The Shape of Water: The Princess is All Grown Up!

CRONOS (1993)

 

Guillermo del Toro wrote and directed his first feature, Cronos, when he was only 28 years old. With a budget of $2 million, del Toro shot this unforgettable film in about 8 weeks and it went on to win 9 Ariel Awards in Mexico, the Critic’s Prize at France’s Cannes Film Festival, and many other awards.

 

Cronos, set in Veracruz in 1536, is a re-telling of the vampire-monster myth. While the film’s title alludes to the disturbing story of the Greek deity Cronus, who castrated his father and ate his children, the film’s setting hints at the violence of European colonialism and exploitation of the New World. In 1519, only 19 years before the story told in Cronos begins, on Easter Friday, Hernán Cortés had landed on Mexico’s eastern coast naming it Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz in reference to the gold sources he expected to exploit and Christ’s crucifixion.

 

It’s interesting to note that the same year that del Toro was filming Cronos in Mexico, across the border, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) was mesmerizing audiences in the USA. This film, written by James V. Hart and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, as del Toro’s Cronos, hooks us in with its opening narrative that integrates historical events with the idea that everlasting life might be more of a curse than a blessing. While Bram Stoker’s Dracula keeps us glued to our seats staying close to the original 19thcentury European novel, and an exuberant to-die-for-vampire played with relish by Gary Oldman, del Toro’s take on Stoker’s mythical creature travels a different route.

 

Del Toro explores the myth through the story of Jesús Gris, loving grandfather, and owner of an antique and art bazaar, and Aurora, his granddaughter. Aurora is speech-less, but apparently only by choice, as toward the film’s end we discover she can speak when she says, “Abuelo.” In her quietness and playfulness (we often see her with her teddy bear and playing hopscotch with her grandfather), the young Aurora anticipates the adult Elisa Esposito in The Shape of Water.

 

 

PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006)

 

In Pan’s Labyrinth

 

the monstrous has now mutated into the mythical Faun, a half-human-half-beast creature related to the Greek deity Pan, and the Pale Man, cannibalistic devourer of fairies and children. But the most unrelenting monster in this film is Captain Vidal, who like the Richard Strickland character in The Shape of Water, is driven by his sense of absolute patriarchal superiority to all human “Others” and the wondrous creature he rips out of a South American jungle with some vague aim to exploit in the name of science.

 

Yet, both Captain Vidal and Strickland dismiss the importance of science, so that in Pan’s Labyrinth Vidal shoots Doctor Ferreiro and in The Shape of Water, Strickland tortures the Russian scientist instead of helping him after he has been tricked and shot by his own people. But while Pan’s Labyrinth is set in an ultra-nationalist-fascist Spain in 1944 in a farmhouse surrounded by a magical forest, in his latest mythical tale del Toro brings us to the USA and closer to our times.

 

 

THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

 

The screenplay for The Shape of Water was co-written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, producer, TV, screenwriter, and as a child, a writer of fairy-tales. The story is set in the early 1960s, takes place in an urban setting, Baltimore, and abounds in references to the lack of full civil rights for most Americans and Cadillacs, space exploration, and the Cold War. A great part of the story develops in a secretive research facility that has been infiltrated by a Soviet spy, Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, in a similar fashion as the Manhattan Project had been infiltrated by Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist, and a real Soviet spy.

 

But while The Shape of Water tackles serious socio-historical issues that we have not yet resolved, in fact, its tag line is “A Fairy Tale for Troubled Times,” the main character, Elisa, retains some of the innocent playfulness of the child characters, Aurora and Ofelia, of the earlier films, Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth.

 

Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, as Aurora in Cronos, is playful in more ways than one: In the film’s first scenes we see her pleasuring herself in the bathtub and she spends her free time with a grandfather-like visual artist Giles, with whom she “tap-dances” as they watch Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. And talking about dancing… Elisa, as Ofelia in Pan’s Labyrinth, is a Cinderella-type. Certainly, both Elisa and Ofelia are associated with shoes, but even more, they are symbolical of a person neglected by those around them but who eventually, with supernatural help, achieve their full “royal” potential.

 

In Pan’s Labyrinth, the final voice-over tells us that Ofelia: “The princess returned to her father’s kingdom.” While the narrator in The Shape of Water in the opening monologue calls Elisa: “The princess without a voice.” In the end, Elisa also joins the ranks of the super-natural as she transforms to become consort to her “prince” in his watery kingdom… and then one of her shoes floats away! Perhaps in her new world of expanded potential, Elisa will no longer be concerned with shoes and other restraints. The princess is now all grown up and can choose to wear shoes, or not! Indeed, the last image of The Shape of Water seems to tell us: Times Up!