Director of “Córki Dancingu” (“The Lure”) talks about love, nature and the nature of love just after the Sundance Festival, where she received a special award for this picture. The story of wild, mermaid youngsters, who come to Warsaw and perform at dance parties at Adria left American public speechless. No wonder, as that was certainly the most interesting debut in the Polish cinema last year. The director was awarded at the Gdynia Film Festival and received “Wdechy” award for “reviving the image of the Warsaw mermaids”. Smoczyńska is controversial, she juggles multiple film genres and portrays women the way no one in the Polish cinema dared to before.
Do we actually know what do the mermaids eat?
Human hearts. They bite in somewhere around the carotid artery, they slurp the blood until they reach the heart. One of the sisters is interested in the human hearts because she wants to eat them, the other sister because she wants to fall in love.
I always thought that mermaids are innocent creatures. The sailors drown, enchanted by their voices, but it’s rather because of their recklessness, rather than the mermaids’ viciousness.
No. The mermaids like fresh human meat. While working on the movie, we did our research to learn what are the sirens’ habits. We’ve been wondering for a long time over what and how they would eat. The mythical mermaids from Homer seduce the sailors with their singing in order to eat them. However, there is no detailed description of how it actually was performed. So we had to “come up with our own method” of eating the hearts, a method that would go in line with the story and still look good on the film.
So they are more like vampires than water nymphs.
There are several theories, stories and mermaid images, actually there are plenty of them. In some legends, they were said to be taking the souls of the dead to the other side. In ancient Greece they were often portrayed in the tomb sculptures as the guides of the dead. They knew when a man was about to die and they were sedating him with their singing, thus helping him to leave this world more quickly. This is one of the theories. In Homer’s writing Odysseus knows that the island is inhabited by evil creatures who seduce the sailors with their voices and then devour them. At that time the mermaids weren’t depicted as half-women, half-fish but half-women, half-birds – predatory women-birds.
Blood-thirsty monsters…
Yes, we choose the blood-thirsty version, because the image of sirens as fatal creatures, existing between the world of humans and the world of animals, was closer to us. We needed a modern mermaid, it wasn’t based on a single legend or myth, we created a hybrid for the purpose of our bloody musical. Srebrna (Silver), our main heroine, climbs out to the surface and falls in love with a human to gain an immortal soul.
The mermaids in all cultures are a metaphor of feminity. According to dream books, the dreams about mermaids are interpreted as the calling of the feminine part of the soul of the dreamer. Why did you want to depict such a brutal and blood-thirsty version of feminity?
This type of woman seems real to me. The image of the mermaids was turned infantile by Andersen and Disney. The mermaid got a beautiful tiny pink bra, pink lips and started singing songs. This sweet image became a pop culture icon. The sweet, defenceless creature that you remember falls in love and loses her voice. And when she gets the dagger from her sisters to kill her loved one before the dawn, she doesn’t do that. Our siren is torn between the two worlds. And I wanted to highlight her dark, gloomy, animal side.
Read the rest of the interview in the printed version of the USTA Magazine.
Text: Ewa Szabłowska, photos: Zuza Krajewska || LAF
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