Sailors know. There is a reason the old salts fear mermaids and sirens, because they really are out to get men. Lula assumes Gaspard Snow will be her latest victim, but the retro-crooner is weirdly immune to her siren song. Yet, she starts to fear for the broken-hearted entertainer’s life as cares for the beached creature in Mathias Malzieu’s A Mermaid in Paris, which screened during the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Snow
would have been happier in the past, so he tries his best to live there. He and
his father operate a secret nightclub in the lower deck of a houseboat that was
founded by his grandmother and her associates, the Surprisers. During the
National Socialist occupation, the Surprisers were an underground resistance
cell, who also raised the city’s spirits by leaving whimsical toys on the
street for children. Snow tries to keep their spirit alive, but that kind of
chanson-elan is not widely appreciated these days.
After
a late-night set, he finds Lula washed up on the river bank, with a clearly
injured tail fin. The hospital refuses to examine her without a national
insurance card, so he takes her back to his bath tub instead. Lula is amazed he
can function at all, because her song has left several bewitched men ailing in
their wake. She is even more impressed when he is still hail and hearty the
next day. According to Snow, his last love affair left him heartbroken and
immune to love. Lula is sort of happy to hear that, because she is starting to
feel something for him.
Mermaid
in Paris sounds
like a conventional fish-out-of-water rom-com (which Lula literally is), but
Malzieu’s visual approach is endlessly inventive. After seeing this film, it is
clear he is the perfect director to tackle a film version of The Drowsy
Chaperone. Best known for the animated Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart, Malzieu
occasionally incorporates animation into Mermaid, but he really shows a
knack for letting visual set pieces unfold before our eyes.