Del Toro’s monster gets the girl
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, “The Shape of Water,” was one of this year’s most lauded pictures.
It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and recently took away four Oscars including for best director and best picture at the Academy Awards.
Much critical praise was also heaped on star Sally Hawkins, who was nominated for an Oscar for best actress as the lead.
Del Toro has built an impressive resume since he broke into feature filmmaking at the age of 29 with Cronos in 1993. His films are typically a mixture of fable and fantasy and often deal in the tropes of the horror genre.
“The Shape of Water” is no different, and while Del Toro has adapted comics to the screen (twice successfully with “Hellboy” and “Blade II”), “The Shape of Water”’s striking palette and elaborate sets turn it into something of a cinematic hybrid that fully embraces the esthetics of comics as well as video games.
Del Toro used the 1954 B-movie “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” as a touchstone and had originally intended to make his film in black and white.
The new Gill-man shares scales and webbed fingers with the creature from the Black Lagoon, but he’s also bioluminescent like those odd glowing fish from the ocean’s darkest depths and is brought to life with remote controlled motors and computergenerated imagery.
St. Catharines lays claim to a direct connection to this fantastic being as local resident and special effects and makeup artist Jason Detheridge was part of the team at Toronto’s Legacy Effects that realized Del Toro’s vision of the creature.
Shot in Hamilton and Toronto, there are lots of Golden Horseshoe relevancies for filmgoers to watch for, including Hamilton’s city hall and Toronto’s Massey Hall, as well as the interior of the Elgin Winter Garden Theatre and the Lakeview Diner on Dundas Street West, although the film is set in a Cold War 1960s Baltimore.
Del Toro considers both horror films and fairy tales types of storytelling that are fundamentally politically motivated to either enforce or critique the establishment and its conventions.
Very much a sign of the times, “The Shape of Water” wears its politics as brilliantly as any of Del Toro’s previous films, including those that have touched on fascism and the Spanish Civil War. He manages this while still fulfilling his stated aspiration to create, “not a love story, but a story about love.”
Sally Hawkins’ character, Elisa Esposito, works as a cleaner in a secret government laboratory where the Gill-man creature is being held captive for study.
A mute, she learns to communicate with the Gill-man through sign, music and dance. When she learns that the creature is to be killed, she masterminds his escape from the compound and keeps him at her apartment before planning to set him free. In the meantime, she and the Gillman fall in love.
As Del Toro has explained, it’s the creature feature where, for once, the monster gets the girl.
Beneath all the layers of fantasy and incredibly lustrous greens and blues of Canadian Paul D. Austerberry’s production design, “The Shape of Water” is a simple story, elegantly told,
about the acceptance of ‘otherness’ and the essential value of empathy.
It champions the refugee and the persecuted, and it pleas for greater thoughtfulness as class, ability, ethnicity, and nationalism become rigidly defined as tools of exclusion.