Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Love, monsters submerge in ‘Water’
Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” may not boast the century’s weirdest sci-fi movie coupling. That honor goes to the 2016 Mexican movie “The Untamed.”
But del Toro’s vision of human/ fantastic creature sex is likely the most romantic ever filmed. By the time Sally Hawkins’ mute heroine Elisa Esposito gets the gilled-and-gorgeous fish man (played by del Toro’s regular monster mimer Doug Jones) alone in her flooding bathroom, their need for each other could not be more palpable.
Especially Elisa’s, whose association of erotic pleasure with water is carefully set up in the film.
“First of all, female sexuality seen in a natural way is very rare in movies,” del Toro points out. “It’s always objectifying, always serving glamor or a winkwink perversity, it doesn’t exist except from the male gaze. What I wanted to do was show how integral water was to her. When you’re blessed to have your first encounter in the bath where you’d been alone, it’s a very special repairing of your soul.”
“I land in her bathtub as my place of refuge,” Jones adds about his character. “Now we have no barriers between us, and privacy, so our touching becomes a big love scene. It had a purity and innocence to it that communicated volumes, I thought.”
The bathroom in Elisa’s apartment was recreated in a water tank for when Elisa gets an idea for an even more heightened experience.
“When she stuffed towels under the door, turned the faucets on and flooded the room, we were in the tank,” Jones says. “That was
about 8 feet of water, so we would have to gather our air at the top while treading water and then dive down to start the scene. Speakers were underwater with Guillermo on microphone, giving us very specific instructions. ... It was like a dance underwater. That’s what it felt like, just beautiful.”
While the creature makes for Elisa’s ideal leading man, his nemesis, government agent Strickland, is the real monster in the voiceless woman’s eyes, especially after he sexually harasses her at work.
With the current exposure of sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry and other fields, that scene plays more charged than it was probably meant to when the movie was made last year. Michael Shannon, who plays Strickland, acknowledges the sequence’s upsetting nature, but feels that it adds extra import to the film.
“It’s important to keep thinking about why people do that and why they think it’s OK to,” says the actor, whose other awards season contender “The Current War” has been indefinitely shelved due to the fallout from the allegations against its distributor, Harvey Weinstein. “The fact that that scene is in the movie, it’s an honest portrayal of a man who is very screwed-up in the head.
“The way we’re dealing with the problem right now is great, holding people accountable and stuff,” Shannon adds. “But we can’t just sweep it under the rug, that’s not the way to solve the problem. We have to get to the root of it, and as an artist I feel like it’s my responsibility to explore that and keep it in people’s thoughts.”