Guillermo del Toro claims the right to be different in Venice

VeniceEight years after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for The Shape of WaterGuillermo del Toro returned to the show today, ready to repeat the success with his version of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. And, from the outset, it must be said that these two sinister fables directed by the Mexican share a gothic aura, the Shakespearean reference of Romeo and Juliet and a Christian background. "For me, the story of Frankenstein "It's been like a religion," Del Toro confessed at the film's press conference. "I was raised Catholic, but as a kid, I didn't really understand what a saint was. But then I discovered Boris Karloff playing the monster, and I understood what a messiah was." Del Toro had been trying to make his version of that horror myth for more than two decades, and he directed it when he had "the means to make it on the scale I wanted to make," "and now that it's finished, it's my turn."Pan's Labyrinth.

If cinephiles have always held that great filmmakers make the same movie over and over again, with slight variations, then Del Toro deserves to be considered a total auteur. In fact, with his spectacular Frankenstein, the director of Hellboy Del Toro once again builds a fantastical universe that serves to celebrate human uniqueness and innocence, and to denounce the despotic nature of powerful, institutional, and normative figures. "We live in a time marked by terror and intimidation, and the only possible solution is love and compassion," Del Toro claimed, who also acknowledged that his Frankenstein It's a very autobiographical film, in which he defends "the right to be imperfect." In keeping with his narrative, Del Toro transforms the character of Victor Frankenstein, the Promethean creator of life, into the fictional villain, while the creature born of the scientist's egotistical ambition shines as a sublimation of candor and tenderness.

The Age of Innocence

To explore the keys to the Frankenstein Del Toro's, it is revealing to observe how the director of Cronos It remains faithful to the structure of Mary Shelley's novel, with the prologue and both sections focusing on the adventures of Victor Frankenstein, played by an energetic Oscar Isaac, and the creature, a Jacob Elordi who combines gentleness and brusqueness in an excellent performance. However, del Toro alters the narrative at will and constructs a transparent ode to the primal candor of human beings and their corruption at the hands of social forces. In this sense, del Toro's refusal to grant his Victor Frankenstein any grace, not even the reciprocal love that the scientist shared with Elizabeth in the original novel, is striking.

For his part, the sewn-up and revived creature assumes a primordial narrative voice, while his homicidal hunger is reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, the characterization of the creature must be taken into account, allowing the viewer to appreciate its human physiognomy and build, to the detriment of the deformity that prevailed in the humanoid figures embodied by Boris Karloff and Robert De Niro in the adaptations by James Whale and Kenneth Branagh, respectively. For del Toro, the creature "is like a newborn." "I wanted to enhance the beauty of the character, which is why I designed it as if it were a majestic statue of ivory or alabaster. I didn't want the creature to look stitched together. I imagine it as a work of art," he explained. This aesthetic radiance fits with the psychological and symbolic dimension of the character, incapable of killing a fly except in self-defense. Thus, Elordi brings to life a character reminiscent of Rousseau's noble savage, an immaculate emblem of innocence interrupted by the brutality of the supposedly civilized world.

To further define the kind monster, Del Toro has drawn on personal memory: "As a child, I wondered why Victor Frankenstein hadn't built his creature from two body halves, or maybe three. Why so many pieces? To explain this, in the film, we see that Victor must resort to pieces of pieces of war. That's why this new version of Frankenstein It takes place in the mid-19th century, during the Crimean War. Del Toro's allusion to the barbarity of armed conflicts was echoed in the large demonstration (10,000 people, according to the organizers) against the Gaza War that marched through the main streets of Venice Lido this afternoon.