Sirens

Sirens may be the first art film ever to attract the beer-swilling residents of sport bars without it having to be "date" night. The reason is simple: you get to see Elle MacPherson naked. A shrewd theater owner would already be lining up a kiosk in the lobby stocked with the swimwear edition of Sports Illustrated.

That is the obvious selling point for Sirens, and it's a film full of seemingly obvious points. The movie flaunts a kitsch-ridden veneer that resembles a Gustav Klimt poster posed for by Fabio. Part of the fun of Sirens is contained in its calculated mix of flagrant tackiness and half-baked profundity. Sirens is part serious, but it is also part satire. It is also a very sexy, funny movie.

It's the early 1930s and the Archbishop of Sydney has a problem. An Australian painter infamous for his ability to shock has submitted to an international exhibition an etching of a voluptuous Venus nailed to the cross. Hugh Grant (of Maurice and Impromptu) is the English-bred cleric who is sent to persuade the artist to withdraw the work. Grant is young, well mannered, and he claims to know something about art. He also can't go to the toilet without his copy of The Decline of the West.

Along for the journey is his wife, Tara Fitzgerald (Hear My Song). She's a pale English rose and behaves like a runaway from a James Ivory production. They are both very civilized and ever so slightly modern (hubby even smokes Turkish cigarettes). However, the Australian town they arrive in is populated mostly by filthy, belligerent drunks who casually greet strangers with a hearty "fuck off." The James Ivory-type movie comes to an abrupt end.

Instead, they encounter Sam Neill, a painter whose displays of wanton sexuality are overtly rooted in his latent sense of voyeurism. He's also something of a scatter-brained intellectual who divides his time between rantings about the evil of Christianity and mumblings about his own past life. He has a unique outlook on life. He also has a unique living arrangement, sharing his house and family with his three models (now you see where MacPherson comes in).

Neill lives in a kind of Eden, as long as you don't mind the assorted snakes, spiders, lizards and large insects that infest virtually every scene. It's a warped, sensual paradise that briefly offers a strange illusion of sexual innocence.

Sirens offers some solid humor and an elusive charm. Even the movie's predictable structure — plus the clipping of the Indian shipwreck scene that concluded the Australian version — gradually melts into its own distinctive brand of wit.