Weird, modern take on Beauty & Beast

Rating: 8/10 (25 March 2018)

Since this film has received so much attention, I had to see what all the fuss is about. Typical for a GDT film, it's beautiful, moody, grotesque, bizarre and fantastical. I liked it and it certainly involved me in the story.
We are introduced to a strange little mute woman who masterbates in the morning while she's making hard boiled eggs. She lives in an impossibly "distressed & antiqued" apartment in what looks like the 1940s, but we come to find out it's really the 1960s. She listens to records that were already old in the 1960s and, of course, she lives above a movie theater. Her best friend is a closeted old gay man, shunned from a modernizing advertising world that no longer wants his paintings for print advertisements. He wonders later in the film if he was born too early or too late to have lived his lonely life. Deep.
So, this isn't meant to be a realistic film. It's about as realistic as Beauty & the Beast, but it takes place in the dank "castle" of a government science facility. The creature shows up with as little explanation. Then again, nobody explains where the old witch in B&tB comes from to curse the prince either. So...
I found all the characters very interesting. They all had believable, human emotions and motivation. Eliza's friend is well depicted as a woman with a humdrum life as a janitor with a lazy, dependent husband. The scientist, a spy for the Soviets, is a man beyond a country. He's disloyal to Americans, and he doesn't even deliver for the Soviets. He's a man who admires what nature has created. The main bad guy (forgot his name) is thankfully quite humanized - with a subservient family and a new Cadillac. When the general dresses him down, you can see the urgency on his face as his life's work slips away. All that matters to him is "getting the job done" and following protocol. I think the rotted fingers were a symbol of him being attached to a career that has rotted his humanity and soul. When he tears them off, he's also thrown off his career self-imprisonment.
I found the whimsical elements of the film very intriging. By BDT never lets this become Disney either. Strange interspecies sex goes on, cats are eaten alive and fish men are tortured with cow prods. The apartments looked like late 19th century French apartments, with art, philosophy and literature books strewn about as only an obsessive set designer could have directed. The government facility is always tinted sickly green, in keeping with with the diseased pursuits of weapons and killing machines of the cold war. Classic musicals take center stage, especially when Eliza finds her voice and dances with her fishly prince in a daydream. Of course, a world class movie theater from the 1930s is right below her, in modest, rundown Baltimore.
The "scars" on Eliza's neck being gills was a facinating final twist. I think the implication is that Eliza, being from South America (from where fish man hails), is an indication she's a half-breed. Perhaps her beatings were a result of her being different as a child, the offspring of a fish/human encounter. It is left to the imagination.
The film goes on a little long. It couldn've used a 10-15 minute trim. I find GDT films to be self-obsessively set-directed. I dislike when the sets are "on display" rather than locations for the characters and plots. No apartments like those ever existed in Baltimore, MD. I could barely believe anything ever looked like that on the left bank in Paris in the 1890s.
I definitely recommend. Be ready for some weird stuff. But be ready to pull for the protagonist and feel a bit sorry for the antagonist. All the supporting characters are richly created. If only all cinema was this artful.