MOVIES
In troubled times, two
sensual films sketch
the shape of love
By Stephanie ZacharekChalamet and Hammer inCall Me by Your Name: the feeling is mutualTHE WEINSTEIN SCANDAL AND OTHER OUTRAGES HAVE
kicked off an avalanche that no one can outrun. Women are
angry, and men are confused. Everyone is talking about gender
and power dynamics. But no one is talking about love.
It may be useful to remember that art can do the talking
for us. When it comes to love and sex, being confused is not
only permissible, it’s also part of the bargain. Two of the finest
movies of the year tread fearlessly into the territory of desire
and eroticism entwined with love. What, after all, could be
more bewildering than love between a human and a being
whom some might call a monster? In Guillermo del Toro’s
The Shape of Water, Sally Hawkins—in a radiant, wordless
performance—plays Elisa, a young woman living in early
1960s Baltimore. Elisa is mute, and she makes her living as a
nighttime cleaning woman at a top-secret government research
facility. It’s there that she meets the love of her life, a sea god
who is being kept prisoner. Slender and muscular, with sleek
coppery skin that’s streaked with iridescent green, he’s like the
Creature from the Black Lagoon reimagined by Rockwell Kent.
This paramour from the deep is portrayed with supreme
elegance by the actor and contortionist (and del Toro
regular) Doug Jones—the performance is more like dance
than anything, a muscular ode to the idea that freedom and
grace can be won, but only after we break free from caution
and fear.The Shape of Wateris a sensual adult fairy tale that
leads us deep into a dream. Waking up, and re-entering the
everyday world, is the part you have to steel yourself for.
Luca Guadagnino’sCall Me by Your Name—adapted from
André Aciman’s gorgeously detailed aphrodisiac novel—leads
us into an interior world of another sort. Young newcomerHa s
fin s
reli f f m
lon l n
Th h e
of W rawkins
ds
ief from
neliness in
he Shape
WaterTimothée Chalamet plays Elio, a
precocious 17-year-old summering with
his American father and Italian mother
(Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) in
the northern Italian countryside in the
mid-1980s. He’s prepared to spend this
summer as he has spent most others,
fending off boredom by transcribing
music and reading almost perpetually.
Then a guest arrives, a casually
presumptive American named Oliver
(Armie Hammer). Minutes after
showing up, he flops face-down on the
guest bed to sleep off his jet lag, not
caring that he’ll miss his hosts’ family
dinner. Then he proceeds to come
and go as if he owned the joint, often
vanishing with little more than the
word “Later” tossed over his shoulder,
like the snap of a towel. His body, with
its long, swinging limbs as gangly-
graceful as those of a giraffe, doesn’t
quite belong in this landscape—an
almost surreally perfect paradise of sun-
dappled ponds and trees bearing lush
burdens of apricots—yet he insinuates
himself into it with breezy authority.
He also charms everyone almost
instantly—except for the awkward
adolescent Elio, who at first views this
swaggering interloper with a mingling
of contempt and envy. What unfolds
between them is, in Guadagnino’s
hands, a kind of languorous hypnotism,
a meeting of spiritual ardor and
tender physicality. “When you least
expect it, nature has cunning ways
of finding our weakest spot,” Elio’s
father tells him.Call Me by Your Name
is all about yielding to nature, which
means succumbing to its mystery, its
sorrow and the everlasting beauty of its
wistfulness, passed down in the cells of
every plant and living creature. □Time OffReviews
L’A M O U R
AQUATIC
Del Toro first met
Hawkins at a 2012
Golden Globes
party, where he
said to her, “I’m
writing a movie
for you. Will you
fall in love with a
fish-man?”CALL ME BY YOUR NAME: SONY PICTURES CLASSICS; THE SHAPE OF WATER: 20TH CENTURY FOX