Fantasia ’20: A Mermaid in Paris

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.

Baptiste: The French Cop from The Missing

Julien Baptiste is a veteran cop, who specializes in finding missing persons, but not necessarily in securing happy endings. Of course, if were up to him every case would conclude with a joyous reunion, but things do not always work that way in the dark criminal underworld that he must navigate. After surviving a brain tumor, the French detective is not exactly retired, but he has something like emeritus status with the Amsterdam police force—even though his Dutch fluency is iffy. Unfortunately, the new case he agrees to take on will have many disastrous unforeseen consequences in co-creator-writers Harry & Jack Williams’ Baptiste, an original six-part series spun-off from The Missing, which premieres this coming Sunday on PBS.

Feeling lucky to be alive, Baptiste assumes he will mostly be a professional grandfather going forward. However, his wife would prefer to get him out of the house for a while, so as a favor to his old colleague Martha Horchner, Baptiste agrees to help the nebbish Englishman Edward Stratton find his niece, who has disappeared into Amsterdam’s murky world of sex-work and drug addiction—or so he says.

It turns out Stratton is not who he says he is—and neither is his niece. The reality is considerably more complex and subject to further revisions. Regardless, all the questions Baptiste asks draw the unwelcome attention of a Romanian human-trafficking syndicate known as the Brigada Serbilu. Presumably, the mysteriously vanished gangster Dragomir Zelincu (who has become a Keyser Söze-like legend for the Brigada) holds some answers, but finding him will only lead to more questions. Further complicating matters, there is business involving a considerable shipment of cash stolen from the Romanian gang.

Of course, it is all much more complex and perilous than that, but the Williamses manage to uncork several surprise game-changers at various stages, so let’s keep the details vague. This is definitely dark stuff. It is not as hard-boiled as Andrew Vachss novels, but the red-light district is definitely present throughout the series.