Patricia Rozema’s queer indie comedy from the 80s Toronto New Wave offers a sharp dig at artworld pretensions, even as it celebrates the wild, imaginative power of women.
Swift, witty and intimate, it is an amazingly confident first feature that reveals with exquisite humor and compassion the pitfalls in a relationship between two radically different women.
I've Heard the Mermaids Singing 1987
In Patricia Rozema’s Cannes-awarded, shoestring-budget 1987 debut, Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) has decided it’s time to tell her story into a home-video camera of the time she went to work for a chic Toronto art gallery – and became privy to more than she bargained for.
Polly’s temp agency describe her as “organisationally impaired,” but despite her klutzy demeanour and tendency to lose focus in whimsical daydreams in which she is more self-assured and successful than in reality, she is hired as a secretary to gallery maven Gabrielle. The curator is deeply discontented due to her thwarted ambitions as an artist and her tortured feelings for the young woman she is having a secret affair with, but Polly quickly becomes fixated by her glamour.
Polly, a dedicated photographer in her spare time, has her own private yearning to have her talents recognised, in an offbeat and charming film that refuses to take itself too seriously, but has much to say about imposter syndrome, self-belief and solidarity, and the double standards of a male-dominated artworld where brutal rejection is commonplace. — Carmen Gray