Review of The Shape of Water (2017) by Sam S — 23 Jan 2018

#Movie-corner.

"The Shape of water": when critics drool over a dummy guide of How to make love to a FISH ??

With the OSCAR season closing in, this movie got an impressive 13 different nominations. I wondered why after watching its trailer which I could not quite digest. So, it wasn't much of a thought to pick it for our next movie trip.

Mr. Del Toro, the director, is very well known for his fantasy/fictional storylines, most prominently "HELLBOY" both parts and "Pacific Rim". However, the storyline of Hellboy despite being fictional proved to be very plausible and clear in its message regarding life choices and what defines being human. In "the shape of water" the message got mixed with unnecessarily bizarre and sick plot holes.

We start the movie with the main character's (Sally Hawkins) daily morning rituals, or night in her case as she works night shifts, waking up on the 60th music tunes, taking her shower and masterbating in her bath tub.... yup.. your eye didn't trick you. We saw this ritual 3 times in the movie, one of them in the first 5 minutes. Buckle up, the journey gets hideous.

Sally plays an average non attractive mute female who feels outcasted from the world because no one notices her as she was telling her gay neighbor who suffers the same social oppression. Her daily ritual becomes a way of loosening her deep hidden tension and anxiety. But did we really need to see the naked scenes multiple times to get the message?!!! I wonder.

It gets more kinky when Ms. Hawkins falls in love with a fish (amphibian), and tells her neighbor in sign language that she likes how it "feels" with the amphibian because: "he doesn't see me incomplete like everyone else, he sees me as I am". Well of course lady, he is not human, he does not even know who you are or what species are you. She trained him like a pet putting boiled eggs daily on his container's edge to attract him towards her. Technically, she seduced him. Guess what, the plot goes on a more lunatic spiral showing her naked...again.. having sex with..... the fish.

Indeed, fantasy had no limits with Del Toro, who adds a scene in which Sally's close work mate (Octavia Spencer) asks her when she realized about their sex encounter: "But how?!!!... does he has....?." and she doesn't complete her understandable question, but hilariously Sally blushingly nods and makes a hand gesture signing a "yes", Spencer laughs saying: "never trust a man even if he is flat down there".............

Unfortunately Mr. Del Toro's main message "seemed" to be the divisive society amidst the cold war era between USA and Russia, the space competition and the wild discrimination at the time towards Gays "Sally's neighbor", black "Random couple", and women "in general". It is in its core a wonderful and rich area to tackle, however the whole message got lost with the messed up storyline written by Del Toro himself.

To add insult to injury, a 2015 danish production short film (13 min) called "the space between us" was recently tied to Mr. Del Toro's movie. I didn't know about that danish movie till after I saw Del Toro's, so I checked it on youtube. Strikingly, the 13 minutes plot and many of its scenes were as if it was a carbon copy from Del Toro's, despite being on a low budget without much of the generous lavish cinematic effects Del Toro had. More mind blowing, when Del Toro was asked in an interview about the striking resemblance down to specific shots, he laughed saying that he has been making movies since 2004 like "Hellboy" with amphibious life forms in it, so his ideas are the original ones and anything else is a copy.

Well, it is always fun to see how famous people don't bother about putting some mental effort in their lies to make them believable, thinking that people will buy whatever trash they say just because they are stars. I would agree to disagree with Mr. Del Toro's faint explanation, simply it is not because you were the first to show humanoid amphibian fish in Hellboy it means that you own any ideas that has similar humanoid structure. Plus, filming on "the shape of water" started in August 2016, over a year after "the space between us" was out. So it is either the people of the danish movie secretly future hacked into Del Toro's mind plans of how he will shoot his scenes, or Del Toro got many of his scenes ideas from the already produced movie making it looking as if it is cribbed directly from the danish one. Somehow many, together with Mr. Del Toro himself, believe that the first explanation is the truth.

Trying to make any sense from the movie by imagining that the whole thing was just a symbolic struggle, and that Sally's life in essence is a symbol of a fish taken out of water and left to struggle till it realizes its true identity and evolved back to what she was destined to be. This might explain why she had a sexual fixation on water from the very beginning and explains her attraction to a fish. Still, this seemed to be a long stretch, specially after Mr. Del Toro said that the movie symbolizes his own journey moving from Mexico to USA!!!!!!

Making sense here is just utter non sense and waste of time.

Del Toro is no doubt a brilliant director, who commands his tools perfectly. Apart from the shaky plot, Del Toro's direction makes the movie a vivid visual experience in addition to the lovely 60th music magical touch. But the question remains if the 60th nostalgia alone is good enough to win him the best Movie of the year at OSCARS. This we will see in less than a month, although if it happened, it would be a very sad year.