The Shape of Water
J. Plascencia
It says a lot about the filmmaking talents of both director Guillermo Del Toro and co writer Vanessa Taylor that they’ve made one of the most compelling on-screen romances of 2017 between a human woman and an amphibious fish-man creature, and that this is the least of the surprising wonders that the Shape of Water has to offer.
The film’s story is about a mute janitor in a secret government facility during the Cold War falling in love with the subject of the facility’s research, and Del Toro takes influence from all kinds of films from that era, from the more obvious Universal and Hammer monster movies to romantic melodramas and musicals.
While I’ve been known to take issue with films using nostalgia as a crutch, this influence is tied together by a magnetic and contemporary originality that keeps things interesting. Many clichés of the time are turned on their heads. For example, the creature, a male character, fills in the role of the “damsel in distress” for the most part, defended by a woman. The director also includes content that wouldn’t possibly be included in movies at the time. Be warned that the film is quite violent at times, and the central romance does become, er...explicit.
The film has another defining trait keeping it culturally relevant: a willingness to discuss the social issues behind those often glorified times. The hero of the story, Elisa (played to perfection by Sally Hawkins), is not only excellently developed and portrayed, but is accompanied by a small group of historically oppressed individuals that allow the story to touch on the treatment of people of color, gay people, and immigrants by society and government in the 1960s. In fact, the only straight, white, and American man in the main cast is the villain.
Through these characters, we can see a grander purpose for the presence of the film’s “monster”, the amphibious man referred to only as the Asset, than being an exciting visual effect or a love interest. The creature becomes representative of the Other, anyone outcast or misunderstood by “normal” people for their differences. Del Toro creates a magnificent fairy tale in which it is recognized that these differences make the Other beautiful, where outsiders are royalty and the real monsters are the humans that would oppress them. It’s an important message in a time like this, when we are dangerously close to the kind of systematic discrimination of the past.
