Mermaid To Order

I've Heard the Mermaids

Written and directed by Patricia Rozema

At the USA/Harvard Square

THE TEASER for I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is so entertaining and so intriguing that I was wary of the movie itself. A simple rule usually holds true: good teaser, bad movie. Here's a movie, however, which breaks that rule and quite a few others on its way to being one of the most delightful films of this year.

Polly (Sheila McCarthy) is a self-described "unsuccessful career woman" who works part-time as a girl Friday for a temp agency. Her lack of success is really a lack of motivation. She would much rather ride her bike around Toronto taking pictures.

Mermaids follows Polly through her daily routine as she narrates what she's thinking and feeling. Her narration is recorded by a video camera; and there are occasional shots of her fuzzy video image talking directly to us. Our intimacy with Polly is further reinforced through her photographs, a series of witty, beautiful daydreams in black and white.

One of Polly's temp jobs is at a gallery where she works for a beautiful French woman she refers to as The Curator. Polly admires The Curator's elegance, the way she is "so serious, even when she laughs."

Polly's stay at the gallery, which eventually turns into a permanent job as secretary, casts her as an outsider looking in on the world of art and its pretentious inhabitants. She eavesdrops on discussions of painting which include comments like "the fork is irrelevant" and terms like "oblique primativism." Polly is both awed and enraptured, and throughout the movie we sympathize with this schleppy, hopelessly unfashionable observer.

This identification is created through the ways in which writer/director Patricia Rozema lets us into Polly's life. At one point, we see a painting that Polly believes is the most beautiful she's ever seen. Instead of trying to find a suitable painting, an attempt that would inevitably have failed, Rozema fashions the painting as a brilliantly glowing rectangle. The pull of this personal vision, combined with Rozema's quirky humor, makes Mermaids irresistable.

SHEILA McCarthy's performance as the shy Polly is truly extraordinary. Her waif-like face and huge eyes are guileless. Her innocence is believable and her naivete is charming. And thus she is utterly at odds with the chic gallery people who treat her like a lost puppy--lovable and amusing but not worth their attention. When Polly hears them say a painter has "acute awareness," she thinks they mean "a cute awareness, like a cute face."

Mermaids has additional strengths in Douglas Koch's unusual photography. He lends Polly's vision a beauty and a complexity which belie her naive exterior. The movie is lushly beautiful. Jeff Wolpert's Laurie Anderson-type music is as entrancing and quirky as Rozema's heroine. The sights and sounds transform the movie into a peculiar world that belongs only to Polly. As she says, "Isn't life the strangest thing you ever saw?"

On the way to see this movie I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said "I brake for fantasies." In I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, Polly always stops for hers and we dream along with her. Mermaids gives us the key to Polly's whimsical imagination and she takes us on a very personal, very funny, and very rewarding journey.