Sirens Movie Review

It's been so long since I've seen contemporary movies with sexual themes free of violence or devastating consequences that I was beginning to wonder if they were still being made. Sirens is certainly the most low-key sexual fantasy film that you're likely to see from the year 1994. It's partly based on the life of Australian artist Norman Lindsay, who died in 1968 at the age of 90. For most of Lindsay's career, his explicit works shocked the people of his own time. John Duigan's fictional film takes a look at a 1930s weekend in the life of the Lindsay family and three of their models. Anthony and Estella Campion, a fictitious twit of a minister and his repressed wife, come to pay a call in order to persuade the artist to withdraw his profane works from a major exhibition. The twit is played by the devilishly attractive Hugh Grant, with tongue firmly in cheek (“Call me Tony”), and his wife by the sultry Tara Fitzgerald, last seen in Hear My Song. True to the artist's code of never putting an amorous hand on a model, Sam Neill's Lindsay is far from the lecherous hedonist expected by the Campions. He is, rather, a devoted husband, kindly father, and disciplined worker. His feelings are expressed entirely in his art, whereas the women who pose for him express their sexuality in their own lives. (They're played by supermodels Elle MacPherson, Kate Fischer, and Portia de Rossi, by far the best actress of the three.) The entire Lindsay clan are looked on with suspicion by the townspeople, but there is no predictable clash. Menacing snakes and spiders crawl through the film, but they do not destroy the Lindsays’ Garden of Eden, either. Instead, we read about their mischief in the newspapers where they're presumably harming the good people who predict disaster for the Lindsays. Sirens, seen from Estella's perspective, reveals how she is seduced into having a rollicking good time, and, surprise, no one gets punished, goes mad, or brandishes a weapon. Beautifully photographed eroticism for its own sake, a few rattled conceptions about Bohemians, and the prevailing social order is all you will get from Sirens, and that's just fine, thank you. For doom and gloom, you will have to choose another movie from the umpteen thousands that occupy the SEX=TROUBLE file.

1994 (R) 96m/C AU GB Hugh Grant, Tara Fitzgerald, Sam Neill, Elle Macpherson, Kate Fischer, Portia de Rossi, Pamela Rabe, Ben Mendelsohn, John Polson, Mark Gerber, Julia Stone, Ellie MacCarthy, Vincent Ball; Cameos: John Duigan; D: John Duigan; W: John Duigan; C: Geoff Burton; M: Rachel Portman. VHS, LV, Closed Caption