Ondine (2009)

I have watched just about every movie you can think off. Ondine is one of the best I have ever watched. The characters are intriguing and complex, the mystery of the silk leaves it all to the imagination. Simply marvelous acting from Colin Farrell and The beautiful and stunning Alicja Bachleda and great cast of supporting actors. 10/10 cinema photography and script is masterfully written. Ondine should have won an Academy Award. I think this movie shows the diversity of the role that Colin Farrell can perform. I was still thinking about Miami Vice for the first five minutes of the film but then his accent and role was flawless. Well done mate top performance and why wouldn't you accept the role with Alicja who holds the screen in her own right and she made the water look like she belonged there!

Fmovies: I did not expect this... SUPER film which is a hidden gem. So enjoyed the story- gives hope for the lost soul's of the world. A must see for anyone who enjoys luck and tragedy crossing paths and resulting in a feel good ending. I would buy this in a heartbeat.

I was intrigued from the beginning and can see why it was nominated for awards. Have no idea why it did not do better in the box office? Perhaps this was just not marketed correctly...

For parents... the rating is about right. Young teens would probably enjoy this, but may be a hair heavy for the under 10 crowd.

Final note- I would watch it again and enjoy it just the same if not more.

I think that this movie started to lose steam in the final 20 minutes. This part of the movie also coincides with the big reveal about Ondine and her back story. Its interesting how the movie quickly shifts from the fairy tale feeling to a real-life atmosphere for this final 20 minutes. On second thought, the director accomplished exactly what he set out to do with this tonal shift. I guess I fall into the category of fans that wish that (Spoiler!!!) Ondine was truly a selkie rather than a drug mule escaping her abusive past life. When she was on the boat, helping Syracuse, I was thinking that she may just have been a selkie. The Irish landscape also provides a great backdrop between the fantasy like cabin area and the bleak aspects of reality of the village The performances were all on point by the cast. Colin Farrell truly looked and acted the part of a hard-working fisherman. The precocious daughter was excellent in her role, and I loved the delivery of "Curious and curiouser". Alicja Bachleda was also mysterious and enchanting in her portrayal of Ondine.

Ondine fmovies. 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 studi

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.

Ondine is a movie that can truly be regarded as a modern day fairy tale. The story has been depicted so amazingly that it mesmerizes the audience and blesses them with a profound sense of compelling magic and fantasy. I am glad that after a long period of time I've watched a fabulous romantic movie, in the true sense of word. Romanticism is something that makes us escape our known world of mundane reality and takes us into a world of perpetual love, warm passion and incredible dreams. The story of Ondine has all the elements of a charming fairy tale and the ingeniousness with which it has been depicted makes it quite believable in the context of our known reality. It has all the elements of a fairy tale and yet it's an outstanding tale of the real world. The Selki myth, the struggling fisherman and her sick daughter, Ondine as the luck mascot, the monster who emerges to take Ondine away and the enthralling aura of mystery that shrouds the facts for long, make it a movie that's characterized by enchanting surprises, suspense, mystery, emotion and fantasy. What more can we expect from a fairy tale. The Selki mythology has been illustrated so wonderfully in the film that it endowed the plot with a compelling romanticism. It's a sensitive story of salvation, love and magic that we often dream of but seldom find in our concrete real world of facts. I particularly liked the ending of the film. Like a wonderful fairy tale it has a "they happily lived ever after" type of ending. After all the tensions, all problems are resolved at the end. I think such endings make us optimistic about life and give us the courage to dream over again. It's a very poignant and sensitive movie; a fascinating love story.