When the vicar and his attractive, tight-lipped wife (Tara Fitzgerald) arrive at Lindsay's remote home, they find themselves confronted by the attractions of the life that the artist has set up for himself A he lives with a proudly beautiful wife and two daughters, as well as the three Amazonian models who populate his canvases. One of these (Elle MacPherson) is sweet-natured and apparently polymorphously perverse, another (Kate Fischer) is a young middle-class maid who models only if she can remain clad (to preserve her "mystique," she says). A third (the loveliest, Portia de Rossi) is an affected socialist.
During their brief stay, the vicar debates aesthetic morality with Lindsay while the vicar's wife watches the erotic activities of the three models (with whom, by the way, Lindsay appears to have only platonic relations). She becomes aroused by them, and eventually joins in. That's the plot. The film is intended to be erotic, and it is, sort of, but only in a rather self-conscious way.
It's much more irritating than it is sexy. First of all, Lindsay's art, what we see of it, seems too aesthetically crappy to be worth the trouble A a cheesy blending of second-rate William Hogarth and Arthur Rackham with risque Victorian postcards. Even allowing that it's Australia in the Thirties, was this stuff really among the best the continent could offer?
But more annoying is the directorial ham-fistedness of Duigan, who is a truly gifted filmmaker, especially when it comes to erotica A his Wide Sargasso Sea was one of last year's best movies, and his Flirting, which was amazingly visually chaste, was nonetheless one of the sexiest of teen romances. Here, for the first time, Duigan seems to be playing the coarse Aussie for an international audience. He pushes the stereotype of Australians as lusty, uncouth, sun-burnished sexual savages, and he even trots out koalas and wombats and other such fauna for cheap travelogue thrills.
Still, Sirens might be harmless enough if it weren't so smug. The vicar's arguments in favor of censoring Lindsay's painting are stupidly patronizing, but the cliched free-love platitudes the artist and his disciples spout in response aren't much less silly.
Lindsay, who enjoys baiting the vicar, is far too impressed with himself and unshakable in his viewpoint, which is clearly the one Duigan endorses. In fact, my own beliefs are far closer to Lindsay's than to the vicar's, but the latter is so much more thoughtful and likable a figure that I rooted for him during the debates. When he finally, impatiently, blurted out "Balls!" in response to some bit of fashionable leftist piety from the socialist woman, I wanted to applaud.
It may be argued that these criticisms, valid or not, are in any case off the point of the film, which is meant to be a turn-on. The real protagonist, after all, isn't the vicar but his wife, and the real subject is her sexual liberation. Tara Fitzgerald gives a fine, quietly alert performance, and the tentative quality of her arousal is both the most touching and the sexiest aspect of the film. Sam Neill and Hugh Grant are both competent, but the three models in the title roles have a rough time of it, with MacPherson faring worst; she's physically startling, but clueless as an actress.
None of this would be insurmountable, though, if Duigan, who also wrote the script, hadn't placed simple-minded didacticism so firmly at the center of Sirens, thus spoiling the picture for those of us who don't want our turn-ons to have a political charter. (Politicizing the erotic, though occasionally necessary, is a dreary business.) Duigan's (and Lindsay's) point seems to be that puritanical sexual inhibition, particularly as regards nudity, is largely a product of the middle-class sensibility that regards the body as a commodity A the rich, it's implied, don't need to protect their "mystique," and the poor can't be bothered to.
Though incomplete, there's an interesting idea here, but Duigan's critique of this attitude would be a heck of a lot more convincing if Sirens weren't itself so giggly and prurient. Tarty Victorian postcards, fun though they can be, are just about as middle-class as you can get.