I've heard the mermaids singing.

I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

"ODYSSEUS HEARD the sirens; they were singing/Music by Wolf and Weinberger and Morley,' begins a sonnet by the Australian poet John Manifold. The unseen mermaids in Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing regale the heroine, Polly, with a selection--also used in the forthcoming Five Corners--from Delibes's Lakme, which bespeaks a somewhat fishier taste. Even so, these recurrent warblers on the soundtrack may be the best thing about this first feature written and directed by the 29-year-old Canadian, which won the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes. Si jeunesse savait! It's a rather empty, clumsy short story, burdened with superannuated tricks and an allegory that sits like a spoonful of jam on a single breadcrumb.

Polly Vandersma (for which read Patricia Rozema), who narrates the story, does temporary office work around Toronto, even though--first of various absurdities--she cannot type. She is a cheery little waif, living alone, listening to records, videotaping her autobiographical ramblings (which, as reproduced on the big screen, make the eye shudder), and taking random snapshots of street scenes that catch her fancy. At such times, we hear a click, and the film goes into a black-and-white freeze frame representing Polly's photograph, one of the hoarier and more enervating cinematic cliches (cf. Cry Freedom, Under Fire, etc.). She also has black-and-white dreams and fantasies, some of them invisible, like the eponymous mermaids out of "Prufrock,' others unfortunately visible, such as one of climbing up and falling off a skyscraper's facade.

For no good reason, the sophisticated Gabrielle St.-Peres, who runs a fancy art gallery and is called the Curator by Polly, takes her on fulltime. Soon Polly is messing up the office and falling platonically in love with her boss. But Gabrielle has a genuine female ex-lover, Mary Joseph, a jaunty young hippie, who pops up to reclaim her as Polly watches, bemused and vaguely jealous. Forthwith something referred to as "Gabrielle's paintings' enters the plot, even though the one "painting' we see is a large sheet of milk glass uniformly lit up by a light mounted in back of it. Such things do pass for art nowadays, but why call them paintings?

The "paintings' are passed off by Gabrielle as her own, even though they are Mary Joseph's; this, along with Gabrielle's unfeeling rejection of Polly's photographs, submitted to her pseudonymously, makes the disappointed and hurt Polly toss a steaming pot of tea in the Curator's face. Later, she claims she did not know it was hot. (No fool like a holy fool.) But, then, not much makes sense on the literal level. Once we realize, however, that Miss Rozema grew up in a repressively Calvinist provincial family, allegorical meanings march in. Polly is the muddled moviemaker herself, and the Curator is the Creator she blindly worships until, wised up, she violently emancipates herself. The archangelic "Gabrielle' and the ambiguous "St.-Peres,' or Holy Fathers, is as close as Miss Rozema dares come to naming her enemy; but light-up paintings (Fiat lux!) and the lover named Mary Joseph complete the muddy picture.

So Gabrielle proves a false God, and it is the human love of Mary and Joseph that is truly liberating: Mary Joseph encourages Polly about her photographs. But the ending, with unlikely plot elements sandwiched in among the final credits (as in Doris Dorrie's Men), defies all interpretation, unless it enacts Oscar Wilde's inversion of Pope, "An honest God is man's noblest work of art.' Yet an even greater trouble is the banality of the dialogue, especially oppressive when it tries to be a witty spoofing of art-critical jargon (e.g., "oblique pragmatism') cheek by jowl with Miss Rozema's bad English (e.g., "This divine gift you have bestowed on we mere mortals').

The acting is undistinguished, even stiff, but critical kudos has focused on Sheila McCarthy as Polly, the holy innocent. For me, the performance is too studiedly simple, too preciously vulnerable, and not helped by a face that seems to have provided junk food for a family of rats, and a voice that breathlessly manufactures fake sincerity. Like the filmmaker, the actress wallows in a gutter of profundities, and the film bypasses the viewer's heart and mind, heading instead directly for his teeth.