The Shape of Water Directed by Guillermo del Toro
The Shape of Water
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Octavia Spencer, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, David Hewlett, Nick Searcy
Year: 2017
Country: USA, Canada
Author Review: Roberto Matteucci
"He's saying thank you."
For a long time, it is the water the place where life is formed.
Genesis 1, 1-2
"In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters."
Koran Sura XLIII, 9-11:
"And if you should ask them, Who has created the heavens and the earth? they would surely say, They were created by the Exalted in Might, the Knowing.
[The one] who has made for you the earth a bed and made for you upon it roads that you might be guided
And who sends down rain from the sky in measured amounts, and We revive thereby a dead land - thus will you be brought forth."
In the Vedas the battle between Indra - the God of rain - and Vrtra - demon of chaos - ends with the victory of the first, then the celestial waters fall on the earth until then held back by Vrtra. With the rain on earth came life.
But my favourite is the eighth chapter of the Tao Te Ching:
"The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In business, be competent.
In action, watch the timing.
No fight: No blame.
... " (1)
This sentence determines the universal meaning of water.
Water is the centre of life because it is able to adapt to everything and everyone. Lao Tzu's phrase could also be the favourite of the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. It is thanks to the water that his fervid imagination is able to construct the fantastic and dreamlike creature of the film The Shape of Water, who is born alive and returns to the water.
The Shape of Water won the Golden Lion at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.
We are in the United States, the sixties. It's a complicated era. Americans live together with a terrible enemy, a very strong enemy that they could even get into the American home. It is the USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
It represents the communist threat, the real danger, despite the alliance against the Germans during the Second World War. They fought together with the Nazis but at the same time, they tried to limit the advance of the terrible bolshevik.
The communist terror intensifies the sense of fear, capable of annihilating and breaking down civil society.
The Shape of Water is set in this fearful world.
Elisa Esposito is a typical example of the sense of terror of those years: she is a single woman and she is mute. She works as a cleaner in a hidden base of the army. Her best friend is Zelda. Zelda is her opposite: chatty, gossipy, married to an idler man: "if the farts were flattery, he would be Shakespeare".
In the base there is turmoil, the military found, in a river in South America, an amphibious creature, a compromise among an avatar, a blue smurf and a nice little monster similar to those used in many B-movies.
Even Del Toro snubbed him, in fact, he did not give him a name:
"The creature did not need a name, for everyone it represents something different, a sort of Teorema, written by Pasolini, with a fish. But on the set, we called him Charlie as a famous canned tuna." (2)
It is the first violence suffered: to be nicknamed Charlie by his own inventor, and how to identify it without soul and heart.
The second violence comes from the military. He is locked up in captivity in the base, always chained and mocked.
Between the American soldiers and the Russian services starts a race to obtain the advantages of this unnamed monster, because both think of using him for military purposes.
In the continuation of the story, the two weakest entities - Elisa and the Unnamed - meet and love each other. It's life, it always happens that way. And obviously, there is the bad man who begins a battle against them to prevent their happiness.
The film has a very simple and direct metaphor, the director explains it:
"I believe that every fantasy story is extremely political, and making politics means choosing. The choice of The Shape of Water is to prefer love to fear. Today fear and cynicism are very persuasive, but we should all get up every morning and to always believe and however in the love.". (3)
The film is like a fairy tale, has a meaning and a clear metaphor. Quality that helps the story and public perception. Del Toro is very good and, The Shape of Water is his the most mature, responsible, more well-done movie. More defined in the characters and in the script. All these qualities, however, do not make his best film.
He draws a colourful, fantastic, utopian world that is undoubtedly dark and gloomy.
The colours are centralizers, as well as the music, strong and enveloping.
The discontinuous editing has elegant fittings: the cut fingers are tied - cynically - with the croquettes to eat.
Equal style has the connection of Richard while engaged in a compulsory coitus with his wife, combined with a rapid movement with Elisa who is sweeping in the base.
The characters are ideal.
Elisa represents sensuality no matter of the form. It is water, with her body wraps the sensual whorls of the unnamed. In order to satisfy one's own passions, she finds a physical artifice, adapting herself to the water environment, she wants to have the gratification of her libido, because she has never tried that experienced. The most beautiful scenes are those of sex between the two because they are two different species, one of which is not human:
"The real monsters are the men who are obsessed with perfection, who can not tolerate defects, differences. It is the most behaviour which scares me, in real life, and this monstrosity I wanted to face, even from a political point of view". (4)
The morality is the freedom to mate as we wish, without fear, without limits, despite the prohibitions of power.
If Elisa is the high-ranking morality, the nice Zelda is the long-winded woman with her feet on the ground. She is aware of the difficulty of life, and she tackles it with the irony of a series of fulminating and funny sentences:
"Never trust a man even when he appears flat below."
"To make a marriage go, so many lies are needed".
And then there's Giles, a failed and lonely old homosexual artist. He can no longer work.
He represents the other part of the world. If the monster had been gay, the couple would have been the unnamed monster and Giles, and perhaps the script would have been even more correct.
If in the first part there is the formation of characters, with a quick but dense and emotional psychological description, the second part is more linear and continue. There is the action, the sexual part, the wickedness of the soldiers, and the sarcastic behaviour of the Russian spies shot from below with a ray of light on the face.
(1) Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, traduzione di Augusto Shantena Sabbadini, Feltrinelli, Milano terza edizione, settembre 2014
(2) https://www.cinematographe.it/rubriche-cinema/interviste/guillermo-del-toro-the-shape-of-water/