Mermaids, Rock and Vodka.

          If I am allowed to be sincere and no doubt many will feel the urge to disagree and if foolish, even be offended by what I am about to state: I am full pledged antagonist of film musicals, I avoid them as much as corporations avoid total transparency or dealing with the gender pay gap, just ask AT&T Mexico.

I have always looked for variety in film, I am the old school kind of person that dives deep in the web, avoiding social media and looking for hardcore forums and blogs about cinema because cinemas and services like Netflix, tend to offer blockbuster or mainstream flicks which I do no find engaging, and although it sounds pedantic, I stick to it. I adore films, watching new flicks and having other experiences.  In the common mediums I rarely get to see a little treasure like a Wai, Goddard, Fassbinder or other aesthetic experiences that do not follow the Hollywood narrative.

I recently had the pleasure and honour to watch “The Lure”(Poland 2015) by Agnieszka Smoczynska, a young and promising polish director. The film is an LSD(don’t ask don’t tell)induced interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”. Imagine musical, vodka, Eastern-European noir, gore, anthropophagy, eroticism, punk, fog and interspecies sex.

Two mermaid sisters, Gold and Silver are taken in by a family of musicians: A Father, Mother and Son (It’s never fully explained if they are a family but hinted) that work at a cabaret and get the mermaids to join them becoming an immediate sensation.
The music numbers contrast with the macabre, light and darkness, creating a bizarre but hypnotizing atmosphere. A zenith in the film is sound design, in a very subtle manner there is whale songs during the entire film, a leitmotiv that only becomes obvious when the two sisters speak to each other and don’t want the humans to understand. Gold has dark hair, she’s bestial and Silver is a blonde, sweeter and falls in love with the family’s son. The communication between sisters is logical if you realize they are aquatic beings, but when it occurs for the first time you can feel a shudder crawl down your spine. Amazing!

The owner of the cabaret is only too happy to have them join. In their first encounter he looks for their vulvas and fingers them, a weird moment out of European 70’s artistic erotica. The mermaids are after all, muses or the bane of sailors or other unfortunates to be at sea. The mermaids can change from human feet to fishtail at will.
The sisters meet a punk musician covered in horrendous scars all over his skull. It is revealed he’s also a sea dweller, a Triton to be precise. He has been living on land for a while, and he’s aware of Silver’s fascination for the human, so he warns her sister, that if Silver doesn’t kill the young man, she will become sea spume.

Silver eventually makes the maximum sacrifice, she has an operation to remove her tail and acquire human sexual organs, all in the name of love... only to be jilted(been there)because the human has fallen in love with another.

The ambiance in the film is oneiric, the epoch in which in takes place is hard to tell. Haircuts and clothes are atemporal and alien to a communist government, however technology grasses it to be between the 80’s and 90’s. I also have to add that the locations are eerie until there’s a musical number in which a character is the demiurge of light and hope. Nudity, which is a constant in the film, is dreamlike, not only because it deals with mermaids but because the English speaking cinema hardly deals with the naked human body anymore, sure we can kill hundreds of minions in a Marvel film, but they are bad, they don’t bleed so there’s no bloody problem, but show pubic hair and we are sent to the gutter. 

As a typical European film, there’s not a happy ending, reality and nature crush Disney-romanticism, leaving the spectator with conflicting emotions. However, there is never any doubt that you witnessed a fairytale, a dark one pack with depth and spontaneity hard to find on mainstream audio-visual narrative.

The last time I enjoyed a musical so much was “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”, and that was in 2001 in a gay cinema in Amsterdam (Netherlands). I adored the freshness of that film, free from the chains of the Hollywood money obsessed machine and focused on an original story and awesome score, and dealing with a topic that no mainstream would dare touch. The songs, I still have them in my Ipod to this day. I was 21 then, Rock was a force that could beat anything, nothing further from the truth nowadays were pop rules supreme.

Fairy tales carry dark messages, something modern parenting avoids at all costs, and this is what this polish story seems to me. An original fable with a message so strong that it seeks to lure viewers to ponder on the painful and egotistical nature of love. There is always one side that loves more, there is always one side that takes advantage of that, and there is always one side that “ends” happier than the other.

I sincerely recommend both films, but the The Lure is released by the Criterion Collection. I suggest you purchase it, if not, send an email or add a comment and I shall share it, but it is a masterpiece in originality.