Like Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s 2015 debut, The Lure (its original Polish name being The Daughters of the Dance), 2016’s Little Mermaid sought to make the original narrative of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale even edgier–as though the story of an earnest mermaid willing to trade her voice, tail and entire family for the faint prospect of making a prince fall in love with her (thereby procuring her this “immortal” human soul everyone is always talking about) isn’t already “raw” enough.
But no, when it comes to twenty-first century live action renderings having nothing to do with Disney, it seems filmmakers favor this idea of transforming the mute Little Mermaid into a stripper, perhaps because in the fairy tale, the Sea Witch mentions the fact that she’ll be able to dance as no human has ever danced before. Co-directed by Roxie Blum and Matt Martin, with a script written by the latter (who also stars as Little Mermaid’s truer love interest, Jax), the tone of Little Mermaid (which sheds the initial article perhaps to differentiate from the animated version) starts out Andersen-y enough, with Little Mermaid narrating what the Sea Witch warned her would happen should she choose to go through with her cockamamie plan to pursue a rather two-dimensional douche bag that ends up abandoning her in a diner. The painful transformation described as follows: “Your tail will divide and shrink until it becomes what humans call ‘pretty legs.’ But every time your foot touches the ground, it will feel as though you’re walking on knives so sharp, that your blood must flow. If you cannot make him fall so much in love with you that he forgets both his father and mother, because his every thought concerns only you, the first morning after he has loved another, your heart will break and you will become foam on the ocean.”
So yeah, obviously a lot of pressure for a girl with no voice to help make a man love her. Then again, The Little Mermaid is very much a grand misogynistic statement on just how much most men prefer “a girl who don’t talk much” so they don’t have to hear her buzzing in their ear all the time, instead appreciating her for the very reason “God made woman”: her body. Thus, it isn’t that difficult for our newly human heroine (Rosie Mac, now best known for being Emilia Clarke’s double on Game of Thrones) to play her damsel in distress card to perfection, landing at the home of Jax, a photographer, who takes her in apparently because his friend who works at the diner says to–later inciting a strange moment of tension not fully addressed at any other point in the script.
The Sea Witch’s (Amber Borzotra) random appearances are, strangely, one of the few elements of much consistency as she shows up to dinner pretending to be an old friend of Little Mermaid’s, though still, no one bothers to bequeath her even with a fake name–she’s just that voiceless. With her new friend, Sky (Erin Marie Garrett), a fellow “dancer” at The Quixotic World (a real theater in Dallas), joining her at the table, Jax feels obliged to carry the conversation by asking the Sea Witch what she does. She returns, “I’m…like a collector of voices.” Jax prompts, “So…a music producer.” The Sea Witch shrugs, “Something like that.” Soon, Little Mermaid and Sky’s own professions are revealed because apparently Jax is just that oblivious to the overt/never thought to figure it out before this moment. Suddenly adopting the part of “morality enforcer,” he tells Little Mermaid he can pay her way for a while if she doesn’t want to do it anymore. But the truth is, like many girls, she relishes the thrills that come with exhibitionism. And after all, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Plus, she has no voice to flaunt, so there’s that.
While there are admirable aspects of what Little Mermaid seeks to do in reinventing the wheel of a classic story, it falls flat in many respects despite the very clear-cut love and attention that was given to its production. From the glamor shot-style makeup to the grating musical choices (The Lure is a true study in brilliant soundtracks, being a The Little Mermaid reimagining aside), there are many small details that might have improved the film overall. It’s also a massive challenge to render a script to screen in the modern era with so little dialogue. And it’s a skill that perhaps only Alfred Hitchcock was truly masterful at. Where the hell is he when you need him to direct a modern adaptation of The Little Mermaid anyway?
And while the stripper aspect (even if delivered a bit unbelievably as she “just happens” to be intrigued by a business card that leads her to the club) brings a spark of intrigue to modernizing the tale, it isn’t as tapped into as it ought to be. As is the case in The Lure, with its dark explorations of the seedy 80s underbelly of a Warsaw nightclub that seems to willingly ignore that they’ve decided to employ two vampiric mermaids in favor of the spectacle it creates for the customers. Possibly, this is the crux of where Little Mermaid fails–in not choosing to go all out with the kitsch the way Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszańska) do in The Lure, camping it up without inhibition while this Little Mermaid, instead, comes across as a vexing lost lamb. What’s more, her “humanity” that shines through in a moment when she’s instructed to claim vengeance for a wrongdoing on Jax’s part just doesn’t ring as true as Golden exacting violent retribution for the way Requisite Fuckboy treated Silver.
To add insult to injury in this rendering, a gender politics line is tacked on at the end for good measure, with Little Mermaid narrating, “I did not turn into sea foam as the Sea Witch said. Instead, I lifted up to the sky, toward the stars. I became one of the daughters of the air, doing good deeds and earning a soul. In three hundred years, I shall rise like this into heaven. Not because of a man, but because of me.” It smacks of inserting a feministic spin way too late in the game, particularly considering her meekness throughout the movie. Though she might be much the same in Andersen’s original, we all know there’s no place for a girl like that in the twenty-first century. And if you’ve got to be a mermaid-stripper, at least have the gumption to be a cannibalistic one.
