Year:  2020

Director:  Mathias Malzieu

Rated:  M

Release:  October 13, 2022

Distributor: Limelight

Running time: 102 minutes

Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Marilyn Lima, Nicolas Duvachuelle, Romane Bohringer, Tchéky Karyo, Rossy De Palma

Intro:
… remarkably poignant …

Love is one of the most rapturous and destructive experiences that the human heart can encounter. There is nothing quite like it, both for better and for worse. For better, it embodies the purest emotional state that can exist between two people. For worse, being open and vulnerable with another can make the sting of closure hurt that much more. Falling from that great a height can create lasting damage, to the point where some can go on to actively avoid ever coming close to it again. In the words of rapper Sirah: It’s not love ‘til it’s rubbed your heart and popped it’.

That quote takes on a quite literal dimension in this fantastical romantic-comedy, as a flood brings a mermaid, Lula (Marilyn Lima) onto the Parisian shore. Lula’s singing voice in-story is so powerful that it fills men’s hearts with so much love that they actually give out and die. Lima’s delivery certainly sells that effect. As does the soundtrack by French band Dionysos, full of love songs which evoke that transcendent experience in the way that only great French love songs can.

Opposite Lula, we have the forlorn crooner Gaspard Snow (Nicolas Duvachuelle), who finds the mermaid washed ashore and who seems to be the only man immune to the fatal power of her voice. Duvachuelle’s every movement, whether he’s roller-skating down the street or slipping and sliding around his own apartment in a rushed panic, exudes an infectious energy that only furthers sell him as a serious catch. Their chemistry together personifies the film’s overall purity of vision when it comes to the idea of romantic love and how important it is.

Amidst the film’s many visual flourishes, from its pop-up book opening credits, to moments of animation reminiscent of writer/director Matthias Malzieu’s previous work Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, to its endlessly inviting atmosphere and environments, what the film ultimately says about love is remarkably poignant.

Finding that one person you can co-exist with, when you just seem to overwhelm everyone else you meet, should strike a serious chord with those who struggle socially. In its dichotomy of love as pain and as bliss, it shows idealism without completely ignoring the harsh reality. With the inclusion of Romane Bohringer’s Milena, it even acknowledges how the loss of love can lead to a poisonous form of envy, where ‘if I can’t have it, no one can’ becomes a mission statement.

A Mermaid in Paris is one for all the hopeless romantics out there. Both as romance and as Jeunet-esque magic realism, it forgoes modern impulses to undercut its own emotional impact by questioning the why of things, letting the audience simply bask in the warming glow of true love. It’s as much a tribute to romance as it is to the many ways it is reflected in the arts, both old and new, showing that la petite mort is worth the mort.

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