By curious coincidence, two of the lovelier movies I’ve seen so far this summer — the family-friendly animated fable Luca and the German art-house fairy tale Undine — tell stories about mythic sea creatures making contact with the human world.
It takes place in and around a small Italian Riviera town whose residents live in fear of the sea monsters rumored to dwell in the surrounding waters.
But he has to be careful never to get wet or he’ll be exposed as a sea creature — a supernatural conceit that sets up a lot of the gags in this literal fish-out-of-water farce.
Eventually Luca and Alberto make their way into town, which is gorgeously designed in a way we’ve come to expect from Pixar: The director Enrico Casarosa, working from a script by Jesse Andrews and Mike Jones, composes an exquisite visual love letter to Italy’s cobblestoned streets and scenic piazzas.
Luca and Alberto befriend an outgoing young girl named Giulia and enter a local triathlon where one of the events is — what else? — a pasta-eating contest.
When the trailer for Luca was released weeks ago, its images of two boys running around a lush Italian paradise led more than a few to wonder, half-jokingly, if Pixar had made its own version of the gay love story Call Me by Your Name.
The title character in the melancholy drama Undine is also a water sprite who takes on human form, though any similarities between the two movies pretty much end there.
You wouldn’t guess that there’s anything supernatural about her, or that she’s bound by a single rule: If a human lover betrays her, she must take his life.
Before she has time to deal with Johannes, Undine is swept off her feet by another man, Christoph, and the two plunge headlong into a love affair that consumes them both — and, like most of Undine’s love affairs, is not fated to end happily.
His filmmaking is so elegant and concise that you may not realize he’s slipping in a lesson on the history of Berlin itself — a history of war, devastation and reconstruction to which Undine has long borne witness.