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If she was a seal, though, would you still do the wedding?
Having just been talking about Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), I realized I have never told this journal much about either of his films that I really love, Ondine (2009) or Byzantium (2012). I still miss the sea desperately and the summer is almost over, so the former gets my vote right now. I saw it twice in two weeks in 2010 and then never wrote about it. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
umadoshi, this is for you.
I said five years ago that Ondine is a film about "the sea and secrets and the reasons that people tell themselves stories." I could also say accurately that it's about an Irish fisherman and his folklore-loving daughter and a woman who might be a selkie, but there are conversations in this relatively familiar tack of retelling/deconstruction that will bewilder an audience unfamiliar with or unwilling to follow the ways in which people shift registers of story within their own lives—adopt characters, try on narratives, talk in metaphor until it becomes the real thing. A woman speaks of herself as dead and seals as her kind and a priest agrees to be a tree. Names matter as much in twenty-first-century Castletownbere as they do in myth. The fisherman who sets off the story by drawing in his nets with a seemingly drowned girl in them is named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), but everyone in town from his ex-wife to the priest to his own ten-year-old daughter refers to him as "Circus," for the fool he used to make of himself when he was the town's spectacular drunk.1 When the resuscitated girl with the foreign accent (Alicja Bachleda) gives her name as Ondine and Syracuse asks her what it means, she replies, "She came from the water," and he takes this as a literal translation until corrected. His better-read daughter Annie (Alison Barry) hears the name and asks promptly, "What's a French selkie doing here?" Because Annie's stepfather claims to have "invented selkies in the Outer Hebrides . . . they're a Scottish thing," Syracuse and his daughter begin to tell people that the camera-shy, fair-haired, sea-gazing stranger now staying in their caravan is from the Orkneys. Do they believe it? Does Syracuse believe everything his daughter tells him about seal coats and seven tears and how a selkie woman can bury her skin and stay on shore seven years for love of a landsman unless her selkie husband comes to claim her first? The story doesn't snowball so much as it stitches itself together from things everyone says except for Ondine, who answers almost all of Annie's questions with an amiable "Maybe." Syracuse knows for a fact that when she goes out with him in his trawler and sings, his usually empty pots come up full of lobsters and his nets leave him ankle-deep in salmon, which you shouldn't even be able to catch trawling.2 So there's the obvious question for the viewer, but it's not an either/or split so much as it is, for most of the film's runtime, a slipstream non-issue. Syracuse is and is not the fisherman in a folktale; Ondine is and is not the seal-woman he drew out of the sea; they both know it, although they do not know the same things. How they tell the story they find themselves in makes a difference to the kind of story it turns out to be.
All of this is the kind of liminal fiction that can turn into Calvinball if it's not grounded, by which I mean that it can feel arbitrary, without either the necessary constraints of the mundane world or the traditional rules of the folktales it's working within. Ondine's shape-shifting narrative actually helps avoid this problem—its fancies are anchored in the "real quotidian world," but the real world is always invoking the fantastic one, even just in figures of speech or wishful thinking. The results are gritty and evanescent at once, a scallop's eye of sky rippling in cold brackish water. I love how much attention the film allows the details of life in its contemporary coastal town, so that the miraculous image of a seaweed-tangled woman dangling from a trawl net does not carry more weight than fish guts and flaking ropes and euros per pound of salmon; some scenes take place under the peat-blue skies and Carrara-white clouds of a postcard from Ireland, others beneath the kind of half-misting overcast that strings everyone's hair damply and doesn't photograph well and shows no signs of blowing off any time soon. Frail Annie spends most of her time in a wheelchair, which aligns her with stories of mermaids come ashore—like Miranda—but there is nothing otherworldly about congenital kidney disease which requires dialysis twice a week.3 Her home life is normal post-divorce messiness; mother with custody, father's the sober one. As far as her health goes, thank God for the CRC. But the sea gets in everywhere, through the cracks of visual resemblance as well as words—I love how Jordan's cinematographer shoots the occupants of a pub as if they were exotic sea life in an aquarium, nighttime streets blurred and lit up like things seen underwater. A hand stretching a fishnet stocking looks webbed, scale-shadowed. Dusk and driftwood make fin-shapes against the sky.
And it is true that encountering Colin Farrell first in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) did him no favors, because he really is talented and I couldn't see it through the unconvincing blond hair and the lack of chemistry with Jared Leto. Syracuse is not and cannot be a showy role; the character's had years of being showy and he's sick of them, of the shaming reminder of a nickname that greets him even in the confessional.4 He's more tongue-tied than taciturn—a dark-browed, sad-eyed man who must be in his middle thirties, but moves like someone ten years older and wearier, a dogged air of keeping his head down even as he lifts and stacks lobster pots or swings his daughter up into his arms, unexpectedly lithe under his cable-knits. He's a good father, but you can see that he doesn't believe it. He has nightmares about being back with his ex-wife Maura (Dervla Kirwan), who still drinks the way he used to, like they're canceling alcohol tomorrow. Ondine frightens him in different ways—worse than being the luckless clown is suddenly having something good, because then he could screw it up. He has absolute faith in himself when it comes to that. I've never seen Alicja Bachleda in another role, but as Ondine she has the tricky task of portraying someone sufficiently enigmatic to entertain the possibility of selkies and yet three-dimensional enough that she doesn't merely look like the hero's catalyst. She has a watchful happiness, a way of gravely answering as if she is learning the rules of a game; then she'll swim out into the bay in a dress Syracuse brought her and sun herself smiling on a floating dock and that looks more natural than anything she's said. The script is clear that the story taking shape around her is one she has more than an accidental hand in.
I felt more positively about it at the time, but I do think now that the hard right turn into explanatory realism in the third act is a mistake. The film salvages it with lingering ambiguity—there is no textual reason that the woman who chooses to call herself Ondine cannot be both an exploited illegal immigrant and the Romanian equivalent of a selkie, perhaps a sort of rusalka; the songs might be Sigur Rós, but they still called the fish when she sang them—but nonetheless I find myself much more interested in the simultaneous currents of fairytale and workaday reality than in the resolution of one in favor of the other. It does not wreck the film or my inclination to recommend it to people who like sea-stories even a little. I had just really enjoyed the film's apparent lack of interest in answering the question of its title character's origins so definitively, and the violence with which it's decided jolts the film for about ten minutes into another genre entirely. (Byzantium handles a similar eruption of the past catching up with the present much more effectively, in part because it's been a violent story all along.) In its favor, however, this reveal makes Ondine the only selkie film I've seen make any use of the belief that selkies are the souls of the drowned, suggested by her death as a drug mule and resurrection as a creature of the sea. "She was drowned, Father. My net brought her back to life." It's another piece of old strangeness that, like the association of fairies with the dead, does not see much play nowadays; I'm glad when it does.
I don't know if Neil Jordan has seen Night Tide (1961). The comparison didn't occur to me when I saw the earlier film; I would be surprised if there were a direct relationship, but the handling of supernatural ambiguity reminds me. Its closest cousin is probably The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), though Ondine is explicitly more modern in both setting and approach. I like this sea-shifting movie very much, is the short version, and it didn't get as much critical approval as I would have liked. In between starting and finishing this post, I saw a midnight screening of Jaws (1975), which I should also write about. This recollection sponsored by my considerate backers at Patreon.
1. It is conceivable that Jordan got the one name by working backward from the wordplay of the other, but I would have chosen it for the classical city whose patron was the nereid Arethousa: she appears wreathed with dolphins on the coinage of Sicily, pearls in her hair; nets sometimes. Fleeing the river Alpheus in Arcadia, she came to land at Ortygia and turned into a fountain. I wrote a poem about her in 2012. The myth is never mentioned in the film, but it occurred to me as soon as I heard Syracuse's name and it would not be out of keeping with the story's themes.
2. I appreciate that the fishing inspectors are also confused.
3. She's also just a very well-done example of an intelligent kid onscreen. Annie reads voraciously, has a vocabulary a college student could be proud of, is almost certainly brighter than both of her parents—her mother tries to pretend it isn't true, Syracuse is a little awed and quietly proud—and it doesn't make her a four-foot-tall adult or one of those cinematic child savants who understand everything better than the grown-ups around them; emotional intelligence is not the same thing as reading levels.
4. Syracuse is not a religious man, but once a week he sits the priest down and makes him listen to the state of his life, including the two years, seven months, and eighteen days he's been sober, "because there's no AA chapter in this poxy town!" Fortunately, the priest is played by Stephen Rea and therefore gives the impression that he's seen weirder. He doesn't even bat an eye when they end up discussing what kind of tree he would be. "You look more like one of those they make hurley sticks out of."
umadoshi, this is for you.I said five years ago that Ondine is a film about "the sea and secrets and the reasons that people tell themselves stories." I could also say accurately that it's about an Irish fisherman and his folklore-loving daughter and a woman who might be a selkie, but there are conversations in this relatively familiar tack of retelling/deconstruction that will bewilder an audience unfamiliar with or unwilling to follow the ways in which people shift registers of story within their own lives—adopt characters, try on narratives, talk in metaphor until it becomes the real thing. A woman speaks of herself as dead and seals as her kind and a priest agrees to be a tree. Names matter as much in twenty-first-century Castletownbere as they do in myth. The fisherman who sets off the story by drawing in his nets with a seemingly drowned girl in them is named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), but everyone in town from his ex-wife to the priest to his own ten-year-old daughter refers to him as "Circus," for the fool he used to make of himself when he was the town's spectacular drunk.1 When the resuscitated girl with the foreign accent (Alicja Bachleda) gives her name as Ondine and Syracuse asks her what it means, she replies, "She came from the water," and he takes this as a literal translation until corrected. His better-read daughter Annie (Alison Barry) hears the name and asks promptly, "What's a French selkie doing here?" Because Annie's stepfather claims to have "invented selkies in the Outer Hebrides . . . they're a Scottish thing," Syracuse and his daughter begin to tell people that the camera-shy, fair-haired, sea-gazing stranger now staying in their caravan is from the Orkneys. Do they believe it? Does Syracuse believe everything his daughter tells him about seal coats and seven tears and how a selkie woman can bury her skin and stay on shore seven years for love of a landsman unless her selkie husband comes to claim her first? The story doesn't snowball so much as it stitches itself together from things everyone says except for Ondine, who answers almost all of Annie's questions with an amiable "Maybe." Syracuse knows for a fact that when she goes out with him in his trawler and sings, his usually empty pots come up full of lobsters and his nets leave him ankle-deep in salmon, which you shouldn't even be able to catch trawling.2 So there's the obvious question for the viewer, but it's not an either/or split so much as it is, for most of the film's runtime, a slipstream non-issue. Syracuse is and is not the fisherman in a folktale; Ondine is and is not the seal-woman he drew out of the sea; they both know it, although they do not know the same things. How they tell the story they find themselves in makes a difference to the kind of story it turns out to be.
All of this is the kind of liminal fiction that can turn into Calvinball if it's not grounded, by which I mean that it can feel arbitrary, without either the necessary constraints of the mundane world or the traditional rules of the folktales it's working within. Ondine's shape-shifting narrative actually helps avoid this problem—its fancies are anchored in the "real quotidian world," but the real world is always invoking the fantastic one, even just in figures of speech or wishful thinking. The results are gritty and evanescent at once, a scallop's eye of sky rippling in cold brackish water. I love how much attention the film allows the details of life in its contemporary coastal town, so that the miraculous image of a seaweed-tangled woman dangling from a trawl net does not carry more weight than fish guts and flaking ropes and euros per pound of salmon; some scenes take place under the peat-blue skies and Carrara-white clouds of a postcard from Ireland, others beneath the kind of half-misting overcast that strings everyone's hair damply and doesn't photograph well and shows no signs of blowing off any time soon. Frail Annie spends most of her time in a wheelchair, which aligns her with stories of mermaids come ashore—like Miranda—but there is nothing otherworldly about congenital kidney disease which requires dialysis twice a week.3 Her home life is normal post-divorce messiness; mother with custody, father's the sober one. As far as her health goes, thank God for the CRC. But the sea gets in everywhere, through the cracks of visual resemblance as well as words—I love how Jordan's cinematographer shoots the occupants of a pub as if they were exotic sea life in an aquarium, nighttime streets blurred and lit up like things seen underwater. A hand stretching a fishnet stocking looks webbed, scale-shadowed. Dusk and driftwood make fin-shapes against the sky.
And it is true that encountering Colin Farrell first in Oliver Stone's Alexander (2004) did him no favors, because he really is talented and I couldn't see it through the unconvincing blond hair and the lack of chemistry with Jared Leto. Syracuse is not and cannot be a showy role; the character's had years of being showy and he's sick of them, of the shaming reminder of a nickname that greets him even in the confessional.4 He's more tongue-tied than taciturn—a dark-browed, sad-eyed man who must be in his middle thirties, but moves like someone ten years older and wearier, a dogged air of keeping his head down even as he lifts and stacks lobster pots or swings his daughter up into his arms, unexpectedly lithe under his cable-knits. He's a good father, but you can see that he doesn't believe it. He has nightmares about being back with his ex-wife Maura (Dervla Kirwan), who still drinks the way he used to, like they're canceling alcohol tomorrow. Ondine frightens him in different ways—worse than being the luckless clown is suddenly having something good, because then he could screw it up. He has absolute faith in himself when it comes to that. I've never seen Alicja Bachleda in another role, but as Ondine she has the tricky task of portraying someone sufficiently enigmatic to entertain the possibility of selkies and yet three-dimensional enough that she doesn't merely look like the hero's catalyst. She has a watchful happiness, a way of gravely answering as if she is learning the rules of a game; then she'll swim out into the bay in a dress Syracuse brought her and sun herself smiling on a floating dock and that looks more natural than anything she's said. The script is clear that the story taking shape around her is one she has more than an accidental hand in.
I felt more positively about it at the time, but I do think now that the hard right turn into explanatory realism in the third act is a mistake. The film salvages it with lingering ambiguity—there is no textual reason that the woman who chooses to call herself Ondine cannot be both an exploited illegal immigrant and the Romanian equivalent of a selkie, perhaps a sort of rusalka; the songs might be Sigur Rós, but they still called the fish when she sang them—but nonetheless I find myself much more interested in the simultaneous currents of fairytale and workaday reality than in the resolution of one in favor of the other. It does not wreck the film or my inclination to recommend it to people who like sea-stories even a little. I had just really enjoyed the film's apparent lack of interest in answering the question of its title character's origins so definitively, and the violence with which it's decided jolts the film for about ten minutes into another genre entirely. (Byzantium handles a similar eruption of the past catching up with the present much more effectively, in part because it's been a violent story all along.) In its favor, however, this reveal makes Ondine the only selkie film I've seen make any use of the belief that selkies are the souls of the drowned, suggested by her death as a drug mule and resurrection as a creature of the sea. "She was drowned, Father. My net brought her back to life." It's another piece of old strangeness that, like the association of fairies with the dead, does not see much play nowadays; I'm glad when it does.
I don't know if Neil Jordan has seen Night Tide (1961). The comparison didn't occur to me when I saw the earlier film; I would be surprised if there were a direct relationship, but the handling of supernatural ambiguity reminds me. Its closest cousin is probably The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), though Ondine is explicitly more modern in both setting and approach. I like this sea-shifting movie very much, is the short version, and it didn't get as much critical approval as I would have liked. In between starting and finishing this post, I saw a midnight screening of Jaws (1975), which I should also write about. This recollection sponsored by my considerate backers at Patreon.
1. It is conceivable that Jordan got the one name by working backward from the wordplay of the other, but I would have chosen it for the classical city whose patron was the nereid Arethousa: she appears wreathed with dolphins on the coinage of Sicily, pearls in her hair; nets sometimes. Fleeing the river Alpheus in Arcadia, she came to land at Ortygia and turned into a fountain. I wrote a poem about her in 2012. The myth is never mentioned in the film, but it occurred to me as soon as I heard Syracuse's name and it would not be out of keeping with the story's themes.
2. I appreciate that the fishing inspectors are also confused.
3. She's also just a very well-done example of an intelligent kid onscreen. Annie reads voraciously, has a vocabulary a college student could be proud of, is almost certainly brighter than both of her parents—her mother tries to pretend it isn't true, Syracuse is a little awed and quietly proud—and it doesn't make her a four-foot-tall adult or one of those cinematic child savants who understand everything better than the grown-ups around them; emotional intelligence is not the same thing as reading levels.
4. Syracuse is not a religious man, but once a week he sits the priest down and makes him listen to the state of his life, including the two years, seven months, and eighteen days he's been sober, "because there's no AA chapter in this poxy town!" Fortunately, the priest is played by Stephen Rea and therefore gives the impression that he's seen weirder. He doesn't even bat an eye when they end up discussing what kind of tree he would be. "You look more like one of those they make hurley sticks out of."
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I thought it was amazing and it came and went from theaters inside of a week. I don't argue that it's flawed, but it does the sea and storytelling so well. One of the reasons I love Byzantium so much is that, on top of a mythos of vampirism I'd never seen before (see here), it gets exactly right the balance of the mundane and the fantastic that Ondine slightly fumbles. But Ondine has selkies, and those are still rare onscreen.
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You're welcome! That's a great icon.
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Nine
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You're welcome. The film is very good at that invocation, which is why I'm puzzled that I don't own it already. I'd have rewatched it this summer if I did.
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This is a wonderful thing to see portrayed and wonderful for you to note. It's something very present and beautiful and tragic that I see around me all the time, and it deserves more notice.
Syracuse knows for a fact that when she goes out with him in his trawler and sings, his usually empty pots come up full of lobsters and his nets leave him ankle-deep in salmon, which you shouldn't even be able to catch trawling. --This is wonderful too, especially in the context of what you say later in the review. Maybe more of us should try singing to the sea. I really do think that if more people did live a magical story, more magic would manifest. I mean that totally unmetaphorically.
How they tell the story they find themselves in makes a difference to the kind of story it turns out to be. Yes. Yes indeed. This goes along with your wisdom the other day about love, that its uncertainty is what makes it powerful and true.
I love how much attention the film allows the details of life in its contemporary coastal town
I am so sold. I am putting it right onto Netflix [if it's available that way]
I find myself much more interested in the simultaneous currents of fairytale and workaday reality than in the resolution of one in favor of the other
You and me both. I think it's a bugbear of Western tale telling. Guys! I feel like hollering. You don't need to nail it down!
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It's one of the things that makes the film feel most real to me, irrespective of the degrees of grittiness or fantasy.
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The thing I'm really mulling over is the degree to which the adults' story--Syracuse and Ondine's story--is told to them by Annie, without Annie losing any of her own agency and realism (she's no Mere Device, though she could be). If I can pull my thoughts together I'll either post them or send you an email.
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I'm glad you still liked it! I think I understand what the third-act reveal was trying for, I just don't think it pulled it off. Too much realism. Or the thing that looks like realism, because it has drug runners instead of seal women. Fortunately, I love the last scenes.
"So who's going to marry her, Syracuse?"
"Well, it's not like there's a queue, Father."
"I can't marry her."
"No. You're a tree."
"Exactly."
If I can pull my thoughts together I'll either post them or send you an email.
Please do! I agree that Annie is the primary storytelling force in the movie: I believe she's the first person to say the word selkie.