ViewGuide

Created Nov 06, 2013 01:02AM PST • Edited Jun 26, 2019 12:54AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   A supermodel performing super-softcore porn overshadows a semi-true story about superstar artist Norman Lindsay and his semi-libertine life in the semi-super Sirens. Notable mostly as the movie debut – and movie peak – of Covergirl Queen Elle Macpherson, it also features a breakout Hugh Grant performance.

   More interesting is the fact that Norman Lindsay was not only a real painter, but really did marry one of his nude models, who did bear him two kids who ran around their paradisiacal Australian Blue Mountains estate. There too he kept a stable of models, the sirens of John Duigan’s movie, shot on the Lindsay estate.

   Lindsay was a real ubermensch who made his own morality, one focused on his considerable appetites. Then as now, the Left Wing fashion was class warfare, which the great artist waged through sexualized paintings and libertine behavior. Nice work if you can get it.

   Decades later, John Duigan found common cause in using the nude female form to stoke conflict between secular progressives and a prudish establishment. And in getting laid, but that should go without saying.

   His callow Bohemianism created an ideal environment to display the wonders of Australia: a gorgeous landscape and “The Body” Macpherson. Made at the height of her swimsuit covergirl dominance, Duigan gives us Elle playing strip poker, Elle rising topless out the water and other dreamy Playboy-esque images. It’s a treat for red blooded guys like me, but not enough to fully rescue the movie’s dated intellectualism.

   So while most of us watch Sirens for Elle or the classic Hugh Grant performance, its enduring fascination stems from seeing some self-appointed harbingers of the future travel poorly down thru the ages.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Elle Macpherson’s accomplished performance proved supermodels can act, not just be unusually attractive. Her “Yeah, you’re living proof” may not be full Streep quality, but she delivers it with deadpan panache. She’s just as casual dropping her model’s robe, upward pointing nipples and impossibly long legs in tow. Why didn’t she make more movies? It’s not too late, is it?

   Hugh Grant plays a classic Hugh Grant roll: the hapless guy who nonetheless is a decent fellow dropped into a thankless situation. Tara Fitzgerald is too tight as his uptight wife. Yes, that’s possible.

   Sam Neill sinks his teeth into libertine painter Norman Lindsay like Hef sank his into pajama party-wear.

   A young Portia de Rossi, voluptuous Kate Fischer and confident Pamela Rabe play the other Sirens, nude models who revel in their freedom. Two reality notes about them.

   • Kate Fischer got engaged to Australia’s richest man James Packer – son of the late media magnate Kerry Packer – a few years after making Sirens, per IMDb. There’s a shocker.
   • Pamela Rabe plays Rose Lindsay, the real woman who rose from Norman Lindsay’s nude model to become “his second wife, his most recognizable model, his business manager, and the printer for most of his etchings.” So says Wikipedia.

   John Duigan favorite Ben Mendelsohn and John Polson appear as local yokels.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Good 3.0

    John Duigan’s film creates a modern myth about a modern artist. At least he doesn’t hide the irony. Indeed his self-aware dialog delights in delivering ironically self-referential lines. “Church baiting’s always been popular,” in a movie about church baiting, for instance.

    Or “Obsession with lustful women is slightly ridiculous.” True, but it worked for Norman Lindsay and John Duigan, just as it worked for Hugh Hefner and countless other guys selling lust.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play OK 2.5

13. Music OK 2.5

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    Drink in the settings, as Sirens was filmed at the Norman Lindsay Museum in Australia’s Blue Mountains.

    Oh yeah, there’s lots of creepy crawly threats, but just as there are no consequences from the libertine behavior, nothing comes home to roost from the snakes and other scary creatures.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.0

    Playboy-quality, super-soft-core eroticism means it’s merely titillating in the end. However John Duigan’s movie doesn’t stint on cheesecake shots of The Body and her three sister Sirens.

17. Sex Titillating 2.5

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 2.1

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    John Duigan found his antecedent in Norman Lindsay, a star artist who not only painted sumptuous nudes but wrote the novel Age of Consent, which focused on a middle-aged painter who meets an adolescent girl who serves as his model, and then lover. The book, published in Britain, was banned in Australia until 1962.¹ It was later made into a movie starring a young Hellen Mirren and an oldish James Mason.

    Like today’s limousine liberals, Lindsay saw himself as a radical chic innovator, creating a milieu where anything bourgeois was bad. For instance, Duigan has one of the sirens spout off about how the Soviets brought freedom and an “explosion of creativity.” Yep, that worked out real well for the proletariat.

    And yet he lived like an aristocrat on a grand estate. No wonder he could afford to give society the finger.

    ¹ Per Wikipedia

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0