She from the sea

Like a siren song for the romantically inclined, writer/director Neil Jordan's Ondine is an elegiac and haunting meditation on the transient nature of love and luck. Lyrical and metaphorical, Jordan's script mixes traditionally rendered, age-old myths into the fabric of everyday life in a small Irish fishing village. 

Colin Farrell plays Syracuse (nicknamed Circus, to his enduring irritation), a solitary fisherman and father separated from the mother of his daughter and walking the line as a recovering alcoholic. To his astonishment, he hauls a nearly drowned woman up in his nets, and her mysterious appearance from the sea and strange behavior soon strike Syracuse and others as uncannily similar to the ancient selkie myth involving the transformation of a seal into a woman possessed with supernatural qualities.

Alicja Bachleda-Curuś is Ondine, the supposed selkie. Her ethereal features and lilting accent are well suited to the role. Alison Barry steals virtually every scene she inhabits as Annie, Syracuse's daughter. A lesser child actor would have almost certainly come off as saccharine and insufferable as the precocious youth, beset as she is by kidney failure and a drunken mother, but Barry gives the role depth and a lightness of spirit. Despite the bleakness of her station and the failings of her body, she is persistently upbeat. Prone to quoting Lewis Carroll ("Curiouser and curiouser!"), Barry's Annie is the film's heart, leavening hard realities for everyone around her.

As one might expect, Farrell is rather another figurative organ, and despite an admirable performance, the actor is somewhat improbable as the town laughingstock and loner, skulking about, casting smoldering looks like an Irish James Dean. He can hardly be blamed for looking good, however, and the film is possessed of enough fairytale elements that it doesn't really matter. In any case, Farrell neither flaunts his appeal nor attempts to mask it, and the result is a mainly sympathetic character.

The Academy Award-winning Jordan (Best Original Screenplay for 1992's The Crying Game) is in fine form with Ondine. His writing has become simpler and more potent with time. The mysterious premise that drives the film is as satisfying as the surprise ending that eventually unravels it.

Jordan's previous work has often been permeated with cynical weariness, containing characters that function as object lessons in human frailty and corruptibility. There is nothing of the sort here. Luck is on the side of the righteous. Love is treated as volatile and elusive, but it is nonetheless pure. Lovers are painted as fickle and unpredictable, but the connection that Syracuse forms with Ondine (a reference to the mythical elementals in European folklore) is life-altering and powerful.

Those familiar with the writer/director's films will be waiting for the other shoe to drop while all this romance is unfolding, and rest assured it does. But unlike other films that abandon fairytale notions of love in favor of realism, the conclusion does nothing to negate the dominant theme that love can, at times, indeed conquer all. The metaphor becomes literal, and childish superstitions are abandoned, but the love at the center of the tale remains true.

The production values on hand are the filmmaker's finest, featuring none of the flashy, distracting editing in his otherwise fantastic remake of The Good Thief (2002) or any of the excessive wallowing in the uglier aspects of life so frequent in his work. Ondine is definitely grim in places, but the dark, as the playwright Christopher Fry put it, is light enough.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com