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The gently unfolding romance at the center of Neil Jordan's Ondine, the sixteenth film from the Irish director, would be just as comfy onscreen as in a collection of fairy tales. In fact, so dreamy is this tale of a fisherman who finds a young lady who may or may not be a mythical sea creature off the coast of Berea that it can't help but remind the audience at every turn of its sweet folkloric nature.
This pressing need to reiterate narrative themes and genre totems has handicapped Jordan before: his very entertaining Breakfast on Pluto and the otherwise wonderful Butcher Boy both suffered from a need to announce intentions of magical realism rather than just play them out. It's sad to report that Ondine is perhaps the most fatally wounded by this nagging problem, one which blunts Jordan's most audacious work and is negligibly absent from his best, namely Mona Lisa and the just-slightly overrated Crying Game.
But Ondine is ultimately more a flawed exercise in storytelling than an honest-to-God failure. The film really starts moving as the fisherman, a long-haired scruffy sort named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), takes the young lady of the film's title (Alicja Bachleda, Farrell's off-screen partner as well) into his small seaside cottage. On his boat, she brings him great luck as he begins pulling in huge loads of lobster and salmon; in town, she is the focal point of gossip and a "curiouser and curiouser" creature to Syracuse's ill daughter Annie (Alison Barry).
It is Annie, after hearing her father's dreamy tales, who suspects Ondine of being a selkie, a sorta-kinda mermaid creature in Irish mythology. This suspicion only grows when a man (Emil Hostina) begins wandering around Berea looking for Ondine, a man Annie believes to be the possible creature's selkie husband. As Syracuse runs to a local priest (Jordan axiom Stephen Rea) to confess sins and deny absolution, Annie uses the enigmatic Ondine as an escape from her drunkard mother and her creepy boyfriend (Dervla Kirwan and Tony Curran).
Culminating in a confrontation between Syracuse and the mystery man, Jordan's script for Ondine thankfully plays it light when it comes to the manipulation inherent in a terminally ill child and the film's climactic reveal. But it all plays out rather routinely, which is sadly what we've come to expect from Jordan. While the filmmaker fails in narrative terms, however, he finds inspiration in the gloomy, lived-in greens, blues, and grays of his aesthetic. The entire technical team works to create some lush, stormy visuals, but Christopher Doyle's expert lensing deserves most of the credit. As in M. Night Shyamalan's reprehensibly pompous Lady in the Water, Doyle shows unwavering creativity in his use of the relationship between land and water.
In this light, Ondine regains some of the mysticism that Jordan's overwrought dialogue dulls, but the collision barely makes the film more memorable. A few images remain -- such as the lovely, talented Bachleda lying on the rocks, or the armada of tubes recycling Annie's blood in a small dialysis center. What does not remain is the sense of wonder you imagine you might feel if a mystery like Ondine found her way into your small existence.
This pressing need to reiterate narrative themes and genre totems has handicapped Jordan before: his very entertaining Breakfast on Pluto and the otherwise wonderful Butcher Boy both suffered from a need to announce intentions of magical realism rather than just play them out. It's sad to report that Ondine is perhaps the most fatally wounded by this nagging problem, one which blunts Jordan's most audacious work and is negligibly absent from his best, namely Mona Lisa and the just-slightly overrated Crying Game.
But Ondine is ultimately more a flawed exercise in storytelling than an honest-to-God failure. The film really starts moving as the fisherman, a long-haired scruffy sort named Syracuse (Colin Farrell), takes the young lady of the film's title (Alicja Bachleda, Farrell's off-screen partner as well) into his small seaside cottage. On his boat, she brings him great luck as he begins pulling in huge loads of lobster and salmon; in town, she is the focal point of gossip and a "curiouser and curiouser" creature to Syracuse's ill daughter Annie (Alison Barry).
It is Annie, after hearing her father's dreamy tales, who suspects Ondine of being a selkie, a sorta-kinda mermaid creature in Irish mythology. This suspicion only grows when a man (Emil Hostina) begins wandering around Berea looking for Ondine, a man Annie believes to be the possible creature's selkie husband. As Syracuse runs to a local priest (Jordan axiom Stephen Rea) to confess sins and deny absolution, Annie uses the enigmatic Ondine as an escape from her drunkard mother and her creepy boyfriend (Dervla Kirwan and Tony Curran).
Culminating in a confrontation between Syracuse and the mystery man, Jordan's script for Ondine thankfully plays it light when it comes to the manipulation inherent in a terminally ill child and the film's climactic reveal. But it all plays out rather routinely, which is sadly what we've come to expect from Jordan. While the filmmaker fails in narrative terms, however, he finds inspiration in the gloomy, lived-in greens, blues, and grays of his aesthetic. The entire technical team works to create some lush, stormy visuals, but Christopher Doyle's expert lensing deserves most of the credit. As in M. Night Shyamalan's reprehensibly pompous Lady in the Water, Doyle shows unwavering creativity in his use of the relationship between land and water.
In this light, Ondine regains some of the mysticism that Jordan's overwrought dialogue dulls, but the collision barely makes the film more memorable. A few images remain -- such as the lovely, talented Bachleda lying on the rocks, or the armada of tubes recycling Annie's blood in a small dialysis center. What does not remain is the sense of wonder you imagine you might feel if a mystery like Ondine found her way into your small existence.
