Just in time for Halloween, musical oddity The Lure has joined The Criterion Collection. Here's Chris on its soundtrack...
Yet another Polish lesbian mermaid pop musical? Geez. For those that complain that musicals have no originality anymore, may I introduce a bloody disco ball of a film: The Lure. The story of two mermaids who come aground and quickly rise to success singing in a Warsaw nightclub, it’s both fairy tale and metaphor for female sexuality. But most importantly, the music kicks a whole lot of ass.
Led by young stars Marta Mazurek and Michalina Olszańska and with some disco diva stylings from Kinga Preis, the film is about the most delightful genre hybrid we have seen in some time. It’s a femme-centric mix of musical and horror, with more pointedly ironic sexuality than any music video once banned from MTV. It would be glib to describe it as a t.A.T.u. performing a Let The Right One In jukebox musical of Abba songs but that is the closest I can get to painting a vision of its giddy melodic morbidity. Or describing the fun of its singular strangeness.
The Lure takes us through the evolution of pop music in the past half-century, from disco to electro-pop to gothy rock. Think of it like a tour of girl power badassery through the ages but with a violent twist, from Donna Summer cooing her way through Brothers Grimm up until to Michelle Branch outs herself as a werewolf. Like the biggest pop acts, The Lure even goes through a tedious self-serious phase that’s easily forgiven by the arrival of the next hit.
The songs never lose sight of the twisted fairy tale vision, allowing Mazurek and Olszańska to vocally recall their opening mermaid siren with angelic vocals throughout, even as it takes its more punk-inflected diversions. The music never seems to forget these girls are mermaids, all glittery soprano and femininity. For all of its strangeness, this musical is of a piece with other, safer enchanted musicals and that comes from its mystic sound.
It’s maybe fair to say that the music does match the originality of the film’s concept, though it is equally as confident. The reason it is so easy to cherrypick other reference points to describe this hard to describe film is because its pop music does have a rather familiar sound (yes, even not in English). But in a post-MTV world where music videos have given us all kinds of strange pairings of song and image, the digestible musicality of the film makes its bizarre flourishes more palatable. It actually makes for quite an addictive combination.
Because the film is such an anomaly, this is likely Soundtracking’s most difficult music to come across (YouTube clips are sparse, but the full album is on Spotify). The melodies, especially on “Take Me In Your Care” are catchy enough to elicit spontaneous humming along or singing along if you’re ambitious enough to learn Polish. Is Criterion missing a golden opportunity to include a copy of the soundtrack in among its typically idiosyncratic extras? You betcha.
Previous Soundtracking Favorites:
The Breakfast Club
Across the Universe
Blue Velvet
Drive
A Bigger Splash
...all installments can be found here!