Severe spoilers ahead. Duh.
Hello, and welcome to my rant about the film Crimson Peak and a discussion about its colors. If you’re here for the colors, scroll down. I have a lot to rant about the plot, characters, and writing of this film, so this rant is going to be slightly longer than I anticipated before watching the film. Oops.
I watched this film with high expectations, considering it has Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain and is directed by Guillermo del Toro, who I’m just staring to realize creates films that are both aesthetically pleasing and color theory analysis gems.
I don’t have much to say about the film. I think the relationship between Edith and Thomas is slightly forced towards the beginning, and we as the audience members never really understand why we should care about their so-called great love affair. I mean, one moment she’s all like ‘I’m going to die a widow’ (which, ironically, now that I think about it, she did achieve), and the next moment she and Thomas are sucking each other’s faces off. So I didn’t understand that.
I also don’t feel like I see the love between Lucille and Thomas. I saw her jealousy (and props to Jessica Chastain for playing Lucille so convincingly, she was the whole reason why I kept watching because her portrayal of the unhinged character is the only other saving grace of this film besides its cinematography), I saw her possessiveness, I get why she and Thomas were so attached to one another, I just don’t… See the love? I know it’s supposed to be twisted and incestuous and unhealthy and all that good stuff (it’s not good. Not good. Just thought I’d reiterate that), but I still don’t understand the depth of their love enough to really believe she is so utterly confident in their scheme that she would really just allow him to go and marry other women.
Also, I hate, absolutely hate how this film tried to redeem Thomas. Like, I know he loves Edith (a whole other issue, I mean, honestly, how do you choose a person you’ve known for the better part of two months over the sister that you have relied on and committed crimes for and had sex with for the past two decades of your existence? It simply does not make sense, especially when all your schemes are just to make sure that you can finish your insipid machine, and your sister is actually getting nothing out of it besides satisfying her murderous nature.) and I know he saves her and Alan (the other physician who literally does absolutely nothing, adds nothing to the plot, and only exists as a distraction for a moment) by telling them the mine is open, but honestly, he was an accomplice to all of his sister’s crimes and to see him white-washed simply because he loved the protagonist is annoying.
Also, I hate Edith. I don’t care. I just hate her. Mia Waikowska plays her with such utter naivety that I sincerely do no understand how she got two separate men to fall head over heels in love with her and risk their lives for her for no reason. I do not understand when we can get over female protagonists who are completely and utterly ridiculous. She is neither intellectual nor independent, she is weak and emotional all the time, and she is an utter child. Yet for some reason she is just so completely different from all the other women in his life that Thomas suddenly just ups and decides he loves her? I hate, absolutely detest with my entire being this trope of the “not-like-other-girls” girl getting the praise when she has everything literally dropped in her lap. She had the supernatural ability (and she still didn’t know to light out of Crimson Peak like her tail was on fire), she had the money and the beauty, and even so she relies entirely on other people to survive. She wouldn’t even have been able to kill Lucille if Lucille wasn’t so desperate to see her brother again. The only good ending this film could have had is if they all died. That is the only reasonable ending to the crap of a character that is Edith.
Her characterization wasn’t even consistent! In the beginning, she’s the epitome of a liberal woman in the 1800s who’s independent and tries to get a career of her own and writes. Then she does a one-eighty, gives up her entire life without a fight to move to a whole other country with a man she just met and somehow married right after the death of her father, completely losing her independence and seemingly having no qualms about that. Even her one defining trait outside of her annoying innocence, her writing, is barely mentioned! I would have forgotten about it completely if Jessica Chastain hadn’t been burning her papers!
At times, I also think the dialogue of this film was cringe-worthy. I honestly hate it when we have characters repeat things so that the themes can be made obvious to the audience. Like, trust your audience to have a brain. We will get the theme if the artisanship of the film is good enough, you don’t have to have a character repeat key words like when Thomas goes “choices” right after Edith says “we could have choices.”
I also have a problem with some of the characters. Alan, for instance, is supposed to be the other love interest for Edith besides Thomas, but I really don't understand his importance? He didn't tell the audience anything about the Sharpe siblings Edith didn't already figure out (and the audience with her), and he got stabbed the moment he started doing something, so he just... Did nothing? And the other characters, the one woman who told Edith that she would "make sure she is in her place" just never shows up again in the film? She just threatens the protagonist and then suddenly disappears, never to be seen again. Why have this character if you're not going to do something with her?
OK.
I’m done with ranting about the ridiculousness that is the story, characters, and plot of this film. Now on to the good stuff. The cinematography, or the colors of the film.
Three colors in particular I think are relevant in the film: yellow, blue, white, and red (crimson, duh, it’s in the title of the film).
Let’s start with the easiest. Yellow.
Yellow is a color that appears quite often in the film, usually on our main protagonist Edith. It’s a color that usually symbolizes happiness and delight, and on Edith, it makes sense, because these are the traits that we as the audience are supposed to associate with her (whether or not we do is a whole other question, but that’s mostly due to screenwriting). She wears yellow a lot, contrasting with the dark surroundings that she finds herself in at Crimson Peak. It makes sense, and it’s the perfect way to visually storyteller. Without telling us (though the dialogue still tells us, how I wish this film trusted its audience to have half a brain), the colors show how different Edith is.
Especially when constructed with the darker colors of Lucille’s palette, Edith is the epitome of sunshine and happiness, something I imagine is very lacking in Thomas’ life, adding to his assertion that he loves her. The color yellow also appears earlier in the film, through the butterflies’ wings. Where Lucille is like the dark moths of Crimson Peak that eat everything away and preys on the beautiful and gentle yellow butterflies, Edith is meant to be the yellow butterflies, fluttering away in the smooth autumn wind, gentle unlike anything at Crimson Peak and in Thomas’ dark childhood.
Even the dress she wears when she first dances with Thomas is yellow, a muted champagne type color, and her hair too is long and yellow, evoking feelings of comfort and coziness, which is probably what she is to Thomas, who has only known the twisted love of his sister and the beatings of his mother. She does not wear black except for the one scene, her father’s funeral, and that is the exact opposite of the Sharpe siblings, who seem to only wear darker colors, especially Thomas, who is always in black. She is light. She is happy.
The other time yellow is the main color in the film is when Edith’s father is killed. The entire film becomes a musty yellow, sort of like the color of sand and dirt, and unlike the rest of Edith’s bright yellow, it is muted and dark. Of course, this makes sense, because when you have a character getting their head very viscerally bashed in on a sink, the color scheme is probably going to be slightly darker to match the scenario. The yellow here I think symbolizes both the elusive nature of Lucille, who is like sand in that she is silent, ever-persisting, and unforgiving/ cruel like the dessert, and Edith, who’s only color palette I can see is yellow. However, even though the yellow is muted, it is still yellow, and in a way this symbolizes Edith’s triumph over Lucille in the end: though Lucille taints her days, Edith is still the winner, or the final girl, in the end.
Blue is another color that is present quite often towards the beginning of the film. Both Lucille and Thomas wear dark blue, a blue so dark it is nearly black. But black is the color of mourning, and while Thomas might be often clad in black, symbolizing his mourning for the childhood and innocence and love that he never had, Lucille is not. Lucille is, ironically, the happier of the two, though she is much more refined and contained than Thomas seems at first glance. She is tranquil, in fact, the meaning often attached to blue. She is fine with the murderous life she leads with her brother, she is accepting of her own murderous tendencies and happy to hurt anyone who insults either her or her brother. She is confident, in the beginning, of her hold on Thomas’ heart and body, and she is not threatened by Edith’s existence. So she is tranquil. She is deep and dark and carries inherent sadness, but she is at peace, or as at peace as she’ll ever be. Even when she discovers that Edith and Thomas have spent the night outside, she does not fear as much as she probably should. She still believes he loves her, and he is hers, so though she is jealous and angry, she wears blue. She does not regret the things she has done.
Next, we have the color white. White is the only other prominent color on Edith’s color palette besides yellow, and even then it is usually when she is in her nightgown. But considering girly here spends half of the film running around in her nightgown, the color counts as pretty significant. White is a color that often symbolizes purity, and in a way that is what Edith is. She is pure as snow, and she is untainted by the violence of gore of the Sharpes. She is naive and young, a child, as Lucille calls her, and she acts as such all the time, which is why I find her insufferable as a character. But it is the defining trait of hers.
Interestingly, white is also the color that Lucille ends up in when she dies. In a way, this makes sense: white is also often the color of mental asylums and other institutions we associate with mental and personality disorders, including the almost sociopathic nature of Lucille (I’m no psychologist, so I won’t try to diagnose her, but I think she shows the traits pretty well). When Lucille’s hair is let down in the end of the film, she is nearly the exact vision of what we would expected of the woman in the attic, a trope throughout literature and film of a crazy women. However, she is not crazy because the men in her life, or the other authoritative powers in her life, make her so. She is just, as we would say, wired wrong.
The white of the scenery is also symbolic. Crimson Peak is predominantly crimson for much of the film, living up to its title, but the snow that covers it and flows around the house that is falling down is like the purity of Edith. She comes in quietly, and Lucille, who’s identifying color to me is red/crimson, is not afraid of her at first. But at the end of the film, white dominates red in the winter storm outside, and Lucille’s life is ended at the hands of Edith. Both women are, of course, left scarred by one another, with Edith’s hair (a Cornish yellow) is stained with crimson red blood and both her and Lucille’s white dresses equally bloody, and the white of the snow is covered with the bloody footprints of Edith and Alan as they escape. But the majority of the red is confined to the edges of Crimson Peak, symbolizing that though red is pervasive, in the end, white wins.
Of course, talking about that leads perfectly into my segue into red. Red is the most interesting color, in my opinion, of the film. The first time red really made an impact on me was when Lucille first appeared, in the blood red gown she donned for the party Edith and Thomas appear at. She is striking, the only person in the room who donned such a bright color, and in contrast with her dark hair, she looks the part of a femme fatale. The first time she kisses Thomas’ cheek in the ballroom, and this might be the acting of Jessica Chastain or the slightly romantic red lighting of the scene, the audience immediately feels the sexual chemistry between Lucille and Thomas, so much so that I did not expect them to be siblings and remained unsure about that for the entire film, until Lucille confirms that they are actually siblings.
The red is also the color of the clay in the Sharpe mines that Thomas is so desperate to revitalize. It is the same color of the clay that the bodies of past victims of the siblings are dumped into, and in a way, this red symbolizes the nature of the staining backstory of the siblings. They cannot be redeemed, because red stains everything, and both of the siblings are stained beyond recognition. The difference, however, is that Thomas never donned red. He is not proud of it, he begrudgingly accepts it, but he doesn’t want it. Lucille, on the other hand, knows no other life, so she accepts it and is nearly tranquil about it (see blue).
Red is Lucille’s color. There is no doubt about it. She wants to remain at Crimson Peak, she is Crimson Peak. If Edith is the snow that surrounds the place during the snowstorm, she is the red that stains the snow just surrounding the manor. Red is also the color of blood, and the blood that stains Lucille’s hands is far beyond anyone else’s in the film. It is also the color that most of the ghosts appear as, and since they all died at Lucille's hands, that makes sense as well. She is quite literally, red. Personified.
I liked the colors of the film. I found them engaging and beautiful. The reds of the film in particular stood out, often striking against the blue or yellow backdrop. I think as a Guillermo del Toro film, the cinematography does not disappoint. The writing and the plot, though, need much more fine-tuning, and I would not recommend this to anyone who wants to watch a film for anything beyond purely aesthetic reasons. Also, the violence and gore of this film are very, very graphic. I didn’t have a problem with it, but my family did, so be warned.
Happy Saturday!!
コメント