★★★★
Instagram mermaids meet the siren within in a pop-saturated fairy tale from Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani: a Japanese mermaid boarding school becomes the setting for an ambitious reckoning with feminine power, what culture does to contain it, and what happens when it refuses to be contained. Featuring an extraordinary debut from Arisa Sasaki, a new cult favourite is in the water.
There is a recurring image early in Titanic Ocean: a girl in a silicone mermaid tail, filming herself for Instagram, beaming. She’s living her best life; her mermaid life. Be the magic you wish to see in the world, is the general vibe. She is adorable. She is also, by the time the film is done, capable of raising the ocean itself.
Konstantina Kotzamani’s debut feature is set inside a Japanese boarding school that trains teenage girls to become professional mermaids. They learn to hold their breath, practise apnea techniques, bubble kisses, the correct angle for a tail flip; they perform for aquarium crowds; they document everything. The school’s year builds toward a grand mermaid competition, which will separate the sharks from the minnows.
At the centre is Deep Sea, a student whose voice abandons her at moments of stress, leaving her temporarily mute; Deep Sea’s best friend Yokohama Blue; and, circling, the blonde Eternal Sunset (surely a Kaufman reference, rather than an Alexander Pope one), a rival whose confidence in the competition is absolute. The face this world presents to the outside is the face of contemporary girlhood as lifestyle content: pastel-coloured, enthusiastically feminine, upbeat and safe. The girls are goofy and sweet and endearingly earnest about the silicone tails they periodically have to strap into for training. They care passionately about ocean ecology. At one point, debating the subject with the fervour of the recently converted, one of them amusingly shouts: oceans are for turtles, not for tampons! All of this is entirely sincere, and it is exactly the register the film inhabits for its first hour: the passionate, slightly absurd, wholly genuine world of adolescent girls taking themselves seriously. Kotzamani does not condescend to it for a moment. She needs you to love these girls before events overtake them.
Such is the punishing nature of the school that at one point a mother arrives to withdraw her daughter, accompanied by a lawyer. The lawyer, presumably engaged for precisely this confrontation, instead immediately begins bowing to the school principal’s authority — simply because the principal is forthright, certain of her own status, entirely at home in her own domain. The lawyer cannot help herself. The principal wields no supernatural power, no siren song. She is simply a woman who knows that she is in charge, and that turns out to be more than enough. Feminine authority, Kotzamani suggests, does not require a mythic register. It only requires that you know your power.
The school’s language is the frictionless vocabulary of self-actualisation: Disney Princess refracted through social media: find your inner mermaid, become your truest self. You better believe these girls love Ariel. This is a genuine mythology that has been made smooth, made safe, made adorable. What Titanic Ocean seeks is to restore what has been lost. Deep Sea’s graduation is something closer to what the old stories described before they were sanitised for children: a transformation that is also an awakening into power, and into the terror that power produces in others.
Deep Sea’s “real name” is Akame, although perhaps Deep Sea becomes her real name over the course of the film. Between her purple hair, the blue of Yokohama Blue and the near white of Eternal Sunset, maybe there a whisper of transness here, of reinvention. She played by Arisa Sasaki in an extraordinary debut. Her gaze is fragile and open and somehow already fathomless, precisely the quality that makes the film’s central argument embodied rather than theoretical. You believe that the wannabe Instagram girl and the powerful siren can be are the same person.
Titanic Ocean is the name of the imaginary ocean Deep Sea constructs in her mind: the deepest and most destructive one, a burial ground for fear. As her father tells her, you thought the ocean was full of shipwrecks and death. It is. It also, eventually, gives back.
Everything in the film seems to exist in a threshold state: between childhood and adulthood, performance and transformation, contemporary Japan and ancient archetype. The boarding school is sealed off from the outside world, like a chrysalis, its candy pinks and iridescent greens gradually giving way to dirty blues and wounded darkness. Cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche, who spent half a month with Kotzamani on the Greek coast before shooting began, testing crystals and rainbow glass beneath the water’s surface, gives the underwater world the look of careful accident: colour blooming and dissolving, shapes losing their edges. The work is highly aestheticised but feels fully realised, with J-pop concerns dissolving into something more ancient and unresolvable and back again. It looks like something created inside a teenage girl’s dream of herself, but it is inhabited by a power that can blow out your ear drums if you break its heart.
The film is at its best when it trusts its images entirely. Deep Sea, wandering through a karaoke bar, locks eyes with an elderly woman sitting alone in a booth: singing through an electronic voice box that she holds to her throat, the sound buzzy, the natural voice long gone. Deep Sea is deeply unnerved and moves on quickly. For Deep Sea, who loses her own voice at moments of stress, it is an omen of one possible future. The Hans Christian Andersen bargain made flesh: the cost of the crossing, sitting alone in a karaoke booth, still singing.
In Andersen’s original Little Mermaid (not the Disney version, though these girls know that one too) the mermaid’s voice is the source of her extraordinary power, and she must surrender it, literally have her tongue cut out, as the price of crossing into the human world. Kotzamani inverts and complicates this: Deep Sea loses her voice repeatedly at moments of stress, the transformation incomplete, the power flickering rather than cleanly surrendered or fully claimed. Deep Sea’s siren song, when it arrives, is the other side of the same coin: a voice so fully her own that it bypasses language entirely and acts directly on the world. The school has been training these girls to perform. What they are actually becoming is something that cannot be coached.
When Deep Sea reaches her own booth she cannot choose a song, so Yokohama Blue and the others tell her: for a first time, you must let the song pick you. She closes her eyes and selects at random: Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers. She finds something in it immediately: the pull of the current, the surrender to something larger than yourself, the voice that follows rather than leads. It becomes hers, a private talisman, recurring on the soundtrack as her theme. (It recurs, if anything, a little too often.) But when Deep Sea is asked, at the mermaid competition, to name the song she will perform, the voice goes again: the same failure, the same silence, the transformation still incomplete, the power still not fully hers to command. Later on, while she is suffering again from a loss of voice, someone else tries to steal that song to use in the mermaid competition. Deep Sea’s response is not a song. It is a terrifying ultrasonic scream: the voice that cannot be coached, cannot be stolen, cannot be held to the throat from the outside. The Andersen bargain, finally, refused.
This is a film about what young women actually contain, versus what they are encouraged to perform. The boarding school channels enormous energy into an approved and decorative shape. The girls are trained to hold their breath, to be graceful, to delight. What we see is the point at which the container can no longer hold what is inside it, because no amount of pastel Instagram content changes what a young woman’s desire and grief and fury can do to the world around her.
There’s something of Christian Petzold’s Undine here: both films use the water-spirit myth as their spine, and in both, the man drawn close to the mythic woman is eventually destroyed by that proximity. Kotzamani is warmer and more hallucinatory than Petzold, but the logic is the same: feminine power, in these stories, is not something men approach without cost. Closer to home, Sogo Ishii’s August in the Water (1995) and Toshiharu Ikeda’s Mermaid Legend (1984) (the latter released the same year Ron Howard was making the mermaid safe for multiplex audiences in Splash) both track the emergence of an unnameable force through a Japanese woman’s body. Where Ikeda’s feminine power is unlocked by patriarchal violence, Kotzamani’s requires no such trigger. It was always there. A faint body horror register also places the film in distant conversation with Julia Ducournau, though Kotzamani approaches that territory from the direction of reverie rather than confrontation. The point, throughout, is to collapse the gap between the beaming girl on Instagram and the creature who can move the tides.
The Instagram reels and tampon debates work because they are honestly superficial: banal language applied to banal things. It’s in the gap between that surface and what lies beneath that the film’s power lives. It is a pity, then, that Deep Sea’s voiceover periodically applies the same trite vocabulary to the transcendent, closing that gap and dissipating the tension the film has spent so long building. A tighter final act would also have helped: Titanic Ocean finds one conclusion, then another, then considers a third, and a single definitive image would have hit far harder than the three it offers.
But none of this undoes what Titanic Ocean achieves at its best, which is a genuine reckoning with what girlhood contains and what culture does to it. A film this alive to the electric gap between the banal and the transcendent is haunting, hypnotic, and frequently extraordinary – and thus maddening in the way that only near-greatness can be.
Titanic Ocean played in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival.
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