Liberatore said:When you look at the biblical motifs, it’s very much like a Tarkovsky film—you have the fish (that early Christian symbol, obviously) and water, which act as almost iconic symbols throughout the movie (think of the diving board scene). Then there's the father lying in bed, which feels like a direct nod to that famous painting of Jesus—I can't recall the artist offhand, maybe someone Spanish.
Hmm, yeah, we could also point to the scene where his sons carry his body to the beach and drag him toward the boat; the bird's-eye view of him lying there with his arms outstretched is a dead ringer for the crucifixion of Jesus.
That said, I have to admit that after sitting through the film and digging into some critiques and reviews, all these Biblical parallels started feeling a bit overblown to me. It’s probably because I wasn't approaching the viewing from a religious standpoint—aside from what I touched on in my other post here, but even that was just a personal comparison.
For those of you who actually caught these motifs, how are you interpreting them? Are they meant as direct links to the characters' fates, or something else entirely?
Take, for instance: the father acting as a parallel to Jesus, the savior. One son functions like a devoted apostle—John, right? The other is essentially Judas, given how he indirectly caused his father's death. And since the father is gone so soon, he returns to "save" them...