the shape oF water
Sea of love…
Gushing over del Toro’s creature-feature marvel.
Even before you factor in his love for ghosts, fauns and kaiju, thick currents of feeling have always run through Guillermo del Toro’s finest films. Consider Federico Luppi’s poetic longings in The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy’s love for Selma Blair’s Liz Sherman, or the weeping heart of innocence lost in Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s no strain to call del Toro’s films love letters to cinema, either. At best, they double as declarations of devotion to the belief that film can seduce and transform across boundaries.
Those rivers of feeling overflow in his tenth film, an impassioned musical romance brimming with evidence of deep directorial conviction. True, recent del Toro workouts Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak also stretched beyond their monster-movie and melodrama roots thanks to his unfiltered investment. But The Shape Of Water is the director at his purest, surfacing as an English-language (and sign-language) extension of Backbone and Pan in its fulsomely imagined period allegory of outsiders resisting the tide of historical oppression.
For Backbone’s orphan hero and Pan’s inquisitive Ofelia, substitute Sally Hawkins’ mute Elisa, a lonely but life-loving cleaner who lives above an old-school film palace in 1962 Baltimore and finds escape in movies, music and moments of bathtub bliss. Meanwhile, her outsider bonds with potty-mouthed fellow cleaner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) receive full expression in del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s character-rich script.
At another extreme sits Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon), who we meet as he delivers an ‘asset’ for containment to the government facility where Elisa and Zelda work: a creature (Doug Jones) from a black lagoon, deemed to be of Cold War interest. After a shocking, bloody episode reveals our amphibi-man enjoys neither imprisonment nor torture, Elisa forms a bond with him based on Benny Goodman records and hard-boiled eggs. Soon, aided by sensitive scientist Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) and pals, she hatches a plan to bust the creature free: and Strickland isn’t the kind to pay enough attention to ‘the help’ to see the plan coming.
A kind of renegade fairytale romance ensues, though this being del Toro, it ensues in extravagantly wrought fashion. Never mind that the plot points can be semipredictable; fairytales often are. What’s more vital is the poetic potency with which del Toro frames the transformative, language-leaping bond between a wounded fish-fella and a scarred woman who has, finally, found someone who doesn’t look through her.
THINK LIKE A FISH
It also helps that Hawkins is on peak form. In her richest role since Happy-Go-Lucky, she communicates non-verbal feeling with an unforced charm that never dampens the longings below. Don’t let the faint echoes of Amélie dupe you: Hawkins and del Toro ensure her feelings run truer than any burped up in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s whimsical hit.
‘A TIMELESS, FANTASTICAL AND FORCEFUL FABLE OF OUTSIDER LOVE’