sábado, agosto 19, 2006
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fotograma de The Isle de Kim Ki-Duk.
"Strong, vibrant, resilient: the fish dancing on a hook is a feast for the eyes.
A stocky fiftyish angler pulls her out and throws her on his pontoon raft with a doll-house of a cabin. A pretty hooker beside him laughs watching the catch. Her client suggests an appetizer for the forthcoming sex: a slice of "sushi".
A morsel of flesh throbbing with life? Who would refuse such a treat?
Well-being incarnate, the client cuts off the fish's plump sides and lets the rest go.
Free to gambol mutilated in her element.
If you've never heard bare flesh chafe against water, this emphatically understated, matter-of-fact shot will sensitise your ear. If you've never seen a weeping fish, try this time: imperceptible tear beads will remain in water long after she makes a few uncertain, almost incredulous movements and disappears in the deep.
These impulsive sensations are precisely calculated: what is actually shot and recorded compels you to feel what the author feels; a razor-sharp picture carves in you something invisible and indelible; the image and your reaction to it are inseparable parts of the scene, one without the other would render it painfully unfinished.
Well, this is what excellent directing is all about.
That stripped fish alone is a passionate plea in defence of skinned people. Both watchers and participants, we avidly absorb this universal agony, impersonated by a living creature and personalized in a human being.
Well, this is what we call poetry. It heals by hurting, the deeper the wound the sharper the pleasure to feel it.
Despite being taught a hard lesson, the stripped fish will bite again.
From the hands of another angler, she'll get away with much less trouble.
That tall and handsome fellow could not care less about fishing. On the run from the police, he hangs on the hook himself. A floating hut on the lake, one of many in this fishing camp site, is the fugitive's hideout. He just feigns angling, often on an empty hook.
In a fit of despair, while chopping at the catch furiously and endlessly, until that throbbing sushi turns into a bloody mash, in the mutilated fish he recognizes his sworn sister, in her bloody wounds his own, and lets her go. She is his next of kin. Actually theirs: the camp's owner and manager - as well as his lover - is another creature with bleeding flanks." (cont.)
posted by Luís Miguel Dias sábado, agosto 19, 2006
