Financial Times (London,England)

July 21, 1994, Thursday

Sensual promises, wishful thinking – Cinema

BYLINE: By STEPHEN AMIDON

SECTION: Arts; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 1049 words

SIRENS (15) John Duigan
LOVE AND HUMAN REMAINS (18) Denys Arcand
THE FLINTSTONES (U) Brian Levant
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS (U) David Hand

MY GIRL 2 (PG)Howard Zieff

Sirens is a smug, frothy ode to bohemianism that leaves you wondering if stuffy conservatism might not be such a bad way of life after all.
Set in 1930s Australia, it concerns a young English vicar (Hugh Grant) who is asked to try to persuade the rebellious artist Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill) to remove an allegedly blasphemous painting from an exhibition. The vicar travels to the painter’s remote studio accompanied by his new bride (Tara Fitzgerald), the sort of repressed Englishwoman abroad who has become a stock-in-trade in art house cinemas of late.
The buttoned-up couple discover that Neill leads a seemingly amoral existence with a free-thinking wife and three dishy models, all of whom pose naked for his racy, idiosyncratic paintings.

The vicar proves no match for all that naturalism, while his wife soon lets her hair down, aided by a steamy encounter with a brain-damaged ranch-hand who looks like a blind Chippendale.
The promise of Elle Macpherson (as the lead model) turning Hugh Grant on to the more earthly pleasures in a film which espouses creativity over convention should have proved a winning formula.
Unfortunately, the film’s celebration of artistic freedom is so self-satisfied that it defeats itself at just about every turn.
Neill and his models are so piously cocksure about their lives that it is they who come across as the fundamentalists, utterly contemptuous of anybody or anything that does not fit their narrow sensual agenda.
Grant and Fitzgerald, meanwhile, prove to be the only real human beings, flawed yet likable characters who are willing to listen, grow and love.
You soon pity them for having to endure this squad of cultural onanists for more than a few minutes. Now, if this ironic reversal had been intended it would have made for a fine comedy, but director John Duigan takes his bohos seriously, littering the film with Edenic imagery of snakes and apples and references to lost paradises.
Indeed, there is something brazenly two-faced about a film which lectures you on the value of artistic integrity while shoving a nude supermodel in your face at every opportunity.
Grant’s and Fitzgerald’s eventual conversion to a more sensual life is utterly unbelievable, more a product of wishful thinking on the director’s part than anything intrinsic in the story.
* Where Sirens is never more than a pale imitation of art, Love and Human Remains looks like the real thing.
French Canadian director Denys Arcand’s first English language feature has the messy, enthralling feel of modern life. It centres on David (Thomas Gibson), a gay actor who rooms with Candy (Ruth Marshall), a depressive book reviewer.
She secretly loves him, while herself serving as the object of the frustrated affections of a lesbian schoolteacher and a married bartender. David, meanwhile, divides his time between his womanising best friend, a confused rich boy and a clairvoyant dominatrix.
While Arcand might not reach the dizzying mythic heights of his Jesus of Montreal here, he does manage to create a film whose honesty is disturbing. For the most part, he avoids emotional cliches and facile resolutions as he charts the interactions of this diverse group. David believes he can live without love yet finds that this refusal causes pain to everyone around him, while Candy wrongly thinks she can love several people equally.
It is only in a gratuitous subplot involving a serial killer that Arcand falters – his vision is much too strong to need such artificial bolstering.
* The Flintstones is a curious cultural phenomenon. Not a film in any meaningful way, it is rather a Dollars 30 million exercise in problem solving on the part of supremo Steven Spielberg and his crew.
Can the filmmakers accurately reproduce the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon using live actors and real sets? Can they create a world in which everything is made of leather and rock, where dinosaurs and people coexist, where every name is a paleolithic pun? Can John Goodman as Fred bring to mind the shambolic presence beloved by a generation of couch potatoes? Can the special effects boffins fabricate a credible Dino?
It is a measure of how dismal the film is that, even though the answer to all these questions is yes, you are still left with a tediously pointless 90 minutes. The few good moments – a living garbage disposal, a soap opera called ‘The Young and the Thumbless’ – are not nearly enough to sustain a project which completely abandons the adult irony and Middle America satire that makes the cartoon so enjoyable.
The filmmakers must hope that we are so dopey with nostalgia and impressed by the film’s dubious cartoon-into-life alchemy that we will forgive them for not bothering to entertain us.
Or maybe Spielberg just had some dinosaurs left over from Jurassic Park.

* At the end of The Flintstones there is a moment when a prehistoric bird, facing imminent extinction, rues not having signed a contract with Disney. ‘They would never have done this to me,’ he quips.
How true, as this week’s reissue of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs reminds us. It is nice to see that there are examples of animation created by people who believe in the art form still on show.
* Interestingly, the Disney classic is not the most schmaltzy film on offer this week. This distinction must go to My Girl 2. For those who missed the original episode – congratulations. That said, at least the first instalment provided the unalloyed pleasure of watching Macaulay Culkin die horribly in a bee-sting accident.
No such luck here as Anna Chlumsky, now 13, reprises her role as the motherless girl with a heart of gold. As part of a school project, she travels to LA to research her dead mother’s life, discovering that she was in fact a serial killer and an S&M hooker who . . . just kidding.
The film’s only distinction is its uncanny ability to present a world in which everyone, including a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, is unfailingly nice. Good soundtrack, though.