Sirene (1968)
Monsterlike cranes reign over an inhospitable harbour as prehistorical reptiles. The only human being they accept is a lonesome fisherman. He is to witness a strange encounter between a ship's mate and a mermaid. Imagination or reality?
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It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
The highlight of this film is the animation. While compared to many animated films today this isn't a great film, for 1968 it is very good and creative. As for the story, it was, well, very odd and not the best aspect of SIREN.The story begins with an odd red and black animation. Not until later are there any other colors and the city is very odd to say the least. There are giant flying reptiles in the skies, weird mechanical cranes and a ship that suddenly changes colors as a mermaid appears. What happens next is just bizarre...very bizarre and involves an ambulance and a truck from the zoo. See if yourself--it's really too hard to try to explain.Overall, an interesting piece of art and not a traditional film in any way. Kids will no doubt hate it, but if you like experimental films, give it a try--it's very nice.
quoting from Philippe Moins and Jan Temmerman's book called a painter-filmmaker's journey:after `chromophobia`'s narrative lead with drums beating, `Sirene` looks like a much less linear, more meandering, atmospheric and poetic film, even if the context to which it refers has links with society and its defects... everything here is more nervous, faltering with black edges, much like the pteranodons which dominate the scene with their heavy flight... the only notable presence, a little fisherman, brings back nothing but fish-skeletons in his baskets, and the entire city, with its cranes and its mooring cables, appears like a pile of nets and fish-bones, carcass of a declining industrial universe... as an idyll between eerie representations (a bow ofa ship and a siren), `sirene` was perceived as an early denouncement of the degradation of the environment. today, the film comes to us both as a poem dedicated to freedom and as a sarcastic vision of the order imposed by human society.