The Shape Of Water Cert: 15 2hrs 3mins
The opening of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water is every bit as beautiful as you would expect from the film leading the race to next month’s Oscars with 13 nominations. As we hear the first few notes of Alexandre Desplat’s gorgeous and dreamily romantic score, the camera enters a submerged world of flooded rooms, floating furniture and slightly startled-looking fish.
We’re in a shipwreck, right? In which case, why are the lights on, and why does the young woman bobbing gently above a chaise longue – a princess, perhaps, a voiceover suggests – look more like she is sleeping than drowned? It doesn’t tie in, either, with the sort of fantastical, fairy-tale-inspired films that the Mexican-born del Toro likes to make, such as Pan’s Labyrinth. Some sort of dream would be more his style.
Elisa (Sally Hawkins, above) lives in a flat above a flea-pit cinema and watches old musicals on the TV with her artist friend (Richard Jenkins) from across the hall
Dream it is. The alarm goes off, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) wakes up, the eggs go on and very soon our 30-something singleton is enjoying her bath in a way that certainly explains why those eggs are hard-boiled and why she always arrives late and slightly out of breath at the strange research facility where she is employed as a cleaner.
Let’s just say it’s not how I imagine most working women start their day. Then again, most working women aren’t about to fall in love with a merman, either.
This feels like one of those Oscar-fêted films that is likely to divide real audiences, in the same way La La Land did and, to a lesser extent, The Artist. On the one hand it’s gorgeous to look at (the nomination for production design is richly deserved), beautifully acted and displays the same love of film, and particularly old film, as its two predecessors. The latter always goes down particularly well with juries, and a cynic might suggest that del Toro is well aware of that.
Elisa lives in a flat above a flea-pit cinema, watches old musicals on the TV with her artist friend (Richard Jenkins) from across the hall and is prone to tap-dancing her way down the corridor and dancing with her mop at work. Yes, yes, Guillermo, we get the message – you love cinema.
On the other hand, however, there will be those who see The Shape Of Water as little more than an art-house reprise of Splash, the 1984 film in which a young Tom Hanks fell in love with Daryl Hannah’s even younger mermaid, only this time around with the genders reversed and more sex.
Rather lovely underwater sex, as it turns out, albeit shot so that only Hawkins reveals all, in a way that surely doesn’t chime with these #MeToo times.
Elisa barely utters a single word all film, communicating either by signing to her work colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer), or with looks, music and hard-boiled eggs
I loved lots of The Shape Of Water – the music, the beautifully recreated early-Sixties setting and Hawkins’ enchanting performance in the central role, with its distant echoes of Audrey Tautou’s Amélie from 2001. I’m not normally Hawkins’ greatest fan but she was terrific in Paddington 2 and she’s even better here, although it may be significant, given her weakness for over-cooking a performance, that she’s secured an Oscar nomination by playing a woman who is mute.
Yes, Elisa barely utters a single word all film, communicating either by signing to her work colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer), or with looks, music and hard-boiled eggs (I knew they’d be good for something) when it comes to her merman, as he languishes in chains in the laboratory tank.
Spencer and Jenkins have both picked up Best Supporting nominations, the latter perhaps a little fortuitously given that the more powerful male supporting performance surely comes from Michael Shannon, playing the sadistic security boss whose job it is to ensure that ‘the asset’, as the merman is known, doesn’t fall into Russian hands. Apparently, the creature’s adaptable breathing system might just give them the edge in the space race.
The end result is a beautiful, but slightly strange hybrid, one part old-fashioned Hollywood romance, one part Cold War thriller that sees the former executed more beguilingly and certainly more succinctly than the latter. I can’t see it sweeping the board come Oscar night (famous last words) but it is stunning to look at, and a little romantic magic realism never did anyone any harm. Unless, of course, that’s just not your thing.
SECOND SCREEN
Lady Bird (15)
Rating: 
It’s certainly not the biggest film among the Oscar contenders, but if there’s a more straightforwardly enjoyable film among this year’s nominees than Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, I’ll be amazed. It’s funny, moving and insightful. From beginning to end, this superficially standard, teenage-rites-of-passage picture is an unexpected joy.
Written and directed by Gerwig, it’s the somewhat autobiographical-feeling story of Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan, below with Lucas Hedges), a teenager growing up in Sacramento, California.
Lady Bird – she’s given the nickname to herself in an attempt to make her sound more artistic and interesting – is spirited, headstrong and creative. More than anything, she dreams of getting away from her wrong-side-of-the-tracks life, her loving but terminally disillusioned father (Tracy Letts) and her domineering, speak-it-as-it-is-because-there’s-no-easy-ride mother (Laurie Metcalf).
Lady Bird – she’s given the nickname to herself in an attempt to make her sound more artistic and interesting – is spirited, headstrong and creative
Ronan is a revelation, mixing comedy and poignancy with an invisible skill, and fully deserving her Best Actress nomination. Brilliant too (and similarly nominated), is Metcalf, best known as a television actress (Roseanne, The Big Bang Theory), who grabs her moment on the big screen with a relish born of knowing that this sort of scene-stealing part does not come along often.
What follows is a tale of first boyfriends, first kisses, the shifting quicksands of young female friendship…all the usual and not-so-usual stuff.
With Academy voters surely keen to advance the female film-making cause this year, this is one to look out for.