Well, I thought of these things that I meant to say, last night after I had turned the computer off and gone to bed - and couldn't be bothered to get up and turn it on again!
I meant to comment on the clever lighting in yesterdays film, especially the bit just before the wife is murdered... the position she is lying in, and the light in the shape of a coffin tells you what's about to happen....
One of the most moving scenes I found to be the image of the dead wife under the water - her hair billowing in the current echoed the movement of the seaweed, and gave the scene a calm yet eerie and melancholy atmosphere - she reminded me of a fairytale mermaid.
Speaking of fairytales, I was wondering if our own childhood experiences of fairytales would effect the way we viewed this movie... I, for one, was brought up on traditional fairy stories, mostly German - these tend to have much darker undercurrents, child abuse being a common theme! Take Hansel and Gretel, whose evil stepmother leaves them in the forest to die as she cannot afford to feed them, or Aschenputtel, which is a Brothers Grimm variation of Cinderella, again with the stepmother as the protagonist. Or how about the Struwwelpeter stories (Heinrich Hoffmann 1776-1822) in which children frequently end up burning themselves to death, wasting away from starvation or having their fingers cut off by enormous scissors because they won't stop sucking their thumbs!
http://www.fln.vcu.edu//struwwel/struwwel.html
Growing up with these stories never did me any harm! (I think.... mwahahahaha!) But seriously, a lot of lessons are learnt from tales like these and I wonder how much harm we are doing our children today by sheltering them from these sorts of stories - I hate all this politically correct rubbish !
And on that note, I am off for some breakfast!
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