You will be as taken with the city of Moscow as you are with the young Alisa after seeing Anna Melikyan’s Rusalka (The Mermaid). Despite their plainness, both characters – the homely, innocent teenager and the concrete, overcrowded megalopolis — come across as magical under Melikyan’s direction on the big screen. Rusalka, the 32-year-old director’s second feature-length after 2004’s Mars, was named Russia’s official entry in the 2009 Oscars’ “Best Foreign Film” category this September.

Melikyan, born in Azerbaijan and raised in Armenia, studied film in Moscow where she met Masha Shalayeva, an enchanting actress for whom she wrote the role of Alisa. The young girl’s interactions with the city of Moscow depict a sense of wonderment that must certainly be a close reality to how Melikyan would have felt upon first exposure to Russia’s capital.

Alisa’s comically ordinary story begins with her underwater conception — the first scene of the film. Her mother, whose character comes to define the picture of small-town frustration, has a chance encounter with a sailor when she is out by herself for a swim at a quiet beach on the Black Sea. The sailor never reappears in their lives, but Alisa’s mother continues to engage passing seamen in rendezvous to ease her boredom and single-mother stress. When Alisa’s curiosity leads her to walk in on one of these meetings at a young age, she reacts destructively, setting fire to their seaside shanty and refusing to speak for the duration of her childhood.

Throughout the grey and provincial scenes of the first half of the film, Alisa’s imaginative narration lends color and humor. She also develops a secret power — if she wishes for something to occur, it will indeed come to pass. A few months before her seventeenth birthday Alisa’s mental efforts cause a massive windstorm in her seaside town, destroying their home yet again and leading her mother to move her and her grandmother to Moscow. Alisa’s frank voice describes the event with innocent astuteness, explaining, “When people have nowhere else to go, they go to Moscow.”

The three women take up residence in a typical Moscow high-rise, and Alisa and her mother join the workforce — her mother working as a smartly-uniformed grocery store clerk, and Alisa handing out flyers around town dressed as a giant cell phone. The young girl’s tender childhood is humorously shattered by the appearance of “Sasha” (Yevgeni Tysganov), a depressed but attractive yuppie who makes his living selling real estate on the moon; he and Alisa meet when they both jump off a bridge on the same night.

The film succeeds in Melikyan’s use of Alisa’s humorously innocent narration, fantastical symbolism, and several visually-stylized dream sequences. It calls to mind Amelie and The Science of Sleep, though it doesn’t quite achieve the complexity of either of these films. What Rusakla lacks in density, however, it makes up for with pure charm. You’ll feel an instinctive pull toward Melikyan’s Moscow, and an honest desire to understand its people and its art. The film breaks through whatever “curtain” the city’s true heart has been hiding behind, as Moscow comes of age on screen, symbolically abandoning it’s tail alongside the story’s young narrator.