The Little Mermaid, with Teeth and Polish New Wave Music

You might not associate Poland with mermaids. But its capital of Warsaw has thanked a Vistula River mermaid for her protection of the city by featuring her on its coat of arms for more than 600 years. And more recently, the country has produced the film The Lure (2015), a horror musical twist on the story of the Little Mermaid and the debut of director Agniewszka Smoczyńska, digitally available in the United States through the Criterion Collection (and assumedly on DVD at some point). 

We meet Silver and Golden, our heroines, luring a father and son from the beach, promising in their sweet song not to eat them. The mother, Krysia, lets loose a scream at her menfolks' peril when she notices. The next thing we know, we're in the surreal nightclub of an alternative 1980s Poland where Krysia sings for her family band in glittery pantsuits. The family has adopted the mermaid girls, and gets the club owner to hire them as a new act.

Smoczyńska's mermaids are fiercely teethed, fishy with monstrous, long, colorless tails, and frequently topless. Along with their songs sung on stage or to lure prey, there are a few more surreal choreographed numbers, including one set in a department store that would not be out of place in La La Land. Overall, however, this film is closer in spirit and style to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. With carnivorous mermaids. 

Silver, the blonde, has a sweeter disposition and falls for the bass-playing son of the family - a risky business given the rules mermaids operate under when it comes to romance with humans (forget Disney's The Little Mermaid and watch the gorgeous 1968 Soviet animated short Rusalochka for a review). Golden, the brunette, is cooler towards humanity, and hungrier.   

The Lure is different, ambitious, and has fun, and I'm interested to see what Smoczyńska does next. The music is pretty catchy. If you think you might be into a Polish-language new wave musical about nightclub mermaids with sharp teeth, I wholeheartedly recommend you see this film.

Janus Films is pleased to present Agnieszka Smoczynska's hallucinatory Polish genre-bender THE LURE, opening theatrically on February 1st at New York's IFC Center, as well as March 3rd at Los Angeles' Laemmle NoHo and at other dates and venues nationwide.

And here's an interview with Smoczyńska. The real gem: 

"In Poland, there’s no tradition of musicals... There’s no tradition with horror. There’s no tradition with genres. You can imagine what people think when they watch this movie... They promoted it as 'the Polish Chicago'... They didn’t show in the trailer that they are mermaids. They didn’t show the horror element. And people with children came to this film."

Warsaw's mermaid in Rynek Starego Miasta, from my 2014 visit.

Death in Sarajevo / FilmStruck

Film is one of my favorite ways to travel, around the world, through time, and into the shoes of others. Run Lola Run inspired me to continue studying German and ultimately write an undergrad honors project thesis about the works of Tom Tykwer and Andreas Dresen, British film was at the center of my studies in London in 2003, the first time I had lived abroad or in a city, and by now I've seen upwards of 500 foreign-language feature films. So I enjoy DC's film festivals, the December European Union one at the AFI Silver (technically in Maryland) above all, and try to get to showings when I can. A few days ago, at Filmfest DC (which unfortunately just ended), I saw Danis Tanović's Death in Sarajevo with a few friends, and I'll recommend it for anyone who has a chance to see it. 

Tanović's No Man's Land (2001) won the foreign film Oscar, and while I saw it too long ago to directly compare the two, I remember it as being excellent. Based on and incorporating a Bernard-Henri Lévy play called Hotel Europa, Death in Sarajevo takes EU-sponsored commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip as the set-up for a dive into Bosnia and Herzegovina's continuing problems two decades after Dayton. It's an Altman-esque nearly real-time tour through a hotel - based on and filmed at the iconic Holiday Inn where foreign correspondents stayed during the war - during preparations for the festivities. The manager hopes to use the sales boost to pay his workers for the first time in month, but they're planning on striking - led, ultimately, by the mother of the chief receptionist who the manager relies on - despite the efforts of the gangster running a strip club in the basement. A famed French actor rehearses the Levy play in his room, filmed by an overzealous but coked-up and distracted security guard. On the roof, a TV journalist interviews historians for a segment and meets another Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist from the provinces concealing a gun and vague plans but not his anger. Sparks fly as they argue about history, politics, identity, and whether any assassination today could make a difference. Tanović draws laughter as well as blood, but this is a sharp film about the country's continuing paralysis, the Balkans' recurrent problems - nationalism, poverty, crime - and perhaps how little the EU ultimately matters there. 

The hotel, taken on my visit in 2012.

On a related note, I'd like to give a shout-out to my top source of cinema at the moment, FilmStruck. As a lover of international and arthouse cinema, I'm a lover of the Criterion Collection - but those DVDs are rather expensive, even when they're 50 percent off in flash sales. So Hulu's collection of Criterion made me a Hulu subscriber a few years ago. Last fall, Criterion migrated to its own start-up streaming service, in partnership with Turner Classic Movies. The best thing about FilmStruck is the library of hundreds of great films. The second best thing is how it's curated - with dozens of virtual film festivals around a particular theme, director, country, actor, cinematographer, etc. on at the same time. The downside is that my Apple TV is too old to carry the FilmStruck app directly, so I watch everything via my iPhone and AirPlay. That works, although it's suboptimal when you need to pause. The cheaper FilmStruck option gives you a sizable selection of rotating films only, the Criterion Channel costs extra but gives you access to the full library as well as additional specials. Overall, I highly recommend.