More mermaids, please. Fay(Emilia Fox) is supposed to like mermaids, but the filmmaker shows disinterest in the mythical creatures of the deep by its very negation from the museum curator's interior life. The mermaid, who is often alone, describes Fay's emotional life. Mermaids are sirens; solitary creatures who lure lonely sailors with their beauty and oceanic love songs. It's a visual motif that needs to be in the film. A filmmaker with an understanding of Irish folklore would exploit Fay's passion to the hilt. When her love affair with Tom Avery(Bruce Greenwood) goes awry, that's when "The Republic of Love" needs the half-woman, half-fish inside Faye to come out of its watery environs. She is a romantic. A mermaid. Late in the film, she watches a documentary about eels, which would've made a stronger impression on the viewer had the mermaid angle been better exploited. The realities of the sea(eels exist; mermaids don't) mirrors the reality of her parents' marriage, and the reality of her godfather's mortality(mermaids are immortal; humans are not). But the filmmaker never allows Fay to be a mermaid. The filmmaker seems to keep the Irish nature of "The Republic of Love" largely in the closet. Instead, for some inexplicable reason, mournful Indian music on the soundtrack describes Fay's grief, even though, earlier in "The Republic of Love", it's her former lover who rented the Bollywood musical. She had fallen asleep. Indian cinema disinterest her. But this filmmaker doesn't care and takes a page out of the Mira Nair handbook(she transformed "Vanity Fair" into something that lovers of the William Makepeace Thackery couldn't recognize), nevertheless, by grafting her indigenous culture onto a foreign one, which probably ill-serves the Carol Shields novel. The late Canadian writer shouldn't be punished for writing about white people. This filmmaker wants to integrate Shields' imagination.
Review of The Republic of Love
