The Form Of Water

The shape of water

"The monster of the black lagoon" would not seem like the model of a festival or Oscar movie, but it is from that 1950s B-movie that Del Toro has taken the momentum to direct "The shape of the water", Leone d ' last year's gold and Venice and candidate for thirteen statuettes on March 4th. If creative fantasy extracted from a classical leitmotif had to be, in fact, the Mexican director of horror sought after transplanted in Hollywood gives a high class lesson on how at the end of a stormy romance Bella may no longer need the Beast become a humanly correct prince. First identikit of a solitude to the feminine, then breathtaking adventure in the shadow of the Cold War, finally cry of freedom in the name of the "diverse" somewhat released, however, by the usual rhetoric:

In order to mitigate the possible melancholy aftertaste, the feeling that little by little conquers the discharged and mute Elisa (perfect Hawkins incarnation) to the mysterious being, captured at the beginning of the Sixties in Amazonia and held prisoner by the Yankee soldiers in the service of a Grupty Colonel (the awesome Shannon) in a secret laboratory where she works as a cleaning lady, is gradually counterpointed by expert flashes, also matched, of humor and eroticism; while the crescendo of suspense does not neglect the obsessive care of the setting, photography and vintage music, not to mention the relevance of the cars, the Norman Rockwell-style billboards and the Orpheum hall located below the main character's apartment where they project themselves at will with delightful peplum and horror. The directorial cut is so direct and sincere that it does not make the film lose its impetus even when each of the co-stars - the black colleague harassed by her husband, the scientist who plays the double game in the name and on behalf of the equally vicious Soviets, the young a failed cartoon artist- accentuates his function as a dramaturgical prop in view of the crossing of escapes and twists in the prolonged, convulsive, mad final. It is not known whether it is appropriate or not to be content with the epigraph "The monsters we are, not them", because the film puts in place a series full of inventions and branches that risk making it trivial or unsatisfactory. What we know well, though, is that Del Toro knows how to make the cinema, and how well he can do it.