Splash: Short Film Review
Lately there has been an attitude of live-action superiority in film; many animated movies of the past, particularly Disney movies, are being “upgraded” to live-action forms – if they can really be called “live-action” seeing as they rely heavily on CGI and animated graphics. However, within the world of moving pictures, artistic movements are often best captured through animation. The medium speaks through a unique visual language synonymous with abstraction and/or impressionism in ways that live-action, which is inherently photographic, cannot. Filmmaker Shen Jie’s short film Splash reaffirms these capabilities of animation, taking inspiration from the art of David Hockney and combining it with the medium of film.
As a whole, the film is difficult to describe on a concrete level, yet there is an underlying plot that flows throughout its duration. A double-amputee goes for a swim, accompanied by a woman – possibly a friend or a lifeguard, though there is another lifeguard present as well. He bites the woman’s hand, using her as an improvised starting block off of which he dives backwards into the water. The woman follows shortly after. These actions of his preparation to jump into the water are intercut with black-and-white images of a man setting off a bomb. We learn that these are flashbacks of the amputee on the moment in which he lost both of his arms. In the pool, he struggles to stay above the water, bobbing up and down before the woman. The last shot we are given is of her performing CPR on the man as he lies unresponsive on the floor.
Right away the film places us in an obscure physical space; it seems that the “camera,” so to speak, sits at the edge of an indoor pool, yet the blue tones of the water extend onto the tile walls above. As a result, although logically we as viewers must be situated above the water, it feels as though we are underwater nonetheless. This shot lingers until it becomes hypnotic, the subtle waving of the water being the only visual movement we are given. However, at the same time, there is a sound, reminiscent of a drop of water falling from a spout into a sink, that repeatedly breaks through the serenity and instills a sense of foreboding. This sound chimes leisurely at first, but then begins picking up the pace, ringing increasingly more urgently, before– a high-pitched beep. A splash. And we see the title card on a static image of a broken camcorder underwater.
The grid pattern of the tiled walls and pool floor continuously muddle our position in the room, particularly following the man’s time underwater: after he is supposedly saved by the woman, we hear a gasp of breath, and then a screen filled with tiles, only barely distorted by the water between the subject and the surface. This surface could be anything – the floor of the pool would suggest that the man is facedown in the water, while the ceiling would suggest the opposite – yet it turns out to be the wall of the room before which a lifeguard sits in his tower.
Ambiguity of space and surreal environments are themes which Shen Jie often explores in his work; much of his photography utilizes inverted colors to build spaces grounded in a sub-reality which we can only vaguely recognize. In this particular short, he conflates this theme with the artistic style of David Hockney – in particular it is reminiscent of Hockney’s pieces The Splash and Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures), both of which involve swimming pools inspired by Hockney’s home in Los Angeles.
As a whole, the film creates a largely disconcerting effect which illustrates the trauma that the amputee has following the bombing that cost him both of his arms. Between the flashbacks to a bombing, the eerie silence of the indoor pool, and the uncertainty of whether we are above or below the water at any given moment, the piece compels us to inadvertently hold our breaths, the feeling of suffocation carrying us throughout its narrative.