"People always have secrets, and without secrets, there is no art."
This quote comes from the genius director Jan Sweymeyer, a surreal director from the Czech Republic who has won the admiration of a large number of fans with his unique image style.
Today we will talk about one of his masterpieces, "Gluttonous Tree"
Gluttonous Tree, also known as Tree Baby, was released in 2000 by the talented Czech director Jan Sven Meyer. The film's story is based on a well-known Fairy Tale in the Czech Republic, and the "grotesque" Style Sven Meyer turns this dark fairy tale into a ghostly fantasy thriller.
The protagonists of the story are a couple, and unlike ordinary people, the two of them cannot get children because of infertility. The couple thinks day and night, and their desire for children is almost paranoid.
One day, the husband dug up a tree root, and in order to make his wife happy, he carved it into the shape of a child and gave it to his wife. But this delivery, there is an accident.
No, that's the child-like root... (The painting style of the ghost animal is impressive)
It may be the pressure and expectation of saving too long, the wife is crazy to believe that this tree root is a baby, and the husband has no choice but to cooperate with her to "play the family".
Until one day, the husband came back from work and was stunned by the scene in front of him.
The roots of the tree are refined... Truly become a living child... Can move, bark, cry, suckle.....
Xiaobian admitted to seeing that here has broken out: WTF??
But the limits of this ghost beast blockbuster are far more than here. Next, the wife really raised this "child", and the husband had to cooperate with her (I did my best to cooperate with your performance...). Together, they take care of this strange creature that seems harmless.
At first, in addition to the ugly points, this tree root baby also has some cuteness, coupled with the child voice dubbing, making people feel that this may be a naïve creature similar to Edward Scissorhands, who is uninhibited on the outside but gentle and lovely on the inside. The wife did her best to take care of her first baby, bathe him, cut his nails/branches, change his diaper...
Sigh... The power of maternal love
One of the charms of cult films is to make people unbelievable and make people inhale cool air. When the film's style of painting suddenly changed again, it was really unexpected.
Our root baby is no longer a good child for mom, he is beginning to mutate. At first, I ate my mother's hair, just like above...
After that, he began to intensify his efforts, eating a cat that had been in the family for thirteen years and vomiting bones...
His diet has increased day by day, to an astonishing extent, from the rice cereal that the couple made at the beginning, to buying more than a dozen pounds of raw meat ribs. Finally, this evil creature finally broke through the bottom line of man, and he began to eat people. And the husband and wife finally realized the seriousness of the matter, from the initial cover-up to the final fear.
This is an abnormal story of tree spirits eating people, saying that it is a thrilling fantasy, but in fact, after watching it, it is a strange and bad taste expression. Hidden in the film are many metaphorical shots, a situation that wanders in reality and imagination. The combination of animation and reality also makes this fantasy story cloaked in a fairy tale. When a childless story is fairytale, even the child's world is no longer simple.
Of course, this fairy tale is not made for children, and even some adults cannot accept such a style and setting, and the film contains too many complexities of the adult world. From the beginning of the film, the film continues to have a strange and eerie style, the innocent cries of children and the unreasonable close-up arrangement, the sound and picture confrontation is creepy, and the beautiful everything is covered with a layer of ghostly shadows.
The mother in the film is controversial, some people say that she represents the conqueror of desire, some people say that her maternal love is flooded to the brink of fire, and some people say that she is also a weak person, we must have compassion.
Compared with maternal love, the film relegates it to a kind of woman's indiscriminate sympathy. Again and again, I covered up to cause the final tragedy, and I also put myself into it. And away from the carrier of the woman, she originally represents the desire itself, and when her desire for children is satisfied, she is insatiable, so she tolerates the fact that the root baby eats people again and again.
If the mother is the mother that the director wants to express, then the endless desire of human beings is like the root of the tree in the film, a survival instinct that has no rationality to speak of.
For him, whoever can give him food is a friend and a parent. When he cannot be satisfied, it is the food on the plate.
When the husband saw that the tree baby had become a sperm, he mentioned the chainsaw to destroy this evil creature, and then again and again, he wanted to cut the grass and remove the roots, perhaps out of love for his wife, but more than that, it was also his inner intolerance, so that he also became a coverer. In fact, the husband's desire for children is no less than his wife's, but the remaining rationality has pulled him from illusion to reality again and again, but in the end he still fell. This is the power of desire and the source of greed.
In addition, there is a little girl who shelters the tree baby, and her purpose is too simple - just to want a friend. When the life-threatening monster and the simple purpose of the girl's friendship are fused, this enigmatic fairy tale reveals the children's urgency to seek a sense of existence and a confidant.
Babies, children, are the representatives of purity, simple new births. The tree baby in the film is crowned with a kind of greed, a kind of evil. Maybe that's exactly what the director meant—that human desire is innate.
In fairy tales, there are heroic aunts who take up a hoe to resist, but what about in real society? People's growing desires are gradually devouring the desires of this world, and who will control them?