Themes: Bohemian Life, Culture Clash, Sexual Awakening
Main Cast: Hugh Grant, Tara Fitzgerald, Sam Neill, Elle MacPherson, Portia de Rossi
Release Year: 1994
Country: DE/UK/AU
Run Time: 94 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Sex, religion, and morality are the key ingredients in this Australian comedy set in the 1930s. Rev. Anthony Campion (Hugh Grant) is a liberal, forward-thinking Anglican priest who is sent on an unusual assignment. Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill) is a popular and highly controversial artist whose paintings often feature voluptuous nude women; his latest major exhibition is to feature a work called The Crucified Venus, which depicts a naked female impaled on a cross. Outraged, the Anglican Bishop of Sydney wants Campion to visit Lindsay and persuade him to remove the work from his show. Rev. Campion and his wife, Estella (Tara Fitzgerald), travel to Lindsay's Blue Mountain estate, where the artist is hard at work with a bevy of lovely nude models in tow, including Sheela (Elle MacPherson), Giddy (Portia de Rossi), and Pru (Kate Fischer). The Reverend is quietly appalled by the open sensuality of Lindsay's household, and Estella is mortified; they're even more upset when Lindsay calmly but firmly refuses to remove The Crucified Venus from his show. However, the longer the Campions stay with Lindsay in hopes of changing his mind, the more they find themselves drawn into the sensuous pleasures of his world. Sirens was based on an actual incident and Norman Lindsay was a real artist of the period (his life was depicted in the film Age of Consent, in which he was played by James Mason). But audiences were probably less interested in art and cultural history than in the opportunity to see supermodel Elle MacPherson appear undraped; she also gives a fine and charming comic performance, as do Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
John Duigan's gently playful erotic comedy on the transformative powers of sex manages to offer a measure of insight along with the sight of three surpassingly beautiful women scampering about naked. Hugh Grant stars as a young English clergyman who journeys to the rural abode of a notoriously controversial painter with orders to persuade him to remove one of his more blasphemous works from public exhibition. Yet, when the repressed cleric and his similar wife arrive, it's Sam Neill's painter and his trio of lover/models who prove far more effective at the art of persuasion. The film, which comes to focus on the young wife's gradual unfolding, is more interested in attitudes toward sex, and its relationship to character, than sex itself. Grant and Tara Fitzgerald as his prim wife are perfectly cast as a pair in need of stimulation, and Neill is surprisingly good in this prankish departure from the kind of serious roles he usually plays. Elle MacPherson also acquits herself well, although after watching her frolic mostly nude for two hours, the viewer's judgment may have been slightly compromised. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Kate Fischer - Pru; Pamela Rabe - Rose Lindsay; Ben Mendelsohn - Lewis; John Polson - Tom; Mark Gerber - Devlin; Julia Stone - Jane; Ellie MacCarthy - Honey; Vincent Ball - Bishop of Sydney; John Duigan - Earnest Minister; Peter Campbell - Articulate Drunk
Credit
Laurie Faen - Art Director, Liz Mullinar - Casting, Sarah Radclyffe - Co-producer, Terry Ryan - Costume Designer, P.J. Voeten - First Assistant Director, John Duigan - Director, Humphrey Dixon - Editor, Hans Brockmann - Executive Producer, Justin Ackerman - Executive Producer, Robert Jones - Executive Producer, Geoffrey Burgon - Composer (Music Score), Rachel Portman - Composer (Music Score), Noriko Watanabe - Makeup, Roger Ford - Production Designer, Geoff Burton - Cinematographer, Sue Milliken - Producer, David Lee - Sound/Sound Designer, John Duigan - Screenwriter
The film stars Grant as Tony, an Anglican priest newly arrived from England, 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 sexual 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 matures emotionally under the influence of the other two models and Estella's advice. It intersects with the primary arc in the person of Devlin, to whom de Rossi's character is attracted.
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]
"Still Glides the Stream and Shall Forever Glide" (1890) by Arthur Streeton,
"Bailed Up" by Tom Roberts, and
"Chaucer at the Court of Edward III" (1847-51) by Ford Madox Brown.
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]
