrenness of the real world into a bustling otherworld -- so the happy parts of the film are all about the water, the cinema downstairs, the music, the dance and the posters of the 1960s. I can almost imagine that Del Toro also experienced the long, dreamy loneliness of the heroine before she met the hero.

In the whole film, there are most two kinds of shots: one is static when a person faces the camera and looks at the camera; Second, oblique 45 degree dynamics. Very close shots, very few long shots, very few outdoor views. The long lens is basically a representation of 1960s American street scene.

Del Toro clearly wants viewers to stand in the loneliness of all the characters, to feel their oppression and loneliness up close. Because this kind of loneliness is so suffocating, the heroine's extremely romantic embrace scene overflowing with water and stage singing are not so abrupt, and even satisfying: since you can't escape the green in your eyes, let the water make the green poetic!

The ending, too, is a consolation for the lonely -- the villain is finished, the illustrator is cured, and the wound on the heroine's neck becomes a gills that allow her to breathe in water.

So this ending, it's better than "ET". The story of "ET" is that the children sent the aliens away, but the ending of this film is so happy. What was missing from the human world -- mute, scarred, lonely -- was perfect in the water world.

I always felt that if the heroine had been a different and younger woman, she would have been the young Del Toro, the Mexican who came to America. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wanted something otherworldly to embrace him and rescue him from his loneliness, saying, "I love everything about you that's broken." That bit of salvation, as if the heroine to the male leading role of the egg, as if "Pan's Labyrinth", to the stone headman eyes.

Every lonely person is waiting for salvation on earth.

In the end, you and the one you love will save each other, even though you belong on the same sea.

Tome.