"I am waiting for you in the rain": touching in the ordinary

Author: Zhang Yiwen

In recent years, there have been endless films with "dogs" as the object of performance, from "A Dog's Mission" to "Little Q" to "The Call of the Wild" and "Togo", the image of dogs has gradually increased on the screen, and the stories about dogs have also made the audience full of emotions. I Wait for You in the Rain is also a film about dogs, based on the novel of the same name, directed by Simon Curtis, about a golden retriever named Enzo and the happiness, bitterness and sorrow of the owner Danny's family. Similar to similar themes, Enzo, like the famous "Hachiko", brings the audience a touch of the ordinary, but in terms of scene creation, performance techniques, theme implications, etc., "I Wait for You in the Rain" will focus more energy on Enzo, truly highlighting the characteristics of the dog as the protagonist.

Life-like scenes

In films with dogs as the main performance object, there are often two types of scenes: one is the spectacle scene of the wild, representing "The Call of the Wild", "Togo", etc., often telling the story of the sled team; the other is the daily life scene, representing "The Story of Hachiko the Loyal Dog", "Little Q", "The Mission of a Dog" and so on. In "I Wait for You in the Rain", more emphasis is placed on the creation of life-like scenes, and even goes further than films with the same life-like scenes. Specifically, the film tells the process of Enzo's adoption by his master from the beginning, which is more realistic than the opening scene of Hachiko falling from the car and losing his way in "The Story of Hachiko the Loyal Dog", and the protagonist of "Little Q" is positioned as a guide dog, and the particularity of his professional identity makes Enzo equally incomparable; from the overall point of view of the film, the film focuses on the life scene of Enzo's life in the owner's danny's house, mainly for the companionship of the Danny family and Enzo's solitude, eating, sneaking around, watching TV, riding a car... Ordinary can not be ordinary. Because of this, the scene of life is more immersive than the spectacle of the scene, the audience's substitution is stronger, the film seems to become life itself, and the story on the screen is more empathetic, invisibly amplifying the dramatic component of the movie, especially the scene where Enzo is hit by a car, which is heartbreaking.

The way the scene is created reflects the creator's concept, so the living can also be seen as an orientation of the creative concept, just as the ups and downs of the legendary life is not the life trajectory of most people, the life of the film is closer to the public film, in this sense, "I wait for you in the rain" has a certain realist meaning, family, work, children, dogs, together construct an ordinary scene in the ordinary family, Enzo's eyes of the Danny family has become the actual life scene of most people, Even with the help of animals' point of view, there is no barrier.

First-person narration

As mentioned above from the animal point of view, the biggest difference between this film and other animal films is that it is completely narrated from the first-person point of view of Enzo the Golden Retriever, and the animals are anthropomorphized, and the methods adopted include monologue narrative, interventional narrative, subjective point of view shot and stream of consciousness shot, etc. The first two methods have the generality of narrative works, and the latter two have the particularity of film art. In the film, the use of the four ways is often cross-integrated, such as in the scene where Enzo is forgotten at home, due to the hallucinogenicity caused by long-term hunger, the film is on the one hand his chattering self-description, on the other hand shows the incredible scene he sees in his eyes: a zebra doll moves on its own, provokes Enzo, and finally empties his body, which is actually a distortion of his real-life behavior in his consciousness, and finally returns home Danny finds the destroyed family scene and reprimands Enzo on the spot. At this time, Enzo's heart is still arguing for himself in the form of a voiceover.

Anthropomorphic treatment eliminates the boundary between animals and people, literature often relies on the reader's self-imagination to construct animal/character images in the text, and the film gives full play to the advantages of the media to provide the audience with this image, so Enzo's imageization should be more real and perceptible, visually creating more identity for the audience, and ultimately serving the story and theme. For example, the same scene above triggered, when Danny is about to sign a legal document that will cause him to relinquish custody of his daughter, Enzo again sees the zebra printed on the pen, it grabs the document and tears it, and finally helps Danny save custody, apparently here Enzo's stream-of-consciousness camera processing intervenes in the narrative, ultimately affecting the direction of the overall plot.

Fatalism and the concept of reincarnation

Scene construction and narrative techniques can still be regarded as the external form of narrative works, and the inner theme meaning is the soul of the work. "I Wait for You in the Rain" conveys a fatalism and reincarnation through Enzo's "consciousness" and fate, compared to the story of the dog Bailey helping the owner to fulfill his wish through reincarnation in "A Dog's Mission", this film is introverted but loses its temperature.

At the beginning of the movie, when Danny selects Enzo from a group of puppies, the bond of fate between the two is established, and as the plot develops, fatalism gradually emerges in two aspects: one is congenital, Enzo innately likes motorsport, which coincides with Danny's racing driver profession, so the two are often inseparable, either Enzo sits in Danny's car or sits in front of the TV to watch racing events together; the second is acquired, that is, Enzo intervenes in Danny's ups and downs of life, From Danny getting married to having a daughter to his wife dying of illness and getting caught up in the custody struggle, Enzo has always been accompanied, and when Danny finally wins custody and life begins to get on the right track, Enzo is suddenly in a car accident and finally leaves. It has to be said that Enzo as a dog and Danny as a human have a deep connection in fatalism.

If fatalism embodies the entanglement of fate between the two, the concept of reincarnation is a belief that unfolds from Enzo's point of view. In the film, Enzo once saw a story about the "Mongolian dog" on the National Geographic Channel: in Mongolia, a dog is buried in a mountain after death, and before reincarnation, the dog's soul can roam freely in the desert and plateau. Enzo said after seeing the story: "They say that not all dogs will be reincarnated into adults, only those who are ready will. I'm ready. Although Enzo is an ordinary dog, he always hopes that when his soul soars, he can become a person who can express his thoughts and do what he wants, saying, "I want to participate, not just observe." Rich in religious reincarnation, at the end, Danny met a racing fan who came to visit, and when he signed his autograph, he learned that the fan was called "Enzo", and Danny and his daughter looked at each other without words, and said without emotion: "You can call me at any time and learn driving skills with me." Here, it seems that Enzo is really reincarnated as a human being and meets Danny again.

From the perspective of film artistic expression, "I Wait for You in the Rain" constructs the fate of a dog in human life through life-like scenes and first-person narrative techniques, and also carries a mysterious color of religious reincarnation. Returning to the general perspective of the audience, "I Wait for You in the Rain" is also like its title, there is not much dramatic conflict, some are just ordinary life like "rain"," but it is also this kind of ordinariness that makes waiting and companionship seem precious and touching. (Zhang Yiwen)