Yes. There is a Swiss coming-of-age film about a teenage girl turning into a mermaid. Complete with body horror and requisite puberty metaphor, Blue My Mind doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it always entertain over the course of a plodding 90-minute runtime. BUT. It’s a Swiss coming-of-age film about a teenage girl turning into a mermaid. There’s a sheer level of novelty to it that can’t be denied, and young actresses Luna Wedler and Zoe Pastelle impress as rebellious sixteen year-olds with a thirst for booze, blunts, MDMA, and in the case of new kid at school Mia (Wedler), live fish and open water. Her budding friendship with cool girl Gianna (Pastelle) is a cute subplot that avoids convention. You know the drill: new girl makes nice with the cool kids only to find out they’re not so cool after all, they’re actually mean and heartless. That doesn’t happen here. Like in real life, the cool kids (some of them anyway) are people too and, in the case of Gianna, can be be real friends too. For a lowly American such as myself, it was more than a little neat watching for differences and similarities between teenage life in Switzerland and teenage life in the States. And for a lowly American such as myself, it was more than a chore watching Mia rebel, rebel, rebel at a European pace. My attention span is vast, but there are limits to the student film slog of adolescent foibles. Repetitive though it is, Blue My Mind can rest on the laurels of decent makeup when Mia’s toes start webbing up or when her legs start turning blue, not to mention the gruesome lengths to which she goes to hide her growing affliction. No matter the pace, there’s nothing like a Swiss coming-of-age film about a teenage girl turning into a mermaid.
Grade: C+
Film Epoch 