[CRITICAL] the SHAPE OF THE WATER

Under the skeleton coarse, each editor of the Blog lies a little sensitive heart, you know. As for Guillermo Del Toro, he has a heart that is huge and intends to prove it with the SHAPE OF THE WATER.

After more than twenty years of career, Guillermo Del Toro is today a filmmaker felt, not to say respected, by the press, the public and professionals of cinema. Even at the helm of hollywood blockbusters such as Hellboy or Blade 2, in a straitjacket of formal and economic conditions his talent, the mexican director has always been able to do shows of his eye of the aesthete and his way as a virtuoso of story-telling by the panning of the camera. However, a share of the public felt up until then that the tenderizing Del Toro had not yet found the project to the extent of his imagination, his ambition and visual generosity emotional. To believe the myriad of awards and rave reviews, that the SHAPE OF THE WATER raises from the Venice film Festival, Del Toro would have reached the culmination of his career in this story of the most romantic, the setting is adequate to deploy the theme and the bias of the aesthetic who are dear to him.

If the SHAPE OF THE WATER does not reach the degree of strangeness and poetry of The Spine of the devil or Pan’s Labyrinth, it is still less work overwhelming, as it seeks to allow it to flourish a love story of how a high achiever, with a sincerity that only the eternal children as Del Toro know we do accept. Without regard distanced himself, without irony or process of laying in the exercise of the fantastic, the staging is accompanied by the emotions and never look over or precede them. Empathy operates and encompasses the approach of the story without leaving margin on the more critical distance, thus making this love story inter-species all the more risky and far more reliant on the development of his poetic universe.And fortunately, Del Toro excels in the field, ensuring the exceptional quality of its artistic direction. We perceive in the depths of dark colours, that the filmmaker intends to portray a world that is confined, suffocating, and strangely implausible, as is sometimes the images that we come from the America of the sixties. The Baltimore sixties of the SHAPE OF THE WATER seems to stay in a temporal fault, not so far removed from that of the Montmartre of Amelie Poulain. The heroine Eliza, who works as a sub-floor and even when she regained the surface, she seems trapped in a jar urban, that the sunlight can barely get through, and that the sky barely invest. Without sky or sun, Eliza seems to be cut off from the natural energies and essential that should normally help to flourish ; then it remains in water as a conductive element of the sensations.

The water takes form, emerges as an allegory of the lack of emotional Eliza. The innocent eyes of a water creature respond to the sight of the fragile young lady ; it will be told later in the movie that this be the blue-skinned is seen as a god by a tribe of the amazon. Eliza does not fall in awe of a god, not that she has a unhealthy relationship with a martyr ; what she sees in this being, it is an individual just as alone as she. With this love story atypical, Del Toro continues the tradition of monster movies that have forged both his film and his romantic sensibility. We think obviously to the couple Edward/Kim (d’Edward scissorhands, and you can even go back to the scene deeply moving humanity of The Bride of Frankenstein, where a hermit is blind considers the creature as a friend.It is necessary to admit, it is not always easy to follow the narrative at the same distance as Del Toro, and even keeping a benevolence towards the romance, our mind comes to ask some questions that break sometimes magic. Usually in the fantastic cinema, the sexual attraction to a creature of inhuman takes a large share of tumult and questioning, both from the audience as the protagonists. Here, Eliza crosses the not quite sudden, without having time to understand how their partner perceives the relationship. The question, “But what I want to do the human naked in front of me ?” would certainly have been more interesting. Del Toro couldn’t devote more time to this element of the story probably because it was already filled by the light of the secondary characters revolving around the love story. If the SHAPE OF THE WATER has a antagonism fort governing the tension and the pace of the story, the film reveals his grace when the allies Eliza and the amphibians are taking part in the breath-fiction, by admitting the evidence of a love that returns them to their own solitude, their own fragility, their own humanity. They are like the rest of us spectators, amazed by these two beings, miraculous that they found the meaning of”being together”.

Arkham

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