M WAITING FOR A WINNER
The Shape of Water’s China release comes soon after it bags best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Xu Fan reports.
exican director Guillermo del Toro’s home, which is located in the outskirts of Los Angeles, has a bronze statuette of the Chinese mythological superhero Monkey King.
The epitome of heroism from the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West is a household name in China. But for Toro, whose movie The Shape of Water bagged four Academy Awards this year, including best picture and best director, Monkey King symbolizes a beautiful figure surrounded by other characters in the novel in their own quest for perfection.
“When I was a kid, I stumbled upon the story of Monkey King. What I love is that it’s a character who is unruly, mischievous and very compelling,” del Toro, 53, says during a recent video interview with Chinese media.
“I was affected by the tale of incomplete people coming together in the quest for virtue or good … I think that philosophy is very moving to me and it’s in The Shape of Water in a way, not directly.”
The movie’s connection with China may be subtle, but it will be screened in China earlier than any other Oscar winners for best picture in the past 20 years. The Shape of Water (2017), is set to open across mainland theaters on Friday — just 12 days after the 90th Academy Award winners were announced on March 4.
Chinese star couple Tong Dawei and Guan Yue are working as promotional ambassadors for the film, and singer Zhou Shen released a promotional song online on Tuesday.
Set in Baltimore in 1962, the movie follows a mute cleaning woman’s love for a captured amphibian creature with human looks in a high-security government laboratory. In the metaphor-studded story, some of the key characters are shown struggling on the margins of society but yearning for love and understanding.
Elisa Esposito, the cleaner, played by English actress Sally Hawkins, is isolated for being unable to speak. Her neighbor is a struggling advertisement illustrator who is despised for his sexual preference. Her best friend at the lab is a black woman suffering a loveless marriage at home and facing racial discrimination at work.
But their rescue of the amphibian man so that he cannot be dissected by the ruthless overseer of the laboratory turns the movie into a warm story about kindness and bravery.
For del Toro, The Shape of Water is “a love letter to classic cinema” that he has dreamed of directing for years.
When the Guadalajaraborn filmmaker first watched the 1954 horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon, he felt that an underwater sequence involving an amphibious humanoid and a female swimmer could have been romantic. He thought they would end up together, but it didn’t happen in that film.
He says he wanted it to end well for the creature, as well as make a film that “heals people the way they need to be healed”.
Haunted by the idea for more than two decades, del Toro even quit directing the $150-million sci-fi film Pacific Rim Uprising early, and took up The Shape of Water, which was being made for only $19.3 million.
“It’s not an easy movie to make for that amount of money. We needed a lot of time to do it carefully,” says del Toro, adding that the project was both ambitious and beautiful.
American actor Doug Jones was key in realizing del Toro’s dream. After starring in crucial roles in many of the director’s earlier movies, such as Abe Sapien in the Hellboy franchise, and Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, he again wore heavy makeup to play the amphibian creature in The Shape of Water.
In the movie, Jones’ character is covered with scales, but still looks sexy.
Speaking about his decadeslong fascination for fantasy movies with creatures, the director says: “It’s very natural for me, because the way Mexicans see myths is that they coexist with daily life.
“In Mexico, you believe in the impossible existing every day. When you say you see a ghost, people say: ‘OK, tell me about it’. They don’t say: ‘Are you crazy?’ We accept the magical and realistic things at the same time.”
The movie has so far won 97 awards, including the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.
Most of the reviews have been positive, exemplified by 7.6 points out of 10 on IMDb and a 92 percent critics’ liking on Rotten Tomatoes. But the movie has been criticized by some for being superficial in its treatment of a Beauty and the Beast theme.
“Opinions are opinions. I think that it’s absolutely impossible to find any other movie in the history of cinema that is a musical thriller comedy (like
The Shape of Water),” he says.