After the heroine trades eggs and music for the mermaid's affection, a 'human-animal love affair' unfolds. In fact, it is a story of two lonely and helpless beings who depend on each other for hope of survival.
Winner of the 2018 Academy Award for Best Picture, The Shape of Water is a romantic fantasy that shows the love between a woman who can't speak and a mermaid, with an ending that fits one of the mainstream fairy tale moulds - the two live happily ever after, leaving many of our friends in tears. friends shed tears of emotion. But is it just a film that celebrates 'true love across species'? Of course not.
The soundtrack is playful and quirky, as is the self-expressive musical dance of Alisa, who is full of enthusiasm for life. The heroine and a painter are dependent on each other to get through the difficulties that life sets up for them. The days flow calmly in this way, punctuated by images of dancing on the black and white television and the optimistic heroine's back dancing on the stairs.
The time coordinates fall during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union made a breakthrough in space and the United States was not to be outdone. This is the wider context, and what is life like for the average person living in America? Without parental care and with a lifelong disability caused by an injury in infancy, the heroine not only has to endure the inconveniences of life, but also the emotional toll of being belittled by a superior villain after a hard day's work. What is the situation faced by the second heroine, a righteous black woman who is a close friend of Alisa's?
As depicted in the film Hidden Figures, racism was rampant at the time, and as a black woman, she often faced being paid less than a white man for the same or even more work, and was not easily promoted. And here the second female is the one who complains in the play that she is responsible for cooking when she comes home after a hard day's work, a situation the film shows directly in camera at the end. Women who participate in the social workforce, generating income for their families while taking on more domestic work, the latter often unpaid, is a phenomenon that still exists in modern times.
The villainous character in the film is a science worker, set up as white, male, who verbally degrades the cleaning girls, mistreats the mermaids, and plots against the female protagonist. This setting is not simply to conform to political correctness, but to some extent is also a partial reflection of the realities of the time.
Observing the film, the scientific staff is predominantly white male, and the jobs held by women, apart from cleaners, can be seen as typists, and these women are usually paid less. The film shows the heroine and the painter renting the top floor of a cinema, which is a somewhat cramped space, while the villain lives in a luxurious flat, bright and spacious, with a beautiful wife and two children to keep her company.
In this way, the heroine is a Cinderella who loves to dream, but the wings of her dreams do not fly high. The second female character is chained to a seemingly unhappy marriage, enduring toil and loneliness. They are both far from the centre of power, banished to the margins.
The heroine encounters the imprisoned mermaid, who is held in chains. This pain-suffering being is also a projection of the heroine herself. In particular, the chains, visible and invisible, hold her and him respectively.
After the heroine has exchanged eggs and music for the mermaid's affection, a "human-animal love affair" unfolds. In reality, it is two lonely and helpless beings who depend on each other for hope of survival. The heroine is not perfectly portrayed, and her 'underwater romance' with the mermaid brings a 'flood' to the cinema downstairs. By current standards of public opinion, disrupting the normal lives of neighbours and causing financial loss is an act that should be criticised. But when it comes to enjoying the film, there is always a certain reluctance, like the painter, to disturb the luxury of romance for the couple embracing each other. It is only in the confined space of the two that these two exiles come to the centre of the action.
When the heroine is pressed by the villain about the whereabouts of the mermaid, her husband reveals the secret the heroine has tried so desperately to keep, hurting the friendship she holds dear. All her grievances explode and the heroine makes a mental "exit" in the form of a "break" to the position of "subject".
The role of the Soviet spy in the film is also very classic. He witnesses the communication between the mermaid and the heroine, guesses that the mermaid is a being with higher emotions, asks his superiors to keep the life of the mermaid, and then acts without permission to help the heroine save the mermaid. In fact, as soon as he feels sympathy for the mermaid, he takes the position of the banished one. As a result, he is shot by his own companions and abused by the villain until his death.
The villain is rewarded at the end of the film when the mermaid rises as a god, picks up the bullet-riddled heroine and jumps into the sea. With his rapid wound healing and regenerative powers, the mermaid in the film is portrayed as close to a god and can also be interpreted as an unknown, highly intelligent life form. In the end, as narrated by the artist, the heroine comes back to life with the help of the mermaid's superpowers and lives happily ever after with her lover in the sea. It seems to be a perfect ending, but fairy tales cannot be scrutinised from a realistic point of view. The artist emphasises that "I tell the story", but perhaps if someone else had told it, it would not have been perfect.
In fact, no matter how happy the story ends, it cannot erase the hint of sadness it projects. The perfect ending for the heroine is like the little girl who sells matches and follows her grandmother to heaven to find happiness, leaving behind a smiling and cold body in reality. As an ordinary person struggling to survive in a society where big news like "space dogs" and mermaids are grand and distant, life for her is just cleaning toilets and laboratories and getting a meagre salary every day, watching the big shots come and go, and listening to her partner complain about her husband. The sadness of this exile envelops all ordinary beings who are trying to make ends meet. The whole film invades an ordinary heart in the name of love, in a fantasy shell.
