After the eponymous novel and at the same time as a disc ( Surprisier ), Mathias Malzieu transposes his intrigue on the big screen. In Une Sirène à Paris, the leader of the Dionysos group recounts the romance between a grieving crooner (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and a mermaid out of the Seine (Marilyn Lima). The director thus offers a new vision of this tale of Andersen with multiple adaptations to the cinema, including Splash in 1984 with Tom Hanks, or the animated version of Disney studios in 1990, which comes out in live-action this year.
A syrupy romance
But this fantastic love story fails to seduce Le Figaro. For Étienne Sorin, it is nothing less than a “franchouillarde version” of La Forme de l'eau, another aquatic romance that won an Oscar in 2018. Far from the lick aesthetics and the nineteen million dollars Budget for Guillermo del Toro's feature film, A Mermaid in Paris is more like a "compilation of clips without tail or head, filled with vintage objects found in flea markets" .
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For its part, Liberation does not appreciate this "webbed nanar" any more. Camille Nevers particularly regrets that the director Mathias Malzieu drowns his subject "under syrupy feelings" . Critics also criticize him for making this modernized version of the little mermaid a woman-object "immobilized, lugged around like a piece of furniture ". A reinvention of Andersen's “nightmarish” tale which shows “to girls the horror of their future condition, feminine and nubile”.
Same disappointment at Première , where "we feasted in advance on this impossible love story between a man who suffered from having loved too much and a creature who never knew love" . But taking real shots prevents the viewer from fully immersing themselves in the film and its "narrow" atmosphere. Thierry Cheze begins to dream of "more whimsical to reinforce an undeniably present emotion" .
An artificial fantasy
In Le Monde , Philippe Ridet believes that the whimsical atmosphere distilled in the film did not reach its goal. For him, this “dilemma between love and reason” takes place “in a Paris that the director would like to be poetic and eccentric” .
"This tale nestled in a postcard Paris struggles to be anything other than the flatly illustrative extension of a musical work , " adds Marilou Duponchel of the Inrocks , regretting that the whimsical imagination of the musician ends up "withering away rather than get rich ” .
Cécile Mury of Télérama perceives a strong influence of aesthetics "bronze and retro Caro and Jeunet" . But these inspirations are not enough to retrieve the film, which "unfortunately remains confined to its artificial fantasy, like a pretty setting in a snow globe" .
Only Le Parisien and Le Journal du Dimanche save Malzieu's mermaid from drowning, one hailing "vintage, fanciful and dreamlike decor" , the other with "pretty staging ideas" tinged with nostalgia.