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I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

Directed by Patricia Rozema
Canada, 1987 (fiction, 81 minutes, colour / black and white, English)
Also known as "Eu Ouvi o Canto das Sereias", "Gesang der Meerjungfrauen", "He oído cantar a las sirenas", "Ho sentito le sirene cantare", "Jeg har hørt havfruerne synge", "Le chant des sirènes", "Merenneitojen laulu", "Sjöjungfruns sång", "Zpev sirén"
I've Heard the Mermaids Singing
Image: © patriciarozema.com
Film Description [in French] :
"Polly réagit à tout ce qu'elle voit en prenant des photos qui déclenchent des visions en noir et blanc. Ce processus d'autodécouverte s'arrête soudainement lorsqu'elle accepte un emploi dans une galerie d'art. Polly développe une adoration tenant du voyeurisme pour son arrogante et belle patronne, et pour l'amante de cette dernière, Mary. Cependant, la soumission de Polly au jugement de la directrice étouffe l'émergence de sa propre personnalité. Ce n'est que lorsqu'elle démystifie ses gourous du monde des arts qu'elle peut à nouveau entendre le chant des sirènes."
-- Noah Cowan (source)

Film Description:
"I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is a quietly amusing and fresh tale told from the point of view of Polly (Sheila McCarthy), a self-admitted 'organizationally impaired' temporary secretary. In her videotaped confession, she tells us how she got caught up in a voyeuristic fascination for her new boss, the beautiful and ambitious curator (Paule Baillargeon) of the Church Gallery, a gallery in downtown Toronto. Polly, innocent beyond her years, witnesses many things quite beyond her ken: pseudo intellectual 'art talk' and the sexual relationship between the curator and a young woman named Mary Joseph (Ann-Marie McDonald). Polly responds to her discoveries through her hobby of amateur photography. After expeditions around the city, snapping pictures of her various new obsessions, she develops her pictures in her bachelorette bathroom. In the little red womb of her bathroom, she spaces off and slips into the black and white worlds inside, worlds where she can fly, walk on water and hear mermaids singing."
-- patriciarozema.com (source)

Film Credits (partial):
Written by: Patricia Rozema
Produced by: Alexandra Raffé, Patricia Rozema, Don Haig
Principal Cast: Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, Ann-Marie McDonald, Richard Monette, John Evans, Brenda Kamino
Cinematography: Douglas Koch
Film Editing: Patricia Rozema
Music: Mark Korven
(sources)

Awards won by I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

Notes about I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

(sources)

Quotes by the Director

"As a young queer woman, back then when it was not cool and could be career-stopping, I did my best to find a way to express myself that wouldn't make it impossible for me to make more films. ... I wanted to find a way to express my fascination for and love for the love of other women, of same-sex attraction, in a way that was amusing and gentle and loving and palatable for people who hadn't come across it before."
-- Patricia Rozema (source)

"I have become post facto a representative of the country. So if you ask, 'Is Mermaids a Canadian film?—it has become one. It has become a means whereby people characterize Canadian film. I think in the creation of Mermaids, I did see it in political terms. I thought of the underdog. Canada is not a superpower by any means. It's very quietly, comfortably democratic, but it's plagued by a sense of inferiority."
-- Patricia Rozema (source)

"Our voices, our representation of ourselves, have been in the hands of others, namely men, since the beginning of the mediums of film and television. My main character in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing videotaped a confession that is used through the film. It's her way of having control over her definition of herself."
-- Patricia Rozema (source)

Quotes about I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

"Perhaps the bravest thing about this movie [I've Heard the Mermaids Singing], is the way the lesbian theme is so blithely understated, as though it were simply one of the facts of the universe."
-- Ally Acker (source)

"What is interesting about this film [I've Heard the Mermaids Singing] is that it is built on the very contradictions which are present in the feminist discourse itself."
-- Mary Alemany-Galway (source)

"Against mainstream cinema's positioning of women as passive objects of an aggressive male gaze, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is a film that places female 'looking' at its centre."
-- Brenda Austin-Smith (source)

"Polly is both the subject and object of her own fantasy. Her reverie is not built around an image of another, but instead, around an idealized image of herself; it is based on activity rather than simple fetishization. [Patricia] Rozema's appearance in Polly's fantasy (an an onlooker, no less) in effect erases the director-as-author as the driving force behind the narrative, and thus, turns the tables on the creative process."
-- Robert L. Cagle (source)

"[I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is a] wonderful film, a sad and uplifting comedy in which the insecure and insignificant Polly eventually proves herself better than her superiors."
-- Alison Darren (source)

"Its reception as an exemplary film of women's cinema is ground for serious self-questioning by those of us who still want to claim the term for a feminist political project."
-- Teresa De Lauretis (source)

"Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is an especially appropriate film to discuss in the context of [Laura] Mulvey's call for a counter-cinema, because in a number of ways it does what Mulvey suggests. It subverts most male-centred conventions of female representation by refusing the voyeuristic pleasure of objectifying or fetishizing women and it also interferes with the male-active, female-passive dynamics of most mainstream films. At the same time, however, Mermaids is visually appealing, emotionally complex, and fun to watch, whether or not one is consciously aware of the conventions it is subverting."
-- Marilyn Fabe (source)

"A temporary secretary in an art gallery, Polly is a frustrated artist and photographer whose rich phantasy life interrupts the main narrative in the form of black-and-white sequences where she scales Toronto office towers or flies through the air like a Canadian superhero."
-- Christopher Gittings (source)

"As in all feminist filmmaking, Rozema's theme and technique in Mermaids are inextricably bound because in cinema technique constitutes the signifying system. [...] Rozema's technique is to make conscious the mechanism of cinematic looking, while her theme is the legitimisation of one woman's way of looking."
-- George Godwin (source)

"Patricia Rozema's charming debut feature I've Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) was not the first film from the [Toronto] New Wave—that honour would go to Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin (1984)—but it established the movement, in part, because of its international and domestic success."
-- Steve Gravestock (source)

"Characters dressed in period costume, special effects (Sheila McCarthy flying across the Toronto sky or hanging on to skyscrapers), colour (Polly's recent past) alternating with black and white (her dreams, with the exception of the one when, after taking her vengeance on Gabrielle, she pictures herself as an orchestral conductor—in Technicolor) and with video tape (the depressing reality of being yet again an out-of-work secretary), all kinds of small but engaging and even outrageous details give a certain flair to the film which was shot in 23 days on a budget of $350,000."
-- André Lavoie (source)

"One of the first films that the OFDC [Ontario Film Development Corporation] had invested in, made for a very modest budget of $350,000, the film [I've Heard the Mermaids Singing] was not only a critical success, it sold to 37 countries world wide, was picked up by Miramax for US distribution and went on to gross more than 5 million dollars, an unprecedented and never to be replicated feat. [...] While few other films in the next decade would match Mermaid's recoupment miracle or [Atom] Egoyan's cachet with international and national film critics, both directors would nonetheless be installed in the policy rhetoric of both the OFDC and Telefilm [Canada] as key exemplars of the viability and vision of the state funding system."
-- Brenda Longfellow (source)

"By depicting Polly's sexuality as polysexuality [in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing], [Patricia] Rozema, like Freud before her, recognizes that human excitations and desires are mutable and capricious, or to use the reclaimed contemporary term, 'queer.' Polly's queer sexual desires and practices are, I argue, far more subversive than previous scholars have contemplated."
-- Julia Mendenhall (source)

"[I've Heard the Mermaids Singing]'s portrayal of our human tendency to have insecurities about our own abilities, and the courage to go on, is part of what made it so useful and inspiriting to audiences, then and now. The film teaches us, in the face of rejection and humiliation, important queer strategies we can use throughout life [...]."
-- Julia Mendenhall (source)

"Sexy, stylish and steeped in a Canadian melancholy, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing was part of the initial move toward magic realism that freed Canadian film from the tethers of realism—and let it fly into the ether of the imagination."
-- Katherine Monk (source)

Quotes about I've Heard the Mermaids Singing [in French]

"En somme, quelle que soit la forme narrative utilisée (la confession sur vidéo, le flashback et les rêves en noir et blanc sont habilement liés au son d'une trame sonore le plus souvent très séduisante), Polly nous dit que la beauté est dans l'oeil de celui qui regarde et je suis tout à fait disposée à endosser son point de vue naïf sur l'art."
-- Marie-Christine Abel (source)

"[En 1986] Patricia Rozema, une jeune cinéaste ontarienne, réalise son premier long métrage, Le chant des sirènes. Ce film drôle et magnifiquement interpété par Sheila McCarthy et Paule Baillargeon rencontre un immense et mérité succès international. Il permet à Patricia Rozema de poursuivre une brillante carrière marquée par le mésestimé White Room (1991) et le brillant When Night Is Falling (1995) avec Pascale Bussières."
-- Sylvain Garel (source)

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