The Lure

Agnieszka Smoczynska helms a funny, biting fantasia of feminine power bursting sexist fables at the seams with her 2015 film "The Lure."

With this genre-defying musical we have not one but two not-so-little mermaids, a pair of sisters named Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek). When the sisters take an interest in a trio of musicians -- a drummer/father figure (Andrzej Konopka); his significant other, who is also the band's singer (Kinga Preis); and a young guitarist (Jakub Gierszal), who is something of a son to the older couple -- they come ashore, walking on magically conjured legs, to lend their voices to the band's shows at Adria, a famed Warsaw nightclub. The year is 1983, disco is still in vogue, and the sisters are soon the toast of the city -- a city they survey with excitement and hunger. This is no small thing; just add water, and the sisters reveal their six-foot-long, eel-like tails and sprout savagely sharp teeth, all the better to eat the occasional unsuspecting man with.

Though women, too, fall under the sisters' spell (a police detective, for example; the singer herself, also, at least to a degree), men are the primary targets, and also the most vulnerable to the sisters' cetacean wiles, none more so than the young guitarist, whose name -- we learn in the course of story -- is Mietek. While Golden watches with a mix of jealousy and concern, Silver falls in love with Mietek, even though -- and he actually says this to her -- he views her as an animal and can't ever love her. To his credit, Mietek makes a go of it when Silver sacrifices her tail and her voice in an attempt to become a human woman.

The old fairy tales have some currency here, as the punk rock star (and slumming god) Triton reminds them. Should Silver fail to win Mietek's heart -- should he marry someone else -- Silver will turn into sea foam... unless she eats him first. It's a savage thing, this love business, but what are you going to do?

Here's a thought: Sing! And sing they do, sisters and bandmates alike, giving voice to a clutch of original songs written by sisters Barbara and Zuzanne Wronskie. The special features that accompany this Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection includes a making-of featurette titled "Off the Hook," in which we learn the film's origins: Originally, it was intended by screenwriter Robert Bolesto to be a fictionalized version of the songwriting sisters' lives (they were children in the '80s and their parents played at Adria). The film mutated from there into a new take on the old mermaid myth.

"Off the Hook" examines the film's various elements, including its sound design and the sisters' stylized movements. There are also deleted scenes, as well as two short films by Smoczynska -- one is narrative fiction, the other a documentary, but they both have musical motifs. "Aria Diva" (2007) is about the powerful, and erotic, friendship between a housewife and an opera singer; "Viva Maria!" (2010) is a documentary about another diva -- Plish opera star Maria Foltyn.

Novelist Angela Lovell provides a spiky, luminous essay that's loaded with piquant gems, among them the observation that "it's hard to picture a woman as ferocious as Smoczynska choosing [to make a film adapted from the sexist Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale 'The Little Mermaid'] for any reason other than to turn the story on its head and settle old scores."

Feeling like a horror/musical mashup with overtones so deeply psychological and strange that David Lynch would nod in approval? This fine, finny flick is for you, then. Beware its entrancing power.

"The Lure"
Blu-ray
$31.96
https://www.criterion.com/films/29061-the-lure?q=autocomplete