海角大神

Guillermo del Toro has a head full of old movies, but his films somehow seem sui generis. I think this is because he uses all those stored-up movie memories as trampolines for his own inspiration rather than as touchstones. The best parts of 鈥淭he Shape of Water,鈥� a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau鈥檚 鈥淏eauty and the Beast鈥� without ever seeming slavish.

But del Toro, who co-wrote the script with Vanessa Taylor, also has his pulpy side, and I often wished while watching this film that he had jettisoned all the cold-war melodrama featuring Michael Shannon, as a big bad government agent, and focused more fully on the relationship between the mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a night-shift janitor, and the mysterious merman captured in the Amazon by government operatives in order to harvest his body parts for 鈥渞esearch.鈥� Still, scenes like the merman and Elisa making lyrical love underwater stay with you, and Hawkins, as she also demonstrated this year in 鈥淢audie,鈥� is touched by grace.聽Grade: B- (Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence, and language.)