Movie Review

Mermaid

By Anna Melikian

I attended this movie on the late Sunday night that it played. At first it was slightly strange like most independent films tend to be. The movie is set in a small Russian city. It follows a little girl named Alissa from her birth through her eighteenth birthday in Moscow. Alissa tells her story in an omniscient point of view. The film is in Russian but it’s subtitled and easy to follow.

We can definitely see stylistic differences between what classical Hollywood cinema tries to do and what we see in this movie. Armenian director and writer Anna Melikian has a uniquely perceptive eye. After watching this I realize just how much is missing from even the most realistic classical Hollywood cinema film. Her characters are curious. They stop to think and feel. They manage to bring humor into an otherwise serious plot. In everyday life people do goofy things that make others around them laugh. I was also laughing almost the whole time although this wasn’t a comedy.

The movie reminded me of a fairy tale in the way it was told. Once upon a time…

The underlying lesson; be careful what you wish for. At leas that’s what I took from it. There are many layers in this movie, it’s psychologically challenging.

Visually the film was clever. They put a lot of subliminal messages in various places in the movie. Had it not been for the subtitles I might not have realized that all the advertising posters that she passes by direct her with encouraging words and forshadowing.

I can’t tell too much here but I could say that the movie, although temporally progressive, breaks the typical Aristotelian curve that most Hollywood films tend to follow.

This movie recently claimed the top prise in the AFI international movie festival.