The Lure (2015)

 

Director: Agnieszka Smoczyńska

Screenplay: Robert Bolesto

Cast: Marta Mazurek as Silver, Michalina Olszańska as Golden, Kinga Preis as the nightclub singer, Andrzej Konopka as the drummer, Jakub Gierszał as the bass player, Zygmunt Malanowicz as the house manager, Magdalena Cielecka as Divine Furs, Marcin Kowalczyk as Triton / Daedalus

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Stories)

 

With animated illustrated opening credits, we are introduced to The Lure, a Polish horror musical which caught a lot of interest, more so as it gained distribution through Janus Films/Criterion as a rare new release from some of the biggest names in distributing and releasing classics of cinema. It opens with two mermaids, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Gold (Michalina Olszańska), taking interest in humans singing and dancing one night on the beach, joining in the singing and catching all off guard. Obvious, in folklore, mermaids in certain forms lured men with their beautiful singing to their demises, which is something director Agnieszka Smoczyńska and screenwriter Robert Bolesto are going to subvert in terms of the gender stereotypes. We will sympathise with these ones even if they are literal man eaters, but at this point, the trio of an older female singer, her musician husband, and the young male bassist instead decide to bring them on land to work at the restaurant bar they perform at as strippers and backup singers.

Set in Poland by way of an alternative eighties, where seventies disco did not die out, the world is grounded in reality in spite of the fantastical plot, clearly reflecting a fondness to this type of world of nightclubs from the director if not hiding the environments' moments grunginess and seediness, with a place where the older man running the club has no qualms with the mermaids working for him as long as he gets them to strip first to demonstrate they are mermaids. In this world, no one bats an eye to their clear unnaturalness, the two sisters able to grow human legs and wander the land as long as they do not stay too long from water. Even if they have Barbie doll anatomy, they look identical to everyone else if seemingly more naive from the off-set, and they re-grow their tales when in contact with water, which does well for business as spectacle. It emphasised a corporal fleshy scaly take on these folklore entities which does not hide from the sexual aspects at all in their desires and humans' desires for them. It is definitely horror too as these mermaids eat people, specially Gold who will eat men, even having a tryst with an older female police officer who finds the giant tail arousing.

The Lure is absolutely a musical too, with full songs and occasional dance numbers, such as one with a full dance chorus in a shopping mall as Gold and Silver are brought into the world of showbiz. This is all in mind that, whilst also depicting these two mermaids as outsiders being exploited and trying to figure themselves out in this world on-land, the film is explicitly a reinterpretation of Hans Christian Anderson's Little Mermaid, the story recreated as Silver falls for the young male musician. It takes a more adult dimension in that the equivalent for full proper legs, as in Anderson's tale, is to have full human anatomy beneath the waist to be as physically loved let alone romantically, but the biggest lesson to learn from the film is never to trust men who ask you to drastically change yourself for their sake, as between his place as the lover of their female manager, or how he has a wandering eye anyway, Silver's story is going to be tragic especially as this follows the story of Anderson's tale that she will lose her voice. As proclaimed by the one merman Gold has a friendship with, Triton (Marcin Kowalczyk), a punk rock singer who literally bites the heads off animals on stage, he wanrs as well that, if Gold's love is unrequited, she will turn to foam and dissipate after a certain time after the heartbreak.

The difference with The Little Mermaid to this is that you do not expect the legs to be acquired through a back alley doctor who switches lower halves between two women to complete a tail/lower waist transplant surgery in musical song. Moments like this are why The Lure does stand out, with its wayward tone in shifting along with these strange and idiosyncratic characters even among the humans in the cast. In another film, it may seem abrupt for the mermaids to just be briefly disposed off midway through, in carpets into a body of water, when they are leaving a body count, only to be brushed under the carpet and everyone getting together, by way of a cold turkey musical number where the three human characters are emotional messes. Here however, it works within the logic of the film fully. All of it works as its own idiosyncratic form, tonally able to sustain itself with its combination of seemingly out of place parts, where the musical numbers work, with the music good, where the gore when it arrives fits especially with the sick humoured tone, and that it does have an emotional finale, even if it leads to the natural idea that guys who cheat on their girlfriends should be eaten instead.

Fugue (2018) caught people off-guard including myself, as a film less easy to sell for its cult appeal, a fitting title in atmosphere where we follow a woman who lost her memory reconnecting to her old environment, whilst The Silent Twins brought Agnieszka Smoczyńska to the United Kingdom in a drama co-produced with Poland based on the lives of a real pair of female twins. This is still a filmmaker who started theatrical length films in the 2010s, with The Lure as her debut, so the question of whether Smoczyńska will ever return to the tone of this debut is to be left on the table as a what-if. Suffice to say, having taken time to digest the film over multiple watching, I finally came to appreciate this interesting and idiosyncratic production which felt like all the best parts of a first theatrical film firing with ambition.