Sirens (film)

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This article is about the 1994 film. For other uses, see Siren (disambiguation).
Sirens

Theatrical release poster
Directed by John Duigan
Produced by Sue Milliken
Written by John Duigan
Starring Hugh Grant
Tara Fitzgerald
Sam Neill
Elle Macpherson
Portia de Rossi
Kate Fischer
Pamela Rabe
Mark Gerber
Music by Rachel Portman
Cinematography Geoff Burton
Editing by Humphrey Dixon
Distributed by Miramax Films
Release date(s) April 28, 1994
Running time 95 min.[1]
Country Flag of Australia Australia[1]
Flag of the United Kingdom United Kingdom[1]
Language English
Budget N/A
Gross revenue Flag of Australia $2.8 million[2]
Flag of the United States $7.7 million[3]
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Sirens is a 1994 film, written and directed by John Duigan, and set in Australia between the two World Wars.

Sirens, along with Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bitter Moon — all released in the U.S. within weeks of each other — were the films that brought Hugh Grant to the attention of American audiences.[4].

Contents

[edit] Plot

The film stars Grant as Tony, an Anglican priest, asked to visit a notorious artist, loosely based on the Australian artist Norman Lindsay and played here by Sam Neill, out of the church's concern about a blasphemous painting the artist plans to exhibit.

Estella, the priest's wife (played by Tara Fitzgerald), accompanies him on the visit to the artist's bucolic compound in the Blue Mountains. The artist's saucy models are played by Elle Macpherson and Kate Fischer; Lindsay's wife, Rose (Pamela Rabe) also poses for him. Portia de Rossi (in her film debut) plays the maid who has just begun demurely modeling for him as well. Mark Gerber plays the partially blind Devlin, the "odd-job" man who also poses for Lindsay.

While both Grant and Neill play characters critical to the film's story, the film is really about Estella, who responds to the sensuality of her surroundings over the course of her visit to Lindsay's estate. Her relationship with Tony includes the intimacy and commitment needed in a well-rounded marriage, but is missing the passion, in all of that term's senses.

All of Estella's senses are engaged by the backdrop for the film, a lush and dangerous landscape filled with the distinctive flora and fauna of Australia. To the prim and proper English wife of a priest it's all quite exotic. Lindsay's voluptuous models (played by Macpherson and Fischer) live the libertine lives that Lindsay champions through his paintings and Lindsay has animated postprandial conversations with her husband. Those scenes and conversations, and various glimpses of naked models and a naked Devlin, contribute to the stimulating environment.

The surroundings and the lives of the models are siren calls that lead Estella to fantasize with increasing intensity[1], and (with encouragement from the models) act on a few of her impulses. She suffers morning-after remorse about a late-night encounter with Devlin, and perhaps influenced by supportive words from her husband (who had witnessed her acting on one of her impulses, though not the one with Devlin), the film ends with a playful scene between the two of them. The scene hints at the possibility that she may find passion with her husband after all.

A separate story arc follows de Rossi's character as she grows up under the influence of the two models. It intersects with the primary arc in the person of Devlin, to whom de Rossi's character is attracted.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Production

Duigan told film critic Stephen Farber what drew him to cast Grant: "Hugh has the capacity to be a terrific player of light comedy, in the tradition of Cary Grant and David Niven. He has the same ease and urbanity in the way he moves and talks."[4] Grant told Farber what he brought to the character of the Anglican priest:

I kept looking at the part and wondered how I could crack it, because he was such a straitlaced character. And then I realized that if he thought he was trendy and avant-garde, that added a whole new swing to it. I see him as quite the star of his theological college, probably quite daring with his Turkish cigarettes. And I imagine that he even makes the occasional sexual reference in his conversation after a couple of glasses of sherry. But confronted with the real McCoy, in the form of Elle Macpherson without her clothes, he's hopeless.[4]

Most of the film is set at what is now the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, which was the original home of the real-life Lindsay.

[edit] Opening credits

The opening credits of the film include a scene in which Grant's character walks past paintings in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, including:

[edit] Reception

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Sirens is best watched as a soft-core, high-minded daydream about the liberating sensuality of art.....[it] has an archly intelligent performance from Mr. Grant, who turns the priest's embarrassment into a real comic virtue. Ms. Fitzgerald, who made a strong first impression in Hear My Song, is again a forceful presence, even when acting out the story's giddy erotic fantasies."[5] Masling said the film "often verges on silliness and desperately overworks the symbolic importance of snakes. Still, it's hard not to enjoy a film whose most intellectually daring character — Mr. Neill's stern Lindsay — claims to have spent a previous life in Atlantis."[5]

Hal Hinson of The Washington Post was less forgiving: he called the ideas presented by the film "warmed-over D. H. Lawrence" and the film, a "peculiar, not entirely undesirable sort of art-house hybrid, like a marriage between Masterpiece Theatre and Baywatch, citing "scenes, like the one in which Estella's passion is released by the tender, knowing hands of a blind laborer, [that] are almost laughable."[6]

Roger Ebert, guessing incorrectly that the inspiration for Neill's character was Augustus John, noted that Sirens has "no particular plot"; he also called it a "good-hearted, whimsical movie which makes no apologies for the beauty of the human body and yet never feels sexually obsessed."[7]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d Entry for the film on the Australian Film Commission (AFC) website
  2. ^ Gross Australian box office from the AFC website
  3. ^ Sirens from Box Office Mojo
  4. ^ a b c Hugh Grant Makes Them Think of Cary Grant, a February 27, 1994 article by Stephen Farber in The New York Times
  5. ^ a b Naughtiness in Pooh Land, a March 4, 1994 review of Sirens in The New York Times by Janet Maslin
  6. ^ Review of Sirens from the March 11, 1994 issue of The Washington Post
  7. ^ Review of Sirens by Roger Ebert

[edit] External links

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