Ondine

The performances in this are just great. Combined with an equally good story, this makes for a very entertaining movie. Entertaining in the sense a story you might like to hear as a bedtime story. There are no big effects here and even great emotional scenes don't feel forced or heightened in any way.

While the main actress is beautiful, she is also good acting wise. And it is necessary, because her character (also the name of the movie) really carries this. Along with Colin F. of course, who has to take a few steps back and be really "quiet" ... kinda like the exact opposite of what you would imagine him to be in real life ... which also shows the strength in his performance!

An unsuccessful fisherman named Syracuse is shocked when he pulls up a strange women in his fishing nets. She can't explain who she is or how she got in the water, but she doesn't want anyone besides Syracuse to see her. Syracuse must attempt to unravel the mystery or who or what she really is while trying to patch up his relationship with his ex-wife and take care of his sickly daughter.

Ondine possesses a style all it's own. It successfully blurs the line between fantasy and reality until the audience doesn't really know where one ends and the other begins. But, at it's heart Ondine is really about relationships and finding hope in desperate situations.

You truly care about all the characters and this is achieved by excellent performances from all the leads. Especially Alison Barry who is an amazing child actress and absolutely inspired as Annie, Syracuse's ailing daughter. Annie is convinced that Ondine is a Selke and revels in living in a fantasy that is much easier than her own life. The chemistry between Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda is another high point.

Ondine is not without it's flaws though. At points the drama can seem forced and it was starting to lose me towards the end. The ending is a little crazy as well, but that is fairly easy to forgive when considering all that works in the movie.

Ondine is an extremely heartfelt story and deserves a lot of praise for originality alone. I believe it is certainly worth watching at least once and hopefully it will get the attention it deserves.

According to the dictionary an 'ondine is a water nymph or water spirit, the elemental of water. They are usually found in forest pools and waterfalls. They have beautiful voices, which are sometimes heard over the sound of water. According to some legends, ondines cannot get a soul unless they marry a man and bear him a child. This aspect has led them to be a popular motif in romantic and tragic literature.' Another bit of background information that aids the viewer of this little rarity of a film, ONDINE, is the bit of folklore often referred to in the film - that Ondine is a 'selkie': 'In Irish folklore, there are many stories about creatures who can transform themselves from seals to humans. These beings are called selkies. The seals would come up onto rocks or beaches and take off their skins, revealing the humans underneath. There is no agreement among the stories of how often they could make this transformation. Some say it was once a year on Midsummer's Eve, while others say it could be every ninth night. Once ashore, the selkies were said to dance and sing in the moonlight. One of the most common themes found in selkie folklore is romantic tragedy. Selkie women were supposed to be so beautiful that no man could resist them. They were said to have perfect proportions and dark hair. They also made excellent wives. For this reason, one of the most common selkie stories is that of a man stealing a selkie woman's sealskin. Without her skin, she cannot return to the sea, and so she marries the human man and has children with him. She is a good wife and mother, but because her true home is in the sea, she always longs for it. In the stories, she ends up finding her sealskin that her husband has hidden, or one of her children unwittingly finds it and brings it to her. According to legend, once a selkie find her skin again, neither chains of steel nor chains of love can keep her from the sea. She returns to the ocean, usually leaving her children behind with their grief-stricken father'.

All of this information may seem redundant, but when a beautiful little film such as ONDINE, written and directed by the always excellent Neil Jordan, knowing the background helps support the manner in which the story is told and revealed. Syracuse (Colin Farrell) is a recovering alcoholic fisherman whose alcoholic wife has custody of his beloved daughter Annie (Allison Barry) who because of renal failure must be dialyzed frequently and spend her days in a motorized wheelchair while she awaits a kidney transplant. Syracuse focuses his life on Annie - until one day while fishing he brings up a beautiful girl in his nets, a frightened girl named Ondine (Alicja Bachleda, a brilliant Polish actress and singer from Mexico) who fears being seen by anyone. Syracuse protects and clothes her and secludes her in his dead mothers shack by the sea - until Annie discovers her, having researched everything she could fine at the library about the selkies. Annie decides Ondine is selkie who must bury her seal coat in the earth and thus gain seven years on land without having return to the sea. With this mixture of myth and reality the story moves along at a gentle pace: Syracuse frequents the priest (Stephen Rea) confessional (his only available semblance of an AA stabilizer in his small village), Annie and Ondine bond, Syracuse and Ondine fall in love (despite the myth's warning that every selkie has a husband), and the townsfolk begin to accept the strange happiness that has returned to Syracuse's heart. The plot then twists and the realities of the myth become known and the story progresses from a recreation of a mythical romance to the difficulties of a true romance.

The chemistry between Farrell and Bachleda and Farrell and Barry is extraordinary and palpable: they make the film sing. The haunting musical score is by Kjartan Sveinsson and the moody cinematography is by Christopher Doyle. Neil Jordan pulls all of these elements together into a film that will linger in memory - like the song Ondine sings. There have been novels, operas, ballets, and plays written based on this myth, but few capture its mystery the way this film does. It is a quiet little gem of art.

Grady Harp

I am a fan of Neil Jordan but I was extremely disappointed with Breakfast on Pluto, so I went to this movie with low expectations. Colin Farrell (once you get used to him with the sing songy Cork accent!)was super as was Alicia Bachleda. Along with the Butcher Boy and The Miracle the real star of the movie is a young actor (Alison Barry).

This is a fairytale interspersed with reality, it is a movie. I'm tired of reading reviewers criticising the fantasy elements conflicting with 'real life'. Suspend disbelief for God's sake , you are watching a piece of fiction, not a documentary.

This was a perfect movie for a lazy afternoon, it would even be suitable for kids from ages 8 upwards.Did not find it in the slightest bit boring or slow. To compare it with Moondance is completely unfair as that movie had both poor directing and a brutal script(in conjunction with some very dodgy acting).

Give Ondine a chance, you might find that you will be pleasantly surprised.

Everything about Neil Jordan's Ondine, a middling good and very Irish expression of his unique vision, is soft around the edges, like the lilting speech of County Cork, where the action takes place, by the sea, whose gentle waters (hithering and thithering waters of, Joyce called the Liffey) deliver a girl into a fisherman's net. Is she a real girl ("one of those asylum seekers," her finder asks) or a selkie or an ondine, a sea nymph, a mermaid temporarily gone human? The distinctions have gone blurry, and the movie swings between fairy tale and a harsh account of modern realities. Ondine succeeds or fails by virtue of its gentleness and deliberately blurred distinctions. It's a nice little story but a fragile one, so understated and gentle it could pass unnoticed if you don't pay good attention; and the accents are so thick we could have very much benefited by having subtitles. Once again it shows this director remains his own man, true to his literary roots and his Irish ones when he wants to be.

The fisherman is Syracuse (Colin Farrell), but his name has been rounded off to "Circus," and Farrell has softened back his voice to an (often incomprehensible) Irish murmur. He says they call him "Circus" because as a drunk he was such a clown. He's been sober for two years, ten months, and 21 days and counting, but he's treading water, in need of something. Circus has a daughter, Annie, whom he cares for, but she lives with her mother, and he lives by himself, and he's too warm and friendly a fellow for that to be right for him. He lives on the edge, a bit uneasily, between sobriety and drunkenness, solitude and a marital state, happiness and bitter disappointment. When he pulls the mysterious female out of the water, she offers hope of something new.

Neil Jordan has always had a gift for transformation and blurred edges. In his very first film, a mild-mannered musician, played by Stephen Rea, changes into a revenge killer, his trumpet morphed into a gun. A Jordan regular forever after and virtually his muse, Rea has been described by Todd McCarthy in terms of ambiguity: "handsome-homely, decisive-passive, gentle-violent." It's true you don't know quite how to take Stephen Rea half the time, and that's the beauty of him. Jordan's most celebrated film, The Crying Game, veers with pleasing and surprising complexity between opposites of sex and politics, keynoted by the fascinatingly androgynous Jaye Davidson. The Irish novelist-turned-auteur filmmaker has dealt in the past with mythical transforming creatures in Interview with the Vampire and In the Company of Wolves.

Ondine is in a lower key, however. The shapely and mysterious young woman Circus catches in his net (Alicja Bachleda, a Polish actress born in Mexico) can't be pinned down. Not, at least, till till the action finale, which brings things to a conclusion with a series of happy accidents. As Circus may have hoped, she becomes a source of luck. Ondine is what she says her name is. When she goes out fishing with Circus, her singing seems to fill his pots with lobsters and his net with salmon. He desires her. He likes dressing her up in nice clothes. When the two of them make wishes, Ondine wishes for Annie to get well. Circus wishes for Ondine to stay. She doesn't want to be seen and he hides her in an isolated cottage once occupied by his late lamented mother.

The plucky, smart, and over-imaginative young Annie (Alison Barry) goes to the library and studies up on selkies. She rolls around in a wheelchair that gets stuck in the water at one point. While she's the most threatened -- she could die at virtually any moment -- Annie is, paradoxically, the strongest person around. The wheelchair she has to travel in hides that her feet are planted firmly on the ground. She's also like a sea-nymph herself, surviving life on earth uncertainly, only by constant dialysis sessions. Of course Stephen Rea is here, and this time he's a Catholic priest. Circus goes to him for confession, but not quite confession: he seems to confuse his sessions with the good Father with AA meetings. These are moments of contemplation, as are, perhaps, Circus' attempts to tell Annie a fairy tale based on what he's actually experienced, but there's a feeling that events are moving forward rapidly and strangely. "Curiouser and curiouser," Anne repeats, echoing Lewis Carroll. But really things are in a slow drift, till the end comes and they're rushed to a conclusion.

That final revelation when bad men turn up may not be so surprising, but what remains of Ondine is its delicacy and sweetness. Ondine herself does seem for a while a creature of the sea, in a very down-to-water fashion. She likes to get wet in the sea. She sets the fashion of wearing thin, wet dresses and she looks great in them, though there's a voyeuristic note in those scenes, as if she's just being posed to titillate the audience. The film seems, not for the first time in Neil Jordan's work, to be more interested in atmosphere than anything else; there's plenty of that, but not much depth in the characters or the action. Jordan pays good attention to his visuals and brings in the best d.p.'s to help him. That first film was shot by Chris Menges and this one by Christopher Doyle. The appropriately feathery camera-work never strikes a note of Irish Tourist Office cliché. Too bad the images, though soft and blurry, are clearer than the dialogue.

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