By Lubna Abdel-Aziz It is little wonder that humans are so intensely drawn to water. Scientists believe all life began in the water, well over two billion years ago, when single cells united to form larger and more complex organisms. Gradually life moved onto land, but our planet remains to be one large ocean covering 70 per cent of its surface, broken up here and there by islands we call continents. Vast and deep, water is constantly moving. There are mountains and valleys under the sea; even rivers flow to and fro. Tides and currents, winds and waves, glide over the many riches of a life largely unknown to scientists below the ocean beds. We ourselves are primarily made up of water (about 65 per cent), and the composition of our blood is almost identical to seawater, teleologically implying that this is where we originated. Is it not a fact that the highlight of a year of sweat and toil is a vacation by the sea, returning us closer to our original habitat. When the sea is beyond our reach, or just for the benefit of water's proximity, we build swimming pools in our backyards to indulge our need for the luxury and leisure that water provides. The swimming pool furnishes some of the hypnotic elements, tender caresses, soothing songs of the deep blue sea. If water provides us with fears and fantasies of water nymphs, and sylphs, of mermaids and mermen, of a mysterious life beneath the sea, why therefore not below a swimming pool? Leave it to writer/director M Night Shyamalan, to rivet us, quicken our pulse, and scare us silly with a fairy tale of living creatures at the bottom of a swimming pool, in his latest film Lady in the Water. Shyamalan's fascination with a million blood-curdling ideas, and hair-raising vision, have already generated over $2 billion for the big screen. Who can forget the little boy in The Sixth Sense : "I can see dead people," leaving little doubt that Shyamalan does too? In his latest adventure into the paranormal Shyamalan sees strange, living, breathing, creatures at the bottom of a swimming pool. A tale which started as a bedtime story for his children, culminated in a disquieting nightmarish account of daymarish creatures that terrify and petrify us to no end. Another twilight zone, another supernatural tale, Shyamalan takes us to the bottom of a swimming pool of a modest apartment complex, where a nymph-like creature is trapped in our world and struggling to return back to hers. The melancholy manager of the building, played by the able Paul Giamatti, helps her make that treacherous journey, with the participation of the apartment tenants. They all embark on a mission to speed the nymph back to her outer realm -- the Blue World. This creature of the water, which Shyamalan calls a "narf", is portrayed by the fragile nymph-like Bryce Dallas Howard, daughter of director Ron Howard ( The Da Vinci Code ). This is her second outing with Shyamalan, who also directed her in his other creepy film of The Village (2005) . The hero of the film, and almost every film he participates in, is Giamatti, who came to our attention only two years ago in the sleeper hit Sideways. Giamatti graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1989, made his big screen debut in 1990 in I'll Take Romance, and has been acting on stage, TV, and film regularly ever since. Born in 1967, Paul Edward Valentine Giamatti was afforded the best education by father A. Bartlett Giamatti, then president of Yale University, and mother Toni Smith, a thespian, who instilled the love of acting in two of her three children. While Giamatti's acting roots are in the theatre, since his days at Yale, he quickly made an impression on the big and small screen. Giamatti has no great ambitions to be a leading man: "I have the mentality of a supporting actor... I have to be the geekiest guy in the world, in a lot of ways." This "geeky guy" has become the most sought after character player in Hollywood, both in independent and mainstream productions. He developed the reputation of a skilful scene-stealer, and all leading actors take heed when opposite him, as in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Man on the Moon (1999). His breakthrough film role came in 2004 in Alexander Payne's phenomenal success Sideways as Miles Raymond, the failing writer and wine fanatic, who embarks on a revelatory wine country road trip with his best friend (Thomas Hayden Church), soon to be married. Giamatti's heartbreaking performance, won him a list of honours including Golden Globe and SAG (Screen Actors' Guild) nominations. He had to wait for the following year to win a SAG award, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as Joe Gould, the loyal manager of boxer James Braddock (Russell Crowe), in Cinderella Man. Giamatti brought the same intensity, diversity and credibility to Cinderella Man which he brings to the character of Cleveland Heep in Lady in the Water. Completely taken by 'Story' the young narf, he helps her overcome her enemies, the fierce beastly creatures, 'scrunts', who are hindering her return to her world. Shyamalan makes great demands on our imagination, leaving us swirling and staggering. He mixes the real with the unreal, the ordinary with the extraordinary, the natural with the supernatural, in such perfect proportions, we find no difficulty in traversing from here, to this outer world, if only for the duration of the film. This fantastic fairy tale, born out of a figment of Shyamalan's imagination is further proof of our desire to escape the doldrums of our lives, developing gossamer wings to help us fly beyond the periphery of our confines, to a parallel world that we must subconsciously know exists, up there, out there, or down there, below the deep blue sea, or even under a swimming pool. There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, Whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath -- Hermann Melville (1819-1891)
