In spite of how beloved the mermaid is in folklore and on clothing, there is no “mermaid genre” per se in film. All we really have to look to in this regard is Splash and, of course, The Little Mermaid (most Americans won’t count H2O: Just Add Water because 1) it’s a show and 2) they have very little familiarity with things of an Australian–or foreign at all–nature). So thank god or whoever that Agnieszka Smoczynska came to everyone’s rescue with her debut film, The Lure, which isn’t just a mermaid movie, but a mermaid-vampire-musical movie (take that, La La Land). How lucky can an audience get?
Originally called Daughters of the Dance, the title was altered as the word does not translate quite so literally to English. In Polish, the word “dance” defines a certain phenomenon of communist glamor (it sounds oxymoronic, but it’s not), and since the film is set in the dancehall-heavy Warsaw of the 1980s, it only makes sense that our anti-heroines, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszańska), would be defined as daughters of the dance. As sisters who skulk together among the ranging waters of The Black Sea (where, apparently, they somehow picked up Polish in Bulgaria) to The Baltic Sea as they ultimately plan to go to America–remember when people still wanted to?–Silver and Golden are attracted to the musical stylings of Mietek (Jakub Gierszal) and his family, Wokalistka (Kinga Preis) and Perkusista (Andrzej Konopka). After the mermaids assure the trio that they won’t eat them (though the opening credits clearly indicate they have a predilection for otherwise), these musicians that just so happen to work in an adult entertainment nightclub enlist Silver and Golden to perform with them upon approval from the owner.
Silver falls in love with Mietek, who is attracted to her, but expresses a reluctance to view her as anything other than an animal (but an animal with the perk of a penis-ready hole in her tail). Golden, on the other hand, doesn’t lose sight of her cannibalistic tendencies, wanting Warsaw to be a quick stop on the way to their ultimate destination. She can see, however, that it isn’t going to be so easy to pry Silver away from Mietek, who is even willing to go so far as to get “a real pussy” in order to be with him. Mind you, this involves a very hackneyed, very graphic surgical process.
In Poland, the movie didn’t exactly resonate. Evidently, Polish people don’t have quite as sadistic of sensibilities as Americans, which is rather unexpected. And as Smoczynska explained at the film’s opening night at IFC (see video below), there were no mermaid or horror elements shown in the original previews because the promoters of the film feared deterring “classicist” Polish audiences. Unfortunately, the effect of not telling them only made the average reaction that much worse. So for once, god bless America for having a more fucked up sense of humor. Elsewhere, the underlying theme of the mermaid sisters’ “immigrant” nature comes into all too real play when considering that they are taken advantage of by the very people that invited them into their home. Treated as sex workers for no pay and physically abused at random by Perkusista, their value is constantly undermined. Especially in Silver’s case, who doesn’t have the presence of mind–thanks to her love haze–to at least maintain a modicum of her true cannibal identity the way Golden does.
As she sinks deeper into the depths of the shallow waters of young l’amour, she risks falling victim to some old mermaid folklore: if you fall in love with a mortal who ends up marrying someone else, you’ll turn to sea foam–that is, unless you eat said mortal within a short time. The question is, has Silver sustained at least one final shred of her beast-like propensities in order to take the revenge necessary for her own survival? Well, to quote Gossip Girl, that’s a secret I’ll never tell. Unless you see it and then we can talk about it. In any case, it’s a refreshing departure from the standard mermaid fare audiences rarely get access to anyway, and conjures certain parallels to another favorite film of late, The Love Witch. Really, there’s got to be something to be said for all this female hostility toward men in recent narratives. It’s like a pop culture burst collectively designed to get back at centuries of suppression and maltreatment toward the “fairer sex”–but mind you, they ain’t so fair in retaliation. And yet who can’t forgive a little bloodlust when it’s paired against the backdrop of such a goosebump-inducing soundtrack?
