La Strada (1954)
When it comes to mute heroines, there are a few worth noting alongside Sally Hawkins, including Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase, Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown, and the inspiration for the latter, Giulietta Masina in this Federico Fellini classic. Technically the character, Gelsomina, isn’t voiceless and has a number lines, but for the most part she keeps quiet opposite the monstrously brute strong man played by Anthony Quinn.
As Hawkins does, Masina expresses herself physical and facially, reminiscent of a silent film comedian such as Chaplin with a touch of Harpo Marx in her appearance. But it’s more playful than the character in The Shape of Water and despite the occasional dialogue she fits more into the “cute mute” trope where the woman has a childishness about her. Hawkins never clowns, keeping her completely non-speaking role more dramatically subdued and nuanced.
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water reminds me a lot of Bjork’s character in this depressing masterpiece by Lars von Trier, and the former’s relationship with Octavia Spencer of the latter’s relationship with Catherine Deneuve in the role of the rational best friend and co-worker. Both sets of woman are in blue collar employment in the 1960s when the more passionate, musical-obsessed of each pair deviates from the everyday routine and winds up in trouble with the law.
For Selma (Bjork), there is a new romantic candidate in her life (played by Peter Stormare), but that’s not what causes her change. And instead of being mute, she’s going blind. She does fantasize about being in a musical, though, albeit in many more sequences than we get from del Toro’s movie, all of them also more clever in their composition and choreography. Bjork gives a brilliant performance, which unfortunately was achieved through abusive means by von Trier, causing the pop star to never really act in a movie again.
Far from Heaven (2002)
As much as I should just recommend an actual Douglas Sirk movie, given his influence on The Shape of Water, I couldn’t help but think more about Todd Haynes’s own tribute to the master of the Technicolor melodrama. Like Far from Heaven, del Toro’s latest has a lot in common with All That Heaven Allows, in which a woman falls for a man who doesn’t fit with her social status. In Far from Heaven, the controversial romance is also an interracial pairing.
In addition to that “mixing two worlds” situation, Haynes has his heroine (Julianne Moore) still married, unlike the woman in Sirk’s film, and her husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay. At first, the characters played by Sally Hawkins and Richard Jenkins in The Shape of Water appear to be married, perhaps just for convenience, but that turns out not to be the case. Still, Jenkins’s character’s homosexuality remains taboo for the 1960s setting.
Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)
While many reviews liken The Shape of Water to del Toro’s more serious fantasy film work, particularly the Spanish Civil War-set Pan’s Labyrinth, there’s also a glaring link to the director’s comic book fare, specifically this adaptation and its sequel. The fish man character, also known as “the asset,” looks a lot like the superhero Abe Sapien, also played by Doug Jones, and even similarly has a fondness for eggs.
Jones told The Hollywood Reporter regarding the comparison:
“Guillermo was very specific, he did not want Abe Sapien in this film at all. He wanted this to be very stand-alone, it’s its own piece of art. Let’s celebrate this own unique story that has nothing to do with Abe…Abe was a very articulate, well-spoken, intelligent, poised and postured being who gestured with his hands a lot and was very gentile. Guillermo wanted the opposite [for the Asset]. He wanted it very raw and animalistic. What he specifically said to me was that he did not want a Dougie Jones performance, he wants a character. He doesn’t want a physical performance. He wanted something raw and animal and real. This character came out of the wild, it’s not a fantasy being. This is something that was found on Earth and is real and is in front of us in the 1960s. My character doesn’t speak, but he is intelligent enough that I can learn communication. Sally Hawkins’ character doesn’t speak either, so we connect on a beautiful nonverbal level which is so lovely to explore on film.”
Hellboy II is an improvement on the first movie in a number of ways, including in its further development of the Abe Sapien character. He gets a love interest in the sequel, if not exactly a romance, when he crushes on another creature from another world, the elf princess Nuala (Anna Walton). Although they can both talk, unlike the characters in The Shape of Water, their greatest communication is made through non-verbal means.
The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (2014)
You’d think I wouldn’t find a nonfiction pick for this week’s list, but there is in fact a documentary about a woman’s sexual relationship with a sea creature. Set in a government lab in the 1960s, even! The hour-long film, aired here on The Smithsonian Channel, is about Margaret Howe Lovatt, who participated in a NASA and US Navy based research project focused on animal communication and admittedly got quite close with a dolphin named Peter.
Lovatt says on camera:
“It was very precious. It was very gentle. Peter was right there. He knew that I was right there. It was sexual on his part. It was not sexual on mine. Sensuous, perhaps. It just became part of what was going on. Like an itch, just get rid of that. We’ll scratch it and be done and move on. And that’s really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter.”
As if that wasn’t crazy enough, the dolphins employed in the project, who’d also been working on the TV series Flipper, were also used for LSD research by the main scientist, John C. Lilly. But Peter wasn’t injected with the drug, at Lovatt’s request. Still, sadly there was no happy ending (well, not the narrative kind) for Peter’s inter-species romantic interests, and the study likely didn’t help NASA in its own interests of learning how to talk to aliens.
Related Topics: Guillermo del Toro, Movie DNA
