The Weekend Watch: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!

As we head into June and towards Pride, I wanted to focus on queer cinema, especially movies without straightforward romance. That isn’t to say that the movies I want us to watch over these weekends won’t have any lovin’ in ‘em at all, but that a central relationship won’t be the end-all-be-all of the films. For example, there’s a sapphic, yearning tug at the heart of Patricia Rozema’s debut, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, but one more complicated by professional and artistic relationships than ones purely sexual or romantic. It’s a sweet and strange little dramedy, with a central performance from Sheila McCarthy pitched somewhere between Pee-wee Herman and police secretary Lucy from Twin Peaks. That could easily be cloying, especially in an artsy lesbian indie, but thanks to Rozema’s inventive images and knowing contrasts of character, it’s a far more endearing tale of oddballs in friction. You can stream I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing on Criterion, Kanopy, or the Kino Film Collection over at Amazon.

If there was any question of Rozema’s nationality, she started writing I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing while working as the third assistant director of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Cronenberg ended up writing a letter of recommendation for his fellow Canadian’s funding application. And it all worked out! The lo-fi movie looks fantastic, flitting between close-held shots of Polly (McCarthy) working at Gabrielle’s (Paule Baillargeon) Toronto art gallery, Polly’s janky direct-address confessionals and her fantastical dream sequences. Polly’s beige clothes and the squashed frames she finds herself in are confining, her shock of bright orange hair a desperate bolt of rebellion against temp work and paychecks.

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And that bolt finds a kindred spirit, even though they may not initially seem so, in Gabrielle. Gabrielle is stern, older, accomplished and French. In a word: mommy. Polly is taken with her boss, who we learn already has a young hotshot lover in Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald). But Polly is also taken with the idea of Gabrielle’s life, one full of art and adventure—one of the more dated scenes involves a trip to a sushi restaurant where Polly naturally screws up and orders something raw and wriggling that’s shot like a meal for Gollum. It’s where Polly’s fantasies begin to collide with reality, her crush leading her to do more and more outlandish things. But she never becomes a leering creep, or even seems that driven by her libido, even when she becomes a peeping Tom to a couple trying to make out in the forest.

The guileless, cartoonishly innocent yet oddly sexual performance from McCarthy (remember that Pee-wee comparison?) gives off a puppy-dog energy, where her burgeoning queerness is taken at face value by virtue of her naivety. She loves Gabrielle, and that’s that. But there’s more to this film than simple infatuation, which is where I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing becomes most interesting.

As Polly becomes more involved with Gabrielle’s life, she falls not just for the woman, but for her art. Polly’s an amateur photographer, and learns that Gabrielle paints in secret. Her crush deepens and broadens, leaving the physical bounds of this older woman and spreading out around the idea of an artistic life well-lived. It made me think of the recent Nicole Holofcener movie, You Hurt My Feelings, where sexual-romantic-artistic feelings are all wrapped up into one vulnerable desire towards the rest of the world. These feelings escape desire, and become encompassing. That means it’s all the more painful and shocking when those feelings are injured. In Holofcener’s film and Rozema’s, there’s deceit that’s more disappointing and disillusioning than heartbreaking. Not simply cheated on, its characters feel cheated. Cheated of an illusion, of an ideal, of a fantasy. In a more realist film, that would lead to defeat or quiet growth. In I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, it leads to something a little more manic and overblown. But it clicks into place, a fitting response to a betrayal that goes beyond relationships—just like the central idealization goes beyond the romantic. It’s tragicomic, sweet-sad, and deeply youthful. You can tell it was made by a young hopeful harboring the first stings of bitterness towards those already more established in the art world (its strange diatribes against any and all criticism is one of the key giveaways).

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing kicked off Rozema’s feature career in style, winning Canada’s first Cannes prize for an English-language film (the Prix de la Jeunesse, or youth prize, in the fest’s Directors’ Fortnight section). It got snapped up by Harvey Weinstein at the fest, and was a financial success (as far as gay ‘80s arthouse dramedies went, that is). Rozema would go on to direct six more features, her latest being 2018’s Mouthpiece, and a decent amount of high-profile TV, like Mozart in the Jungle. But her first feature remains a lovely entry into the queer canon, which stands out for how complex its desire remains.

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

For all the latest movie news, reviews, lists and features, follow @PasteMovies.

The Weekend Watch: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

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