This month on AQUA Film Club: a whimsical comedy about an aspiring artist who falls for a sophisticated art curator.
Art-making and queer desire are inseparable in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987). Writer-director Patricia Rozema's debut feature explores how a consistent art practice is a queer act.
We meet Polly (Sheila McCarthy). She’s an earnest, self-taught artist who takes a temp job at a contemporary art gallery. In mockumentary interviews on videotape, Polly breaks the fourth wall. She confesses her desires, sins, and "where it all went wrong." We also witness her deepest, most expressive fantasies, shot in black and white. The film delights in her unique perspective.
Polly is thirty-one years old. She has no ambitions and is perfectly happy being a temp secretary, even though she isn't very good at it. The only thing she cares about is her photography hobby. That is, until she starts working at an art gallery. Polly falls for the curator Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon). Gabrielle is everything that Polly is not: ambitious, worldly, and arrogant. Polly sees Gabrielle as irresistible and unattainable. Polly even refers to Gabrielle not by her name, but as “The Curator.” The film’s title also reflects this longing and desire. Rozema borrows the phrase from the ending of T.S. Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Like much of his work, the poem explores gender, desire, and sexuality. |
