Del Toro’s ‘The Shape of Water’ makes waves at Venice Film Festival
Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is an aquatic “Beauty and the Beast,” a transgressive fairy tale about a young woman’s love for a scaly creature from the Amazonian depths. Like the best fables, it’s also rooted in the real world: The story of a migrant from the south facing a hostile reception in a security-obsessed United States. “I think that fantasy is a very political genre,” del Toro said Thursday at the Venice Film Festival, where “The Shape of Water” had its red-carpet world premiere. It’s one of 21 films competing for the coveted Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize. “Fairy tales were born in times of great trouble. They were born in times of famine, pestilence and war,” he said. Part monster movie, part noir thriller, part Hollywood musical, the film defies categorization, though Del Toro took a stab, suggesting it’s “like Douglas Sirk rewriting Pasolini’s ‘Theorem’ with a fish.” Some critics are calling it del Toro’s best film since “Pan’s Labyrinth” in 2006. The Daily Telegraph summed it up as “an honest-to-God B-movie blood-curdler that’s also, somehow, a shimmeringly earnest and boundlessly beautiful melodrama.” Screen International called it “exquisite ... del Toro at his most poignant and sweet.” Set in early-1960s Baltimore, the film stars Sally Hawkins as Elisa, a mute orphan who works as a cleaner at a high-security lab. She forges a bond with a captured creature who is at the center of a Cold War tug-of-war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. “The Shape of Water” features del Toro’s usual rich mix of ingredients: everything from Russian spies to musical interludes. Its overriding message, the director says, is “to choose love over fear.”