Sirens. - movie reviews

National Review, May 16, 1994 by John Simon

* New York is threatening to become a wall-to-wall Hugh Grant festival. I have just reviewed him in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and here he comes in Sirens and Bitter Moon. Sirens is a good-bad movie that, if you are willing to settle for some pretty harmless hokum about art, religion, sensuality, and repression, plus one stunning and several attractive women in various stages of undress, you can bear to sit through in a state of benign indolence.

Though the film is fiction, one of its principal characters is Norman Lindsay, Australia's most famous erotic artist and illustrator, who here functions as a Pan figure, obsessedly painting his priapic images, disbursing Dionysiac philosophy, and spreading an air of amused abandon among his three female models, his one male one, his wife, who also models, and his offspring of blond cherubs, who in due time will surely follow suit--or, rather, suitless. Into this unfettered oasis in the outback circa 1930--an earthly paradise except for a certain paucity of desirable males (the one male model, a handsome bushman, has to be stud to all)--come the Reverend Anthony Campion, Cambridge-bred and liberal, and his wife, Estella. They call each other Pooh and Piglet, are very English, and make love sheathed in their bedwear. Campion has been deputized by his Anglican bishop to talk Lindsay out of exhibiting his most controversial painting, The Crucified Venus. The mission of Springwood (the actual Lindsay estate, where this was filmed) is to emancipate the Campions.

The story is inconsequential, and the philosophical debate between the artist and clergyman close to sophomoric. But the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and Springwood look entrancing enough, and the women's bodies easily as good. Elle Macpherson proves amply why she is Australia's gift to international supermodeldom, and her acting is no worse than that of any supermodel-turned-movie-actress. The others look less lush, but act better. A bountiful selection of Australia's fauna and flora make cameo appearances, and there is even a sizable snake in this paradise, but it does no greater damage than knocking over it teacup.

As the Campions, Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald are enormously personable. Grant once again plays the male ingenu in need of sensory fulfillment, at which he is getting to be a past master. Tara Fitzgerald, as charming as she was in Hear My Song, is all heart-shaped face, pouty mouth, and farouche demeanor. They manage their respective sexual awakenings admirably. Only Sam Neill doesn't quite come off as Lindsay: his subversiveness is nicely relaxed, but not magnetic enough.

Still, the film, written and directed by that amiable Australian John Duigan, displays some genuine innocence, and if it does not rise to erotic heights, neither does it become oafish or smutty. From his constant cameraman, Geoffrey Burton, Duigan gets some enchanting landscape shots, a mite predictably punctuating the human cavortings. There is a civilized score by Rachel Portman into which a rollicking Vaughan Williams march can fit itself without having to blush at its musical surroundings. Neither will you at the film, which wears its nudity lightly.