Ondine

I love this Neil Jordan film. First of all, it is set in an Irish fishing village with fantastic views of the sea. I hate the rain but I love the sea. And it's always been my dream to grow old near the sea--to wake up hearing the splashing of waves, to wake up running towards the ocean, the sand wet but warm under my feet. But I digress.

The quiet fishing village is only the setting for this quiet little movie about the possibility of a miracle. Syracuse finds a lady caught in his fishing net. The lady, who calls herself Ondine and who is ethereally beautiful, is believed by his sick daughter to be a selkie, a seal who became human by some miracle. At the end of the tale, we find out that Ondine is actually a drug mule from Romania but that is beside the point.

The thing that Jordan would like us to believe is that "miracles" could happen in everyday life, no matter how numbingly ordinary or woefully hopeless. I particularly liked what the priest, played by the magnificent Stephen Rea, said: "It's easy to be miserable. You have to work at being happy" or something like that.

So, work it!