Stephen Chow’s “The Mermaid” lays out its two-pronged thesis within its first five minutes by using simple juxtaposition. The film opens on images of environmental abuse, machines digging or deforesting, mournful birds coated in slick crude oil, smokestacks puffing away into the air, slurries of waste rushing out of pipelines and into our world; one quick cut later and we’re the captive audience of a disheveled huckster who curates a museum of all things aquatic and weird. Factual to fabrication, documentary to fantasy, authenticity to fakery. It’s a newish approach for Chow, who tends to stick to material that’s unmoored from anything approximating reality, but the segue from grim reality to wacko fiction lends the film cartoonish weight.
You’ll know immediately after the film’s introductory sequence whether you have the wherewithal to stick with it or not, but if you grew up a steady diet of “Looney Tunes” cartoons and Mel Brooks movies, then staying with it should come naturally. Chow has been acting since 1982 and directing since 1994; he’s shied away from being in front of the camera since 2010, putting all his energy into standing behind it instead. In “The Mermaid,” that shift in focus shows. More importantly, it pays off. Chow has always had the same relationship with his camera that Bart Simpson has with his slingshot. In Chow’s hands, the lens becomes an elastic guidance tool for comic energy: fixate on a single image, pull back the band, let go, and snap, his story and characters launch forward in a blur of madcap amusement.
“The Mermaid” demonstrates Chow’s innate understanding of the physics of humor better than anything he’s made since perhaps 2001’s “Shaolin Soccer.” It is a film without mercy for the human funny bone. After it begins in earnest, Chow goes about playing with the very fantasy of aquatic humanoids in his own retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” but his version differs as wildly from Andersen’s fairy tale as it does from Disney’s 1989 take on it. Chow’s protagonist, Liu Xuan (Deng Chao), is a wealthy playboy whose net worth cannot be expressed in mere numbers; it is measured in his possessions, his cars and his castle, in his power, and in his taste in wine (Romanée-Conti isn’t easy to come by even for your run of the mill rich person). He appears to be of near-bottomless means. The trouble is that he’s lonely.
He hides his loneliness in frivolity and meaningless hook-ups, until he meets Shan (Lin Yun), a woman unlike any other he’s ever met or spent time with in his life. Xuan tells her that she isn’t human, that she’s an angel. Good on him for getting the first half right. Shan is (surprise!) a mermaid, on a mission to avenge her fallen merfolk brethren off the shore of a wildlife reserve Xuan recently purchased and cleansed of all life using horrifically violent sonar devices. But love is fickle and complicated, and “The Mermaid” quickly finds itself tilting on an axis with romance balanced on one end and revenge balanced on the other. But for all the gravity of the film’s plot, Chow keeps the tone firmly in the realm of “screwball.” Slapstick begets slapstick, one pratfall leads into another, and before long the film’s zany premise has snowballed into a jocose avalanche.
Avalanches, of course, are hazards, and if you have sensitive ribs then “The Mermaid” might be a hazard to your skeletal integrity. Chow’s sight gags and punchlines rarely relent, and when they do, the reprieve is too brief for catching breath. It helps that the film’s runtime is short, shorter at least than most of his recent output, 2008’s “CJ7” notwithstanding; clocking in at just under 90 minutes, “The Mermaid” doesn’t have time to dally or indulge in excess seriousness. It just moves. That Chow manages to squeeze genuine warmth in between the script’s pell mell joke deployment at all is something of a miracle. Most of the credit for that goes to his leads; the necessary shared infatuation between Shan and Xuan; Chao plays Xuan as Tony Stark sans the genius, plus extra ennui, and Yun swaps modes at the drop of a hat as easily as Chow zips from one zinger to the next. Their chemistry together is nothing if not economical.
But we’re not in for “The Mermaid” to satisfy cravings for sentimental “love conquers all” yarns. We’re in it for Chow’s antics, spun right out of his brain and given shape through undisguised CGI. “The Mermaid,” more so than most of the digitized work in Chow’s movies, leaves one with the impression that they’re watching something that’s animated. For most blockbusters, that’d be a real drag. For “The Mermaid,” the effects enhance its over the top exaggerations as narrative. Chow bookends the film with messages about our roles as environmental stewards, and there’s no reason to believe those messages aren’t meant in earnest. But they aren’t the primary reason that we’re in the theater. We aren’t here to entertain ecological urging. We’re here for eccentric hilarity. Brooks would be proud. [A]
“The Mermaid” is now playing at the Metrograph in New York City.
