1994 film
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]
Plot
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.
Production
The film was a long standing project of John Duigan:
The starting point was the idea of doing something on the tension between the church's teaching and the sensual side of life. I have always felt that the church's actual teachings on this issue - since I experienced it first-hand as a boy at school - reflected some biases, particularly against the place and role of women in the church, and the place of women's sensuality. I wanted to deal with these sorts of issues but I also wanted to explore them in a comic context. It's a film about sensuality but if you don't have a humorous aspect, then I think you're missing out on a particular dimension of the sensuality.[5]
He originally pitched the project to Kennedy Miller after making Fragments of War but they passed.[6]
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 with sequences filmed at the Mount Victoria, New South Wales railway station.
Opening credits
Prior to the opening credits is a sequence in black and white on board a passenger ship, set to the tune "The Grey Funnel Line."
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:
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."[7] Maslin 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."[7]
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 is brought to orgasm by the tender, knowing hands of a blind laborer, [that] are almost laughable."[8]
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."[9]
Box Office
Sirens grossed $2,780,839 at the box office in Australia,[10] which is equivalent to $4,170,959 in 2009 dollars.
$2.8 million[2]
$7.7 million[3]