Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s debut film, The Lure (2015), transforms Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” into a gritty glam-rock allegory for female coming-of-age. Set in 1980s Poland, this genre-bending horror-musical follows two carnivorous mermaid sisters, Golden and Silver, who are drawn ashore by the sounds of a guitar ballad. They go on to explore life on land through the backdoor, singing and stripping at a Warsaw nightclub as the titular act – a play on The Odyssey’s mythic sirens who lure sailors to shipwreck. The mermaids become overnight sensations but are soon exploited by the nightclub manager as an exotic freakshow, never paid for their work. And when Silver falls in love with Mietek, a human bass player who only sees her as a fish, they begin to realize just how little they are appreciated by the walking-world run by men.
Silver’s storyline most closely follows the fairy tale. She runs the risk of turning into seafoam if Mietek marries another woman. She goes so far as undergoing a leg transplant, removing her tail, so her human will love her. Unlike the original story, however, Silver is not a lone mermaid in a human world; Golden is a fiercely loyal sister who is committed to protecting their bond. By coding teenage angst as a monstrous otherness and emerging female sexuality as savage carnality, The Lure is a feminist fable about the bittersweet concessions that carefree girls often make as they approach womanhood.
The permeable line between adolescence and adulthood is visualized through a series of transformational dualities: monster and human, water and land, drab ordinary life and the thrill of the nightclub. The film’s dissonant soundtrack, featuring the dreamy synth-pop of Balady i Romanse (the Wronksa sisters singing duo), productively clashes with the film’s violence, sonically representing the push-and-pull between naiveite and brutal experience. In an interview with the Criterion Collection, Smoczynka said that in terms of design, the point of departure was “the art of [Aleksandra] Waliszewska, who paints perverse takes on fairy-tale characters.” This is especially true of the film’s striking animated opening credits. The cinematography, Smoczynka said, was inspired by Nan Goldin’s photography, which shows adults at their most vulnerable, almost childlike.
Communist Poland, itself, was in a transitional moment in the 1980s. It was the final decade of the Polish People’s Republic and, like the film’s teenage mermaids, its people faced an uncertain future. The era was marked by worker rebellions and strikes as well as martial law. U.S. President Ronald Reagan placed pressure on the Soviet Union in the 1980s, leading to Poland’s independence. Polish immigration to the United States experienced a small wave in the years following 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of Soviet control freed emigration from Poland, a theme in the film. Golden suggests to her sister that they, “hang out” in Poland “before swimming to America.” Given the gendered dimension of their migrant experience, Golden’s suggestion might be hinting at the burgeoning Eastern European bride industry or more exploitative sex trade in the U.S. at the time.
Smoczynka draws on a local Polish fishermen lore to animate her dystopian setting. As legend has it, two mermaid sisters were swimming through the Baltic Sea; one swam to Copenhagen, but the other swam down the Vistula river and later became the symbol of Warsaw. Mermaids decorate several iterations of the Polish coat of arms from the 16th to 19th centuries and sculptures of mermaids are erected across Warsaw.
With its dark campy song-and-dance routines, the film recalls theatrical cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Its aesthetic might remind audiences of a more twisted The Shape of Water (2017) – though it predates Guillermo Del Toro’s film by two years. The Lure buzzes with wild energy, emphasizing how surreal and scary girlhood can be.
By Rebecca Kumar
