Product Description

Sexy and spirited, this endearingly funny comedy has captivated moviegoers everywhere! The charming Hugh Grant (FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL) plays an idealistic young minister on a mission. He must tame the wicked ways of a notorious artist (Sam Neill -- JURASSIC PARK), whose nude paintings of his beautiful models (including sexy supermodel Elle MacPherson) scandalize the nation! Intent on delivering salvation, the repressed reverend and his wife instead are led into temptation by their playfully seductive hosts and sensuous new surroundings! Enchantingly sexy fun from beginning to end -- you too will find the allure of SIRENS irresistible!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17924 in DVD
• Brand: Disney
• Released on: 1999-05-18
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
Australian filmmaker John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Wide Sargasso Sea) has a taste for sensual art direction that occasionally flares up in a big, big way. With Sirens, he manages to turn oceans of female nudity into a slightly tongue-in-cheek decorousness that is neither unpersuasively arty nor purely soft porn. Starring Hugh Grant (and released the same year as two other Grant vehicles, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bitter Moon, thus establishing him as a star), the film finds the handsome, stammering actor playing an Anglican priest newly posted to Australia. There, the clergyman's first mission is to convince a famously libertarian artist (Sam Neill) not to exhibit a painting with mixed erotic and religious themes. The experience of being at their host's anything-goes compound for a few days, however, nestled deep in the wilds and keeping company with uninhibited, frequently naked models proves terribly stirring for Grant and his character's timid wife (Tara Fitzgerald), the two of them a study in sexual repression. The film doesn't have a point so much as it does an appealing atmosphere of unbridled naturalism counterpointed by Grant's charming self-consciousness. Once you've grown accustomed to the phenomenal sight of an unclothed Elle Macpherson (who is actually very good in her acting debut as a semi-savage model) wandering toward the bank of a river, for instance, you realize she's only part of the amazing flora and fauna enriching this pocket of earth and the souls of our principal characters. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

A little deeper into Sirens > a different interpretation
Spoiler alert: You might not want to read the following if you haven't seen the movie yet.

Most of the reviews of Sirens at Amazon focus on Elle, the nudity in the movie, and themes surrounding the Church's stance against freedom of expression. A few reviewers have touched intelligently on some of the biblical, Atlantean, and Homeric symbolism that suffuses the movie.

Only one reviewer, who happened not to like the film, touched on what I consider to be one of the most telling elements of the story: that Tara Fitzgerald's character Estella cheats on her husband, Hugh Grant. The reviewer thinks this is a problem, and it is, because Estella is a clergyman's wife. This should require some explaining, as Estella changes a great deal in a short amount of time during the film.

The cover of the movie shows Hugh Grant and Elle McPherson in poses suggesting a light-hearted romantic comedy. The movie is actually completely about Tara Fitzgerald's character's journey. What are the clues? The movie starts with Estella both flirting with and rebuffing a sailor on an ocean liner. Hugh Grant is not in the scene at all.

The movie follows Estella much more closely than any of the other characters and at key moments we even see hallucinations as Estella sees them: when she imagines herself naked in church and most importantly, when she "dreams" that the sirens are baptizing her (with water that turns to blood, no less, at which point she "wants to wake up") toward the end of the movie. The offensive painting for which Estella and her husband travel to Sam Neill's house shows a woman crucified in Christ's place, signalling that the female lead, not the male, is the protagonist.

But is the movie about Estella's sexual awakening? Not really.

It is not until after she awakens from the dream described above that the viewer learns the ship on which Estella sailed was the Titanic (look above her head when she and Hugh Grant are on the train leaving Australia--it is the same ship shown throughout the film). What could this mean? Estella is drowning in the wreck of the Titanic. As she is dying she experiences the events in the movie, a mix of Ulysses' sailors drawn to their watery graves by the beautiful sirens, a magical trip to the island of Atlantis (Australia), and religious rumblings of the moral tension between fidelity and self-expression. The "mission" to convince Sam Neill not to exhibit his blasphemous painting represents Estella's fight to stay alive. When she and her husband accept that they will not change Sam Neill's resolve (including the fact that he has painted Estella), Estella is giving up her grip on life. Look at the expression of relief and release on her face in the movie's very last scene before fading to the sirens on the rocks.

With a seemingly slapped on ending in which Estella and husband leave some of their sexual repression behind them, voila: you have a movie that viewers enjoy but is quite a bit deeper, as well.

Check it out, it's beautiful and brilliant!

The minister, his wife, and four nude models
SIRENS, released in 1993, is a beguiling film that pokes fun at the sexual repression that may result from an overactive religious zeal. Hugh Grant, as the Anglican minister Anthony Champion newly arrived in early 20th century Australia, is asked by the bishop to pay a call on a local artist, Norman Lindsay, and to beseech him to withdraw from exhibition a painting considered scandalous. Horror of horrors, it includes bare-naked ladies.

Anthony and his young spouse Estella, played by Tara Fitzgerald, arrive at Lindsay's estate to find the artist, portrayed by Sam Neill, busily painting away. Norman's earthy wife and three resident female models serve as his inspiration, and clothing on the four is, more oft than not, unabashedly optional. This in-your-face display of live, nubile flesh leaves the Reverend rather tongue-tied and confused (as only Grant can play it). At first, wife Estella shares her husband's righteous indignation. Then, the lush, humid, tropical surroundings and free-spirited lifestyle of the Lindsay estate, along with the presence of a hunky handyman, begin to work their liberating magic on her repressed desires. (A very nice touch is the representation of Temptation as a large serpent that slithers through occasional scenes unnoticed by anyone but the viewer.)

It all sounds potentially raunchy, but never is. Rather than being a manipulative, licentious debauchee, Neill's on-screen persona is one of an amused, live and let live observer of human nature - a sort of detached Hugh Hefner. There's an abundance of casual nudity, but it's almost artistically presented. The sexual nature of a couple scenes is more sensuous than bawdy. And, one of this film's undeniable attractions is real-life model Elle MacPherson, who plays the role of one of the uninhibited SIRENS, and who shows an eyeful. Boy, does she ever. It's an amusing and well-done adult, fairy tale.

Cute and sensual at the same time
Most reviews like this movie for good reason, but there are many details that nobody mentions which are an important reason why this movie works so well. It should be required viewing for every subsequent generation of film-makers.

There are too many wonderful things to explore in this movie than can be covered in an Amazon review, but here are a few. Why is the opening boat sequence shot in black and white, when the rest of the movie is in lush color? Do you understand the snake metaphor? (It shows up once in reference to Stella and once in reference to Stella and twice more.) Stella loans Giddy her wedding ring to fool Devlin, but what more than that does it represent?

Sam Neill and Hugh Grant are perfect as opponents together; but the story isn't about them. Stella makes the journey in this story, and if the result is a bit predictable it is so well done that it doesn't matter.

Also it is interesting to see a then-versus-now comparison of Portia de Rossi (Giddy) who grew up to play Nell on Ally McBeal. There's a lot of talent there that seems to have not been used enough.