Hmm, what can we saw about “Ondine” that we haven’t already said. Well for one, we were big fans of the Neil Jordan mermaid fairytale, but are honestly not loving this trailer. In fact, that’s an understatement.
What’s it about? Colin Farrell plays an Irish fisherman and recovering alcoholic who discovers a woman in his fishing net who he believes to be a mermaid (Alicja Bachleda; the mother of his 2nd child no less, and yes, they met on set).
It’s a wonderful, romantic and dreamy little fairytale and yes, it’s flawed and has a twist ending that doesn’t really work, but the rest of it is so beautiful — in part due to Christopher Doyle’s gorgeous cinematography and the Sigur Rós members’ elegiac score — that we were able to forgive its flaws. It also might be too saccharine for some, but when we saw it, we were absolutely in the mood for it. Perhaps you can dub it a beautiful mess, but you can’t apologize for a film that hits the “how I’m feeling right now” sweet-spot right there in the moment. Jordan mainstay Stephen Rea co-stars.
Magnolia picked the film up for U.S. distribution earlier this year and now the picture is set for a June 4 summer release. So the trailer? Ugh, that piano sonnet around the 30-minute mark that expands into the uplifting anthemic music? It just doesn’t seem to suit the tone at all and only emphasizes the sentimental, yet not cloying tenor. The music throughout only gets more melodramatic and worse and worse as it goes on. Sure, they’re trying to sell it in a broader way, but it’s not the little daydream-like picture we saw at TIFF. Would love to see an alternate version of the trailer featuring more of the gorgeously illusory score by Sigur Rós’ keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson that you can hear a few seconds of at the beginning of the trailer. Hope they release a disc of that score. It doesn’t really break the Sigur Rós mold much, but dammit, it’s pretty beautiful.
