The Shapelessness of Water

On Valentine’s Day, I went to see Guillermo del Toro’s thirteen-time Oscar nominee with my valentine. Because I adore El laberinto del fauno, Pan’s Labyrinth, and am a famously huge Jaws fan, not to mention a fan of both Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins and romantic fairytales in general, I figured this film will be a shoo-in.

As it unfortunately so often goes in these situations, I am afraid to say that the news is not good. WARNING MAJOR SPOILER ALERT!!! There is absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever with The Shape of Water. Not one beat is missing from its deep green and blue tones and the David and Goliath reference and the soft and hard juxtapositions. One might say it is a disgustingly perfect film. A well-oiled piece of emotionless work; an odorless, humorless, and, most of all, soulless, film. A useless machine, to quote Grace and Frankie.

About a week ago, I read on IMDb’s news section, how Jean-Pierre Jeunet had publicly complained about Mr. del Toro’s use of the tap-tap dancing sequence Jenkins and Hawkins perform at the beginning of the movie, and how he felt it was directly copied from his early Nineties black cannibal comedy Delicatessen. It has been almost twenty years since I last saw it, so I have no recollection of the tap-tap dancing sequence, and felt more exasperated at Mr. Jeunet for being caught up in the major drama of bringing up all past and present wrong-doings of others in the vein of since everybody else is now doing it, why not join the party.

There are issues that are important and worthy and need to be discussed openly and in public, if there is ever going to be any change in how the movie industry sees and treats women, but recently it had seemed that the Burn, Motherfucker, Burn -rage had taken hold of most everyone working in the industry. I mean what had del Toro done to anyone with his nightmarish visions of romance? Every film we see is linked and related to every other, there is no way to create something entirely new anymore, there are always homages and references to everything else, and why do we feel this crazy need to politicize del Toro’s take on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, another one of my creature favorites by the way, which seemed so gorgeous in the trailers everywhere, anyway?

Turns out we just do. After seeing The Shape of Water, I have to say that not only do I, too, want to now join Jean-Pierre Jeunet's choir, but the heavily referenced, homaged, and pastiched film here from where I was sitting was not so much Delicatessen, but Amélie, a more recent work of his.

The deep hues of green and blue, and, later in the film, red, are exactly the same as Amélie’s color palette. The protagonist deriving pleasure from the little things in life, her mannerisms, the low-income job, even the much older artist friend, living in the same building, painting his work while they talk. Sure, there was the darker subplot, or mcguffin, of the antagonist losing his fingers and, enraged, truly becoming the monster he thought he was fighting, then chasing the lovers until the bitter end, but even Michael Shannon’s tough guy Strickland felt to me like a full-blown, stretched version of Collignon, the a-hole proprietor living on Amélie’s street, the fruit and vegetable stand man, mean as a snake, who deserves and gets a lesson in the end. Elisa’s muteness, packed and ripe with meaning, so much akin to Amélie’s silence and difficulty in communicating with others, the long gazes, the hiding behind the enormous water tank the way Amélie hides behind the transparent notice board. The use of a certain type of romantic songs from a bygone era on the soundtrack of The Shape of Water just made the comparison that much easier.

And even if that is alright, I mean, Amélie was a long time ago, and there is always a market wide open for the depicted human condition of loneliness, difficulty to connect, and the hidden, magical worlds lying just beneath the surface, still the proverbial shark here remained not working the whole duration of the otherwise quite beautiful film. It just – didn’t happen. The magic, serendipity, call it what you like. Whatever it is, it was sorely missing from The Shape of Water. The whole movie just felt forced, calculated, over-thought, and as if Mr. del Toro was trying too hard to create a dark, romantic masterpiece out of just the right ingredients. It left me feeling hollow and without any real emotion for the characters, pretty much the way I felt after seeing La La Land last year.

I am not saying Guillermo del Toro did it on purpose. In fact I think he had no idea he was doing it. Not many people, I believe, have seen Amélie as many times as I have, and the basic story is different in these stories. But for me, the similarities in the ambiance, the way the film was photographed and paced, and the overall tone of the story were still too striking to ignore. The Shape of Water failed to give me any identification points whatsoever, it was all lovely and stylized and beautiful to the point of being entirely devoid of feeling, no matter how gorgeously the entire cast were acting, and kudos for all that, while I still watch Amélie every two years and cry. I guess you can have a hundred different takes on a subject matter, and that is okay, just count the ways the human condition of loneliness has been pictured and presented in cinema. But not everyone succeeds in delivering something more than the sum of its parts; not even the masters get it right every time. If you aim for serendipity, you fail, by definition.

And that is precisely what The Shape of Water misses: superseding the sum of its ingredients. The Shape of Water is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. And that's all.