Sirens

Having discovered sex in his sensitive autobiographical films The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting, Australian director Duigan is at it again with another foray into nonsense and sensuality. Grant is Anthony Campion, a progressive Anglican priest taking up a parish Down Under with his young wife Estella (Fitzgerald). His first duty is to visit the provocative libertarian artist Norman Lindsay (Neill) to dissuade him from exhibiting an erotic religious painting. However, over the course of a languorous weekend in the presence of the painter's uninhibited wife and models, it's prudish Estella who experiences a spiritual and physical conversion. Headily atmospheric, Duigan's film takes place in an outback of 'perpetual tumescence'. It's all very DH Lawrence, and consequently a mite predictable. The picture's strongest suit is Duigan's deft, witty touch, and the confident, classy playing (Grant's familiar stuttering Englishman notwithstanding). Duigan seems to lose his sense of irony entirely, however, when it comes to celebrating the standard soft-core coupling.