THE LURE (Córki dancingu, 2015)

Imagine a cross between an AIP beach movie and All That Jazz and you come close to Agnieszka Smoczyńska's perhaps unwitting contribution to the urban fantasy genre. From a different perspective, perhaps it belongs in the same category as Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a near contemporary film and another quirky woman's take on familiar horror tropes. It's a vividly grungy fantasy with the tragic quality of many an authentic fairy tale, and it clearly has something to earn almost instant canonization in the Criterion Collection, if only Janus Film's involvement in its U.S. distribution last year.

Set in a time approximately contemporary with Splash!, The Lure tells what might happen if that film's protagonist, a mermaid, made a wrong turn on her way to America and ended up in a decadent Communist bloc country. This film is twice as good, however, because there are two mermaids! In fact, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska) are on their way to the U.S.A. when they're drawn to some Polish shore by a trashy rock trio jamming on the beach. These three could be father, mother and son, though they probably aren't. They perform regularly at the sort of trashy nightclub you might not have expected to exist in a Warsaw Pact nation, and recognizing the significance of their catch, they propose adding the finny girls, naturally topless to their act.  The mermaids can transform their tails into simulacra of human legs, but lack sex organs in that state, though they do not lack sexual desire. They could be a global cultural phenomenon but appear content to be, so to speak, big fish in a small pond.

Above, the mermaids show their true faces. Below, for a 1980s nightclub act they look a lot like a 

Commander Lexa tribute band. 

While Golden (the one who isn't blond) still sees people, with apparently one exception, as food, Silver (the blond) falls for Mietek (Jakud Gierszal) the boy in the band. He tells her he can only think of her as an animal, but she can take steps, so to speak, to correct that. Silver is your classic Hans Christian Andersen/Walt Disney mermaid, willing to sacrifice her identity and risk her existence to win a landlubber's love. She opts for a preposterous lower-body transplant. Even more preposterously, it works, though Mietek gets grossed out by her all over again when they try sex before she's fully healed. A singer in another band lures her away, putting Silver in mortal peril. By the rules of her kind, if you love a man but he marries another, you turn to sea foam -- unless you eat him, as Golden urges her to do.

In an interview, Smoczyńska says that the mermaid story was the hook that enabled her to make a movie about the seedy show-business milieu she grew up in. The result is inevitably more fantastic than whatever she originally intended, but I suppose there was something fantastical about that milieu of people struggling to live their dreams or embody other people's dreams. Perhaps liberated by the fantasy element, she makes her film a full-blown musical by staging a classical-style set piece with people bursting into song into a surprisingly well-stocked (for 1980s Poland, I presume) department store as the mermaids take their first-ever shopping trip. That exuberant excess makes The Lure more tragicomic than tragic, but also more opera than musical comedy. Inevitably more prickly than quirky than any American approach to the subject you can imagine, it still feels like a genuine 21st century fairy tale. Playing here in 2017, it makes an interesting companion piece to The Shape of Water and makes that film look like pure Hollywood pap by comparison. That's not to say that The Lure is the better film by any standard, but it's definitely the more grim fairy tale of the two, if that's what you're looking for in your sea-creature romances.