Ondine (2010)
Directed by Neil Jordan
On the coast of Cork, Syracuse is a divorced fisherman who has stopped drinking. His precocious daughter Annie has failing kidneys. One day, he finds a nearly-drowned young woman in his net; she calls herself Ondine and wants no one to see her. He puts her up in an isolated cottage that was his mother's. Annie discovers Ondine's presence and believes she is a selkie, a seal that turns human while on land. Syracuse is afraid to hope again.
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Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Jordan's movie plays with the Celtic myth of the selkie - a seal that can shed her skin and transform into a human.
Like John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, Neil Jordan's intoxicatingly beautiful Ondine plays off the marvelous folklore of the selkie, a seal who sheds his or her skin temporarily and can live on land as a human.
A hybrid creature well known to fans of John Sayles' lovely 1994 movie The Secret of Roan Inish, the selkie sheds her seal coat to venture ashore.
Take a dash of Splash, a generous pinch of The Secret of Roan Inish, and a healthy portion of low-key and very effective Irish charm, and the result is Ondine , a sweet and frankly lovely little film from Neil Jordan .
Half inspired by John Sayles' far superior 1993 film "The Secret of Roan Inish," Jordan sets up a tale about a sheepish Irish fisherman and divorced father named Syracuse (Colin Farrell) who pulls from the sea what he is led to believe is a selkie mermaid named Ondine (Alicja Bachelda).
No, not a mermaid exactly, but perhaps a selkie, one of the seal-women of local legend and John Sayles’s 1994 “The Secret of Roan Inish,’’ whose grounded whimsy this film shares.
The film was shot by Christopher Doyle ("In the Mood for Love," "Paranoid Park") in a semi-straightforward manner that nonetheless has an underlying sense of magic, accentuated by original music from Sigur Rós keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, both of which recall "Local Hero" yet achieve their own tone.
The movie jumps the selkie completely in the final act, which culminates in a climax marred by muddy visuals (it's hard to believe these scenes were lensed by noted cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the man behind the lush images in Zhang Yimou's Hero and Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love) and contrived plot points.
Shot by the spectacular Christopher Doyle ( In the Mood for Love , The White Countess ), Ondine is one of the most beautiful films of the year.
Like Tom Hanks in Splash before him, Syracuse feels protective of the sea creature, or whatever she is, and honors her desire for secrecy, privacy and maybe a pretty dress or two.