2023-05-24 18:00:00
Fwould it make one of Walt Disney’s most iconic cartoons, The little Mermaid, released in 1989, very freely adapted from a tale by Andersen, a film? The pharaonic project of Rob Marshall (to whom we owe in particular Chicago, Pirates of the Caribbean: Fountain of Youth or Mary Poppins Returns) was carried out with a budget of 150 million euros. We all have in mind the images of the 1989 cartoon, its milk-skinned red-haired mermaid, accompanied by her fish, crab or gull friends, and her underwater collection of everyday objects gleaned from shipwrecks by this mythological creature that humans fascinate. Will the film betray them?
From the first scenes, this “live-action” version of the tale (that is to say a remake, with actors in the flesh, of the original cartoon) takes us on board. It all starts with crashing waves, a ship rocking on the waves, spray, foam. On our seat, we are almost tempted to snort, won over by the sensations of rolling. Soon, we dive deep, swimming alongside Ariel (Halle Bailey), in a world where crazy algae dance, where jellyfish play, where the multicolored and enchanting life of the ocean vibrates. This show alone, which brings the legendary cartoon deliciously to life without distorting it, justifies the price of the cinema ticket: there is something there to open your eyes to young and old alike.
Javier Bardem to the rescue of the oceans
But the director also opens up another dimension, very contemporary, in the subject of the film. In 1989, we were not yet thinking about plastic pollution, green algae, endangered species. Faced with the enchanting spectacle of an ocean that is doing very well, at a time of fairy tales where ships are made of wood and where we are lit by candlelight, we are both conquered and disturbed. The images of the infamous “seventh continent” of plastic go to our souls. Magical, the oceans? The film dots the ‘i’s through the thunderous voice of Javier Bardem, playing a formidable and fearsome Triton, Ariel’s father and king of the seas. Trident in hand, he who rejects humans body and soul blames them for the damage they inflict on its natural habitat: their incessant shipwrecks damage the Great Barrier Reef, which will take centuries to rebuild, their fishing decimates innocent creatures of the seas, and their greed harms the balance of the oceans.
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None of this existed in the cartoon. The fact that Bardem is a fervent defender of the oceans (he campaigns in particular within Greenpeace for their preservation, and we have seen him, for example, plead the cause of the blue continent before the UN) allowed Rob Marshall and his producer John DeLuca to take hold of the matter, avoiding gravity. “It was important for us to remind viewers that the ocean is alive. We have sought to avoid heaviness, while recalling this obviousness”, explains Rob Marshall. Bet won. We think of the lost paradise of a clean sea, without being thrown against the pitfall of a moral lesson, prohibitive when we offer ourselves the escape that a Disney promises.
Against the little music of racism
Who says Disney, says music. The lightness is also played on the soundtrack of the composer Alan Menken, who won an Oscar for best film music and the best original song for “Under the ocean” in 1990. The composer skilfully remixed the titles, which we recognizes the flavor while discovering another depth to them – embellished with a few new ones. If you have to love honey, sugar and orgeat syrup a lot to appreciate Ariel’s title song (“Leaving there”), the other songs in the film (including the legendary “Under the ocean” ) are more mischievous and bouncy than ever.
But are we really only looking at an embodied version of one of our good old Disney classics, pleasing to the eye and to the ear, a harmless romance with the tunes of Proust’s madeleine and the invigorating taste of sea salt? ? Not only. There are other dimensions in this new Little Mermaid. The film, sometimes accused of pouring into untimely wokism, split from its first trailers. Many have been moved by videos of little African-American girls upset to see black actress Halle Bailey play the traditionally pale Ariel, which have circulated widely on the web. Others cringed, in the name of respecting traditions. Faced with the film, we no longer ask ourselves the question of the skin color of the actress.
Halle Bailey vibrates in her role, inhabits it with every fiber of her body and her soul as a musician – before becoming an actress, the young woman was first a singer, five times nominated for the Grammy Awards. “I am a musician above all, explains the actress. I tried to embody, through the songs, the soul of Ariel, her passion, her stubbornness, her strength. Vocally, the songs are real challenges. The artist believes he hit the nail on the head when Alan Menken, to whom Ariel’s melodies had been sung thousands of times, shed a tear when he heard his interpretation. “To be able to appropriate these pieces while paying homage to the originals, what an honor! smiled the young woman.
Ariel, Triton and the “time out”
For her, as for the viewer, the love story between the prince and Ariel is the “icing on the cake” in the life of the young heroine. The real big duo of the film is not the one she forms with her famous prince, camped by the charismatic Jonah Hauer-King, but the father-daughter couple that she composes with her father, Triton. Steeped in contradictions, Javier Bardem is irresistible in the role of the falsely authoritarian daddy-hen, who sees his “little one” escape him to join a world that revolts him. You have to see Bardem, bursting with muscles, trident in hand, melting from scene to scene in front of his rebellious daughter.
To embody this father more real than nature, Bardem, father of two children with Penélope Cruz, went to draw on his own experience of fatherhood. “All parents know that the one and only unconditional love is the one we have for our children,” says the actor. We wanted this link to be visible and to take a more important place in the film. But to this faithful description of the turmoil opposing a teenage girl to parental authority is added a reflection on the challenges of successful parenthood – right in the middle of the debates that agitate the media around education and this great question: positive, or authoritarian? In a die-hard application of the “time out” dear to child psychiatrist Caroline Goldman, Triton forbids his daughter to leave her small “safe” portion of the ocean. Result: Ariel makes a pact with the awful Ursula, witch of mothers (played by the glauquissime and brilliant Melissa McCarthy), gives up her voice, swaps her mermaid tail for a pair of legs and runs away in the direction of the idealized world of humans.
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“King Triton demands respect from his daughter, but does not give her the respect she herself claims and deserves,” adds the Spanish actor, who definitely embodies the voice of wisdom. The film’s lesson in parenting has the merit of being given by a father whom the subject touches closely and whom he took to heart. The final reconciliation between father and daughter, which marks the end of an era of distrust and rejection between mermaids and humans, brings to its climax what was already the message of the 1989 cartoon: the unknown is not not always our enemy, our differences are also our riches. The skin color of the Little Mermaid, then, is self-evident.
In promotion, Javier Bardem is not stingy with anecdotes concerning his feelings and those of his children. He says, amused, that his daughter Luna, 7 years old at the time of the casting, was overjoyed at the idea that her father could play in The little Mermaid… but very disappointed that he does not embody his red-haired heroine. The ultra-virile Javier Bardem in Ariel: that would have fueled other debates on gender issues. For the next decade?
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