Saw Beasts of the Southern Wild, a beautiful, poetic, fable of a film which follows Hushpuppy, a girl living with her father off the grid in the outskirts and wetlands of (I think) Louisiana. She is taught and minded by a gang of dunks and weirdos who teach her that the icecaps are melting, freeing old extinct monsters that the cave men fought off. These beasts become associated with water and storms to young Hushpuppy, a fitting nemesis in a post-Katrina New Orleans.
The film is shot sort of magically and sort of realistically. The girl is abandoned by her father for a while (for example) only for him to show up again in a hospital gown. When she asks where he went, he just yells at her. Earlier in the film, she puts her head to a hog's side to listen to its heart beat. It's a strange mix of touching innocence and harsh reality colliding in this one girl's head.
The image of water is potent as well. They live in a watery land, but also a land where too much water, thundering down like the hooves of those large beasts, spells doom for the floating community. Rain is reason to be scared but, during deaths, the community sheds no tears, instead drinking clear, vodka-like spirits. Water is life but also it is death.
Hushpuppy is made tough by this world and while her toughness is admirable, it's also poignant. I wish she could have been allowed to grow up in the dry world where she maybe didn't have to be so tough.
This film was very lyrical and interesting. I enjoyed it even as I felt I didn't fully understand it.
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