Opening night at Boston Underground Film Festival is always a jovial, if not transformative, experience at the movies. The first night that I attended there in 2014, I got to see Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell? Which resulted in all of my preconceptions about the festival’s programming being shattered. Seeing the new Polish, pseudo horror/musical wasn’t much different. I stay consistently surprised by the kind of films the powers that be show to audiences every year. Important, weird, different, against the grain. These are all words and phrases I would use to describe the festival’s programming. Luckily for the audiences, if opening night is any indication, they’re in for some boundary-pushing stuff. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stick around for the late showing of Belladonna Of Sadness, but I’ll be seeing it soon and will sound back after I do so.

The Lure

Loss of innocence has been a recurring theme in cinema for God knows how long. It’s always interesting to see how that theme is passed down from genre to genre, all ending up with some kind of different return. The Lure takes that theme and pushes it through a ringer of different genres, including musical and horror, and even a bit of new wave sentimentality to mix things up a bit. The narrative may be a bit overwrought and incoherent, but I’d be hard-pressed to find a reason not to like a movie about a couple of mermaid strippers killing men in a bid for gender reclamation.

Silver (Michalina Olszanska) and Gold (Mara Mazurek) are two mermaids dreaming of a life on land, lured into the wild world of music performance at a strip club. They team up with a mother (Kinga Preis), son (Jakub Gierszal), husband (Andrzej Konopka) trio and become the hot attraction in 1980s Warsaw. Their tails retract and sprout depending on how much moisture is applied. Things get a little hairy when Silver falls in love with the son, who is also the bass player of the troupe. Here’s the catch: Silver will turn into sea foam if her love marries another woman. Also, Gold really likes eating people so that kind of throws a wrench in the works.

The Lure is the kind of film that opens up more and more when trying to describe it, for better or worse. Is it a story about innocence lost? Sure. Does it have mermaids with vampire teeth who face the difficult struggle of leaving their prior lives behind for humanity? Definitely. The problem here is that the film is sunken under so many layers of formal gobbledygook. At one point, it’s a musical. At another, it tries to offer a bleak look at characters not fitting in with their world. There are so many ideas thrown onto the screen here that a cohesive aesthetic isn’t attained and the narrative suffers for it.

The narrative isn’t something that is pitch perfect, either. It’s a concoction of “growing up” tropes with a feminist undercurrent never rising to the occasion. The Lure is partially about female empowerment and how these mermaids’ bodies can be used for love or as a weapon. The former subject to many jokes (the mermaids have a vagina on their tails), and the latter subject to instances of throat-ripping (not as shocking as you may think).

Despite it all, though, there’s something really charming and admirable about the film. It’s a strong debut from Agnieszka Smoczynska, filled to the brim with ideas that don’t complement each other, but by some damn miracle, those ideas provide fleeting instances of greatness. The beginning has a musical sequence scored to “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer and it’s almost overwhelming how well it complements the place and time in the narrative.

Those aforementioned ideas are tossed out and picked up again from scene to scene, creating an inconsistency that almost hobbles the film had it not been for its gonzo material. The Lure is the exact kind of film that BUFF plays and should be playing, despite my grievances regarding quality. It has a modern voice rooted in a bygone era that we barely get to glimpse at in mainstream cinema. Plus, it has mermaids being sassy to each other through telepathy, which deserves more than a little bit of credit.

GRADE: C

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Sam Cohen

Sam Cohen is that guy you can't have a conversation with without bringing up Michael Mann. He is also incapable of separating himself from his teenage angst (looking at you, Yellowcard). Read on as he tries to formulate words about movies!

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