A noted director of shorts, Greek filmmaker Konstantina Kotzamani makes her feature debut with Titanic Ocean, a purposefully opaque but frustratingly vague coming-of-age story that attempts to explore cloistered femininity, celebrity, and pop aesthetics, all mixed together with heavy symbolism and occasional bursts of surrealism. It’s a lot, in other words, and for all its myriad minor pleasures it never finds the right register to make all of these various components fit together.
The film begins by dropping the audience directly into its strange milieu — a highly competitive Japanese boarding school that specializes in mermaid training. This is apparently a very real phenomenon, and involves these young women practicing swimming in large, fake tails, undergoing strenuous exercises to control their breathing, and perfecting their movements so that they can glide gracefully underwater. Kotzamani focuses the most attention on Akame (Arisa Sasaki), who goes by the moniker Deep Sea (all the women have chosen “mermaid names” for themselves). She’s a quiet, introverted student, struggling to keep up with the other girls while harboring a burgeoning crush on Coach Kotaro (Masahiro Higashide), one of the only men featured in this mostly female-dominated environment. There’s also Eternal Sunset (Haruna Matsui), the most aggressive student, and Yokohama Blue (Hanase Kotone), Akame’s friend and confidant.
Much of the first half of the film settles into a quiet, somnambulist rhythm, where the girls go about their harsh training regime and spend their downtime crafting elaborate costumes and adorning themselves with colorful jewelry. Some ruptures threaten to flare up, but interpersonal conflict isn’t really Kotzamani’s interest here. Instead, the director seems to be establishing a firm footing in reality only so that she can gradually unmoor the narrative into the fantastical. We get several scenes of the school headmistress selling the school’s wares to dubious parents, and there are brief moments where we are privy to the financial strains this pursuit places on families. For all the grace and beauty on display, this is also a business, and the product is women’s bodies.
But all of this narrative information is very slowly parceled out in-between mostly repetitive scenes that constantly reiterate the same formal ideas. It’s hard to articulate just how staid the visual ideas are; Kotzamani and cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche favor a highly controlled color palette, all blues and pinks, but the color grading is so muted that true blacks and white highlights are erased. It’s all very woozy and dreamy, but the effect becomes oppressively dull after a while. A brief sojourn to the city changes things up a bit, hi-def scenes of a glistening skyline offering a brief reprieve from all the pastels. But it’s short lived, and soon we’re back to the mostly boring school environs.
All of this training is building up to a large international competition that will find girls from all over the world performing for judges and placement at various prestigious aquariums. Each performer must find their voice, literally and figuratively, and when Akame finally does so, it splinters the film into the realm of the symbolic. Kotaro hears her song and, like the sirens of lore, is magnetically drawn to it, never mind that it makes his ears bleed and sends him into a comatose state. Akame begins having intense visions, culminating in a long sequence that involves her conquering her fear of the ocean and swimming into its darkest recesses. And this reflects the general tenor of the film: Titanic Ocean is grasping for the sublime, but gets tripped up on the rocky shore of literalness. The result is that fall the intimations of female empowerment, Kotzamani instead winds up turning Akame into less of a fully fleshed-out character and more a symbolic token.
Comments are closed.