When the Arizona summer positions parts of the state somewhere between Mercury and the Sun, when even reading a book becomes too much for the poor sizzling brain cells, what can be better than a nice mini-film festival? And what’s better for that than a virtual voyage to the far northern latitudes, where the seas are grey and turbulent and the skies are more often storm-wracked than blankly and relentlessly sunny? Just seeing the humans there in their thick woolen sweaters is enough to trigger a sense of the strange and the alien.
This week’s offering, like last week’s, is an Irish indie production: Neil Jordan’s Ondine. It leads with a well-known actor, Colin Farrell in this case, but fills the rest of the cast with lesser-known and unknown talent. It’s set on the Irish coast, and it’s a very Irish film, without tumbling down into twee.
The question it asks is, is it real? Or is it fantasy? Is the female lead a selkie? Or is she something much more mundane?
It begins in one of the classic ways, with a down-on-his-luck fisherman pulling up a young woman in his net. She doesn’t know or claims not to remember her name or who she is. She tells him to call her Ondine, which is the name for a magical spirit of the water.
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He takes her in, and settles her in his late mother’s house. And then magic begins to happen. Or so it seems.
It’s his young daughter who determines that the woman must be a selkie. Annie is very bright and very precocious, and very ill. Her kidneys are failing; she gets around in a wheelchair. She lives with her mother, who has a boyfriend, a large and boisterous Scot.
Her father is named Syracuse. The locals call him Circus and mock him as a loser and a clown. He does his best to help raise Annie, taking her to dialysis and telling her stories during the long, tedious sessions.
Annie quickly discovers her father’s odd guest, and equally quickly decides that she’s a magical being. She’s a selkie; she’s here for Syracuse, as she says herself. If she buries her sealskin, she can live on land for seven years, and she has seven tears that she can shed. But she has to watch that her seal-husband doesn’t come for her, and that he won’t take her back to her home in the sea.
The film builds up the magic in subtle and not so subtle ways. It shows her emerging from the water like a seal, wearing a form-fitting dress that looks like a seal’s spotted pelt. She basks on the pier or the shore, as a seal will. When she goes out in the boat with Syracuse and sings to the water in a piercingly sweet voice in a language he doesn’t know, the fish crowd into his net, even varieties that don’t show up usually or at all.
It’s not only good luck she brings, either. Tragedy strikes, but even that brings good in its wake.
With tragedy comes reality, and the mundane explanation for the mysterious woman from the sea and the equally mysterious and sinister man who comes looking for her. It explains where she came from, why she’s there, and what brought her into Syracuse’s net. Even her song has an explanation, and a provenance.
And yet.
What is magic, really? Where do fairy tales and the mundane meet? How does Syracuse’s luck change and his nets fill, if not by the selkie’s magic? Is it just a coincidence that the tragedy happens, and that while it kills one person and disables another, it saves a very important life?
The film isn’t quite fantasy, but it’s not not fantasy, either. It skirts along the edge of magical realism. There are wonders in its world, though they may not be exactly what they seem.
Or are they?
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
