The Movie that Everyone is Raving About: THE SHAPE OF WATER at the Venice Film Festival

The Shape of Water

(Venice, Italy) I love romantic fairy tales, and I always dream that I can breathe underwater. So I wasn't sure if anyone else would love The Shape of Water as much as I did until the industry audience broke into wild applause here in Venice this morning. Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro has captured a spark of the divine. It is a masterpiece.

I had never seen a Guillermo Del Toro film before, so I didn't know what to expect. What kind of fantastic mind imagines a plot like this: Elisa, a mute cleaner at a U.S. government aerospace facility falls in love with a captive watery Creature, a merman, during the Cold War.

Sally Hawkins & Guillermo Del Toro - Venice Film Festival

At the press conference, I fell immediately in love with Guillermo Del Toro, too, when he said that choosing fear over love is a disaster. "The Beatles and Jesus both can't be wrong, and when they disagree, I go with the Beatles."

"The Beatles and Jesus both can't be wrong, and when they disagree, I go with the Beatles." 
Guillermo Del Toro
The Shape of Water press conference
74th Venice Film Festival

Del Toro has drawn out the purest, most creative aspects of everyone working on the film. It is a perfect unit, led by Sally Hawkins' silent, sublime performance, and enriched by Alexandre Desplat's musical score. All the actors -- Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, Octavia Spencer -- are in top form as they bring the screenplay by Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor organically to life. The costumes by Luis Sequeira and production design by Paul Denham Austerberry are magical, captured by Dan Lausten's ethereal cinematography.

Venice has earned the reputation as an "Oscar Launch Pad," which The Shape of Water is certain to enforce. Guillermo Del Toro has created a timely gift for humanity. 

Sally Hawkins

Here are some rave reviews, which also describe the story:

From The Daily Beast:

A majestic 1960s movie palace, glistening in the rain. A derelict apartment awash in antiquity. A mute woman (Sally Hawkins, lovely as always) and her elderly gay caretaker (Richard Jenkins, ditto) parked in front of the tube. The Shape of Water casts a spell over its audience from its opening moments and holds you in its thrall long after the credits have rolled.

 From The Hollywood Reporter:

Guillermo del Toro delivers pure enchantment with The Shape of Water. A dark-edged fairy tale as lovingly steeped in vintage movie magic as it is in hypnotic water imagery, this captivating creature feature marries a portrait of morally corrupt early-1960s America with an outsider tale of love and friendship molded by a master storyteller.

Centered on an exquisite performance from Sally Hawkins that conveys both delicacy and strength, this is a visually and emotionally ravishing fantasy that should find a welcome embrace from audiences starved for imaginative escape.

Sally Hawkin & Octavia Spencer

From Variety:

A ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, it also offers more straight-up movie for your money than just about any Hollywood studio offering this year. This decidedly adult fairytale, about a forlorn, mute cleaning lady and the uncanny merman who save each other’s lives in very different ways, careers wildly from mad-scientist B-movie to heart-thumping Cold War noir to ecstatic, wings-on-heels musical, keeping an unexpectedly classical love story afloat with every dizzy genre turn.

Lit from within by a heart-clutching silent star turn from Sally Hawkins, lent dialogue by one of Alexandre Desplat’s most abundantly swirling scores, this is incontestably Del Toro’s most rewarding, richly realized film — or movie, for that matter — since 2006’s “Pan’s Labyrinth.”

 From IndieWire:

At one unexpected moment in Guillermo del Toro’s virtuosic new film, the characters break into a song. The lights dim, the colors drain to black and white and Sally Hawkins’ otherwise mute Elisa takes Doug Jones’ unnamed creature by the hand, and the two begin hoofing old Hollywood style in a “Top Hat” reminiscent musical number set to the old standard “You’ll Never Know (Just How Much I Love You).” It’s just one more magical moment in a film full of them, another reminder that not only is “The Shape of Water” one of del Toro’s most stunningly successful works, it’s also a powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.

The Shape of Water will be released on December 8, 2017 in the United States.

Ciao from the Venice Film Festival,
Cat Bauer
Venetian Cat - The Venice Blog