SIRENS
A film review by David Cowan
Copyright 1994 David Cowan
SIRENS has been spoken of highly by critics as being a rare mix: a film that is just as intellectually appealing as it is titillating. Given the promise of the much ballyhooed nude appearance by Elle MacPherson, it would seem that if SIRENS could live up to that sort of praise, it would be one heckuva film. Amazingly enough, the film turns out to be considerably more intellectually appealing than titillating--the film does a good job of exploring the theme of whether censorship of obscene or blasphemous art is beneficial to the would-be viewer of that art. However, the film drags so much in the second and third acts as to make it overall only a bit better than the average coming-of-age or sexual awakening film.
Hugh Grant stars as Antony Campion, a young British priest who is sent by the Anglican Church to discuss the showing of a painting featuring Venus being crucified at a Sydney exhibition with the artist, Norman Lindsay (an underused Sam Neill). The church would like to see Lindsay's art displayed, but object to that particular painting, and it is Campion's task to convince Lindsay to substitute it with another, less blasphemous painting. Campion and his frigid wife, Estella, travel to Australia to meet with Lindsay. They arrive at his estate where they find he lives not only with his wife and two daughters, but three models. Two of the models embarrass the Campions with their brazen attitudes towards sex, nudity, the bourgeois, and eating cheese with one's hands. The third, Giddy, is a young innocent who won't pose with her clothes off.
Lindsay and Campion argue about the censorship of art--or rather, Campion does. Lindsay throughout the entire film shows only an air of bemusement to his guests, simply continuing with his work and not backing down to the church's requests. Campion tries his hardest to argue for the church with a "non-fundamentalist", contemporary point of view hoping to reach Lindsay, but he ultimately fails miserably. Campion believes that the displaying of such offensive work as Lindsay's would make a permanent impression in the mind of the viewer and corrupt them. Lindsay and his cronies believe that to be nonsense.
In the meantime, the Campions learn they must stay another week at the Lindsay's, the train they were to travel back on has derailed, and the track needed to be rebuilt. Estella, while they wait at the Lindsays, gets to know the models and, while originally repulsed by their attitudes and actions, slowly begins to warm to their views on life, love and sex--and ends up having a affair with the blind handyman.
The film never breaks from its investigation of the two different lifestyles and views on sex, nudity and blasphemy portrayed by the two families--often this theme takes on a ironic nature and is fascinating and ultimately thought-provoking. However, when the film gets into Estella's "awakening," and she goes from being frigid to being one of Lindsay's sirens, the film loses a lot of its drive. We've all seen the image of the frigid schoolmarm or librarian seduced into letting her hair down a hundred times, and SIRENS doesn't put a new spin on it. We follow this thread of the story for almost half of the film, and it gets tiring and predictable. The main driving force of the story is Antony Campion, and while Estella's sexual awakening is necessary to the plot, one leaves wishing there had been more plot or discussion and less of Estella's inane, unexiting fantasizing or sexual encounters.
The acting is uniformly good, especially the surprisingly good performance by Elle MacPherson. MacPherson's brazen model is so abrasive as to be stomach churning at times, and shows her character to be significantly more than a brainless body. Sam Neill's tired, bemused performance as Lindsay is well performed, though he is on the screen very little--it is like his character in UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD ... his character is a guiding force of the film but appears very little. Hugh Grant as Anthony Campion is just right as the contemporary young priest, getting enthused and perturbed over all the right things, all the while displaying a peculiar innocence. Only Tara Fitzgerald's unexciting Estella and the mindlessly bad acting of whoever the blind handyman was (reducing the performance to that of one of those robo-hunks in soft-core porn) were standouts in an otherwise good cast.
Ultimately, I wish the plot would have gotten more into characters that are presented as being interesting--Lindsay and the models are fascinating sketches of characters, but we fail to get into them because the film spends too much time with Estella. However the symbolism presented in the film, the subtle ironies of the plot, and the theme of the film kept me thinking about it long after I had left the theatre, so it certainly wasn't a waste. I just wish that the parts meant to be seductive and sensual were as well done as the parts which were mentally stimulating.
5 out of 10. SIRENS had a chance of being an excellent film, but squanders that chance in foreign art-film coming-of-age pretension.
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