Long before "glamour" was a word applied all too casually to movie stars and red-carpet gowns, it was a term used to denote an enchantment or spell, a cobwebby thing that could either lull a human being into a woozy dream state or suddenly make him feel fully and bracingly alive. Neil Jordan's modern-day Irish fairy tale Ondine works that kind of glamour, at first offering us the illusion of pure, stolid ordinariness -- to the point of being, quite literally, gray -- only to shift, before our eyes, into something darkly glittering and spectacular. The magic of Ondine is all beneath the surface, a shimmery school of fish that you can never be fully sure you glimpsed, but whose existence you don't for an instant doubt. Maybe all you see is a silvery flash, but that's enough.
Jordan opens Ondine with a fairy-tale image shot in the most prosaic tones: Colin Farrell is Syracuse, a preternaturally worried-looking fisherman who, in the course of a normal day's work, pulls up something quite extraordinary in his net -- a girl who at first appears to dead. The water around Syracuse's boat is gray, the sky is gray, the girl is gray: Everything in Ondine, in those moments, is the color of the lack of hope, both beautiful and despairing.
But the girl turns out to be miraculously alive, although after Syracuse revives her, she's terrified: She scuttles away from him, from one end of the boat to the next, like a fearful, impossibly graceful, long-limbed crab. He blinks at her, recognizing her as something beyond human. She blinks back at him, deciding on a slow-burning whim to trust him. Her eyes are large and round, fishlike in their blank directness.
This shy and exquisite creature -- she's played by Polish actress Alicja Bachleda -- makes it clear she doesn't want to be seen by anyone other than Syracuse, and he brings her to a deserted house (the one his late mother used to live in), where she'll be safe. The next day, she goes back out on the boat with him, and as she sings out to the ocean, lobsters from all around hear her song and creep by the dozen into his traps. It's the best luck he's had in ages. She tells him her name is Ondine, which is, coincidentally or not, just one name for the fairy-like sea creatures who have, over the centuries, crept from the collective memory of many different cultures.
Syracuse's young daughter, Annie (Alison Barry, in a marvelously smart and unsentimental performance), knows something about these creatures -- she calls them by their Scottish name, "selkies." Annie is a sickly kid who desperately needs a kidney transplant; she's so weak that she needs a wheelchair to get around, although she's staunchly un-self-pitying and refuses to let anyone else pity her, either. Syracuse adores her, but he's estranged from her boozy mother (Dervla Kirwan); he himself sobered up after realizing he was letting Annie down, but he knows that in the small Irish coastal town where he lives, a burg bound by tradition, he'll never be granted custody. Still, he tries to care for her as best he can. And when Annie discovers her father's secret houseguest -- she catches the ocean-loving Ondine swimming, in a filmy dress that clings to her like seaweed -- she's at first intrigued by her. Then she simply comes to like her.
Is Ondine a magical creature or a disappointingly human one? By the time Jordan (who also wrote the script) answers that question, it no longer matters, because he's already redefined what we commonly think of as magic: Ondine suggests that coincidence and magic are often the same thing. That idea is right there in the look of the movie: The picture was shot by Christopher Doyle in a shifting palette of shadowy deep blues and greens, along with those aforementioned grays -- Doyle seems to have found a thousand shades of them. In fact, once you key into them, the no-colors of Ondine are as vivid as the rainbow. Similarly, the characters do exceedingly average things that somehow take on a mystical allure: Syracuse goes shopping, in a sleepy little village store, for a dress for Ondine (he boosts a few things, too, to make his newfound riches go a little bit further). She puts it on -- it's a low-cut, ruffly little thing, pretty but undistinguished looking -- and not long afterward, she wears it when she goes swimming in the sea, fully making it her own: Damp and clingy, it ceases being a frock and becomes a Delphos gown. It's not shielding her from nature; it's soaked with nature.
In the course of his career, Jordan has certainly made a strange mix of movies, from the despairing gangster love story Mona Lisa, to the arthouse gender-bender The Crying Game, to the alternately joyful and wrenching glam-romance Breakfast on Pluto. (That's not even taking into account the flawed but weirdly effective vigilante picture The Brave One, or the smart, sharp heist caper The Good Thief.) Still, it's easy enough to make the case that Jordan is always as fascinated by surfaces as he is by what they hide. What people choose to show us of themselves is, after all, part of their identity. So why can't a person who's a woman on the outside be a mermaid on the inside? Bachleda makes us believe in that possibility: She's sexy not so much because of her nymphlike curves but because of everything her quizzical smile hides -- she plays Ondine as a woman who has perhaps only reinvented herself as a creature of myth. But what is reinvention besides a form of alchemy?
No wonder Farrell's Syracuse is alternately and simultaneously charmed by her, drawn to her and afraid of her. Around town, Syracuse is dogged by an old nickname, Circus, because in his drinking days he repeatedly played the role of the crazy loser clown. He's no longer crazy and no longer a clown, but he's still, for sure, a loser, and most of the people around him have little patience for him. He particularly exasperates the local parish priest (played by Jordan regular Stephen Rea, who's offhandedly hilarious), whom he visits now and then in the confessional. Syracuse isn't a faithful Catholic; it's just that there's no Alcoholics Anonymous in his crap town, so a priest will have to do.
As Syracuse, Farrell carries so much sadsack sorrow in his eyes that you fear nothing will ever go right for him. He's scruffy, cautious, unwilling to accept the possibility of happiness: Next to the evanescent Ondine, he's a rough-skinned, land-bound lion. But once he gets the gist of Ondine's song -- once he falls hard under her spell -- he becomes a shimmery creature too, albeit one with a five-o'clock shadow.
The worst thing a movie can try to be is magical, perhaps because we need to believe that magic just happens -- it can't be caused by lighting or camera angles or clever editing. Ondine doesn't strive for magic; quite the opposite, it insists on being quotidian. Jordan acknowledges the world as a flawed place. But he also knows that the cracks in everyday life, even the ones so fine that sunlight can't get through, are exactly where the glamour creeps in.