Lukewarm water? Some thoughts on why I'm 'cool' on The Shape of Water.
Peter Bradshaw's strap line for his review of The Shape of Water described it as 'Immersive cinema', I'm not entirely sure what he meant by that as he never really adequately defined it in his assessment of the film, but I certainly wasn't immersed in any 'shape' (pun intended) or form by the film. In fact my reaction was quite the opposite. It left me cold, I was never swept up by the narrative or the plight of the characters. Ironically, for a film with water in the title, I found it to be shallow, superficial and soulless. There was no depth to it. As my paternal Grandfather would have said, this was 'splodging' (a Northern term for paddling). There was no danger of it going too far or deep. It lacked a necessary sense of danger and disturbance. In the parlance of swimming, it's 'feet' never left the bottom. It chose to stay in the shallow end.
With an over-determined emphasis on outsiders and marginalized characters in a cartoonish vision of early 60s America (the mute, the creature, the black woman, the sympathetic Soviet spy, the gay artist), I felt like I was watching the perfectly, cynically-crafted, mainstream film. One specifically designed to woo the hearts and minds of the Academy and snatch up a bunch of awards – which, of course it did. As an avid admirer of Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, I felt betrayed and conned by this vapid film. How had Del Toro fallen so low as to be reduced to this? I guess the glittering allure of an Oscar is just too powerful to resist.
My response to the film was particularly galling as I avoided going to see it for some time, not because I thought I wouldn't enjoy it, but because I thought it would be too emotionally devastating for me to bear. Anyone who has read this blog (I'm presuming someone does, although I'm not convinced) will know of my affection for horror films. Ever since I saw the original King Kong at the age of nine, I was always drawn towards the monster, it was always the poor, excluded, persecuted creature, who you knew was doomed from the moment you saw it that elicited my sympathy. I never got any sense of this from The Shape of Water, so let me dive right in. I've tried to summarize my response to the film and some of my objections below. As ever, it's all informal.
1. Not so magic-realism.
This is a term I often hear used in relation to Del Toro and the emphasis on whimsy in his films. However, I strained to detect a sense of magic realism in The Shape of Water because the 'real' world was itself highly stylized and cartoonish. The attractive, but over-determined sense of design never made me believe this was actually 60s America, there was no realism for the magic to manifest in. . Watching the film is a curious experience as it relies heavily on a series of borrowed moments, scenes and structures. The brilliantly executed production design, immediately makes one think of Delicatessen/The City of Lost Children and the wonderful structures, forms and palettes of cinematographer Darius Khondji and Production Designer/Director Marc Caro.
2. You like your whimsy strained?
The film's relentless 'borrowing' (to be polite) from other films also impeded my ability to invest in the characters or the narrative. Amongst others, and to varying degrees, it reworks Splash, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and numerous small moments from the work of Jeunet et Caro, particularly Delicatessen and Amelie, both of which it shamelessly plunders for it's sense of whimsy. As I watched the film, I simply found myself spotting the references and the borrowed moments. Again, there was no emotional immersion or engagement. The clips below illustrates just how heavily the film borrows from Jeunet et Caro and others. Thankfully, a few like-minded souls on Youtube have done the heavy lifting for me.
3. Trams on a track.
Perhaps inevitably, because the narrative felt so cynical, the world so over-determined in its sense of design, the characters themselves simply felt like ciphers, they lacked depth. They don't drive the narrative, they merely seem inserted into it in order make crude points about exclusion, minorities or monsters. Watching the film feels akin to riding on a tram, there's no deviation possible from the rails, characters are along for the ride on the narrative, hanging on until it reaches its predetermined final destination. The films lacks jeopardy, pathos and tragedy.
4. What's left for me to do?
The film leaves one with no work to do as a spectator, everything was simply and clumsily signalled, everything is laid out for passive consumption and minimal engagement. This is starkly illustrated near the opening when Elisa stands in front of the mirror and there's a huge close-up of the scars on her neck. The moment the film does this, you're left in no doubt why it's done it. Look! This is important! These will become her gills. I cringed. There were numerous other instances of this heavy handed signalling, such as the introduction of Agent Strickland and the cattle prod. We're told what to think about him before we see him and nothing we subsequently see invites us to alter that initial opinion. There's no nuance, no development. Of course, predictably, he's the sadistic government agent, he's the film's 'real' monster.
5. An oddly incoherent opening
Watching a film is always a process of negotiation, you're constantly negotiating with and revisiting scenes you've seen as you watch a narrative unfold in order to understand and make sense of it. After I'd watched the film I was discussing the issue of moment so incoherence in film's with my friend Doug Pye. Having watched the film once the opening continues to puzzle me, but also confirms some of my suspicions about the film's cynical attitude towards its subject.
The inclusion of the prologue is an odd decision. Its status is at best ambiguous and it seems to serve no purpose. It doesn't seem to look forward to a later point in the narrative, as at no point do we see Elisa's apartment somehow transported underwater, and the absence of the gill man is also a curious detail, suggesting what see isn't projecting forward to the end of the narrative. Curiously, what we see in this opening seems to undermine the central narrative thread that Elisa will find romance, understanding and fulfillment with her gill-man lover. This puzzling scene finds her lying alone on her floating couch (which is synonymous with her isolation and sexual frustration) and not, as we might expect, in the empty bed.
More intriguing still is the presence of the voice over and the language that it uses to draw us into this world. The words and references are invite us to make links to fairy-tales, the references to princes (presumably John Kennedy) and princesses, but this is a puzzling choice as fairy tales seem to play no significant part in the deeper embedded themes of the film or the lives of the characters. It functions as a superficial conceit designed to engineer a sense of wonder. When considered in relation to the rest of the film, it seems at best seems incoherent and unsystematic and at worst falling lazily back on a trope previously employed in a commercially successful film.
There are striking similarity between the opening of The Shape of Water and Pan's Labyrinth, both have prologues and voice-over which tells us about a princess and the language and world of fairy tales. However, fairy tales and the escapist nature fantasy are more deeply embedded in the narrative of Pan's Labyrinth, and the status of the prologue as fantasy is easier to determine. Traumatized by the loss of her father in the civil war and her mother's decision to marry and have a child with the sadistic Captain Vidal, Ofelia retreats into a world of folklore and fantasy where she has power and agency. there's a coherence in the relationship between the prologue and the main body of the film.
The soundtrack, composed by the excellent Alexandre Desplat, whose work I admired so much in Peter Webber's underrated Girl with a Pearl Earring, also struck me as being highly derivative of the work of both Yann Tiersen and Carlos d'Alessio (who composed the scores for Amelie and Delicatessen). The accordion in particular, features heavily in their compositions and naturally, given it's magpie-like approach to the subject, we hear its familiar strains in The Shape of Water. One might be forgiven for thinking it is culturally out of place in the musical landscape of 60s America, but this is clearly not 60s America, it is not even a superficial veneer of 60s America. I could go on, but I won't. As I left the cinema, I wasn't emotionally devastated, just struck by how transparently obvious its appropriations were. It wasn't the fact it had borrowed I objected to. What frustrated me, was Del Toro's inability to integrate these threads into its own project. Rather than being immersed and moved, I felt like I'd taken a cold shower, is this the best mainstream cinema can do now? Perhaps I'd have been impressed and moved if I was nine and it might have encouraged me to explore some of the films it references. But as a middle aged man who's already seen those films, I could see the game and moves the film was playing. I could admire the technique and the breadth of references, but not the end product, which reminded me of a corpse entirely composed of the remains from other cadavers.
