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    I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic
    I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic
    I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic

    By Julia Mendenhall

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    About this ebook

  • Part of the Queer Film Classics series of monographs on films for LGBT audiences, launched in 2009.
  • I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is a quirky, ethereal lesbian love story by Canadian director Patricia Rozema. (The title is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”) The film’s lead character is Polly, a socially awkward secretary who takes photographs as a hobby; when her former lover Mary, an artist, comes back into her life, Polly alternates between the growing realization that she is too old for Mary, and an idyllic dream state in which plain-looking people like her lead passionate lives.
  • The film has appeared on the Toronto International Film Festival’s Best 10 Canadian Films of All Time. Feminist writer Camille Pagilia praised the film for its “wonderful comedy and realism.”
  • Mendenhall situates the film in the context of the history of feminist films, written, directed and starring women.
  • Academic interest in this title should come from LGBT, film, and women’s/gender studies.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArsenal Pulp Press
    Release dateDec 8, 2014
    ISBN9781551525655
    I've Heard the Mermaids Singing: A Queer Film Classic

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      Book preview

      I've Heard the Mermaids Singing - Julia Mendenhall

      I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING: A Queer Film Classic

      Copyright © 2014 by Julia Mendenhall

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

      ARSENAL PULP PRESS

      Suite 202–211 East Georgia St.

      Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

      Canada

      arsenalpulp.com

      Efforts have been made to locate copyright holders of source material wherever possible. The publisher welcomes hearing from any copyright holders of material used in this book who have not been contacted.

      Queer Film Classics editors: Matthew Hays and Thomas Waugh

      Cover and text design by Gerilee McBride

      Edited for the press by Susan Safyan

      Cover photo: Miramax Films/Photofest

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

      Mendenhall, Julia, 1960–, author

      I've heard the mermaids singing / Julia Mendenhall.

      Includes index.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-55152-564-8 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-55152-565-5 (epub)

      1. I've heard the mermaids singing (Motion picture).

      2. Rozema, Patricia. 3. Motion pictures—Canada—History

      and criticism. 4. Queer theory. I. Title.

      PN1997.I84M46 2014 791.43'72 C2014-906268-0

      C2014-906269-9

      O brave new world with such goodly girl in’t!

      For Carol Denise Bork, sine qua non.

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      Synopsis

      Credits

      Introduction: The Oblique Pragmatist’s Stratagems

      One: Creating the Queer Fairy Tale

      Two: Coming Out, Cannes, and Criticism

      Three: Reading Polly’s Perversities

      Four: Envisioning Our Futures

      References

      Filmography

      Index

      Acknowledgments

      This book would not have been possible if it were not for Patricia Rozema, the writer, director, co-producer, and editor of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Thank you for your glowing intellect, wit, and spirit.

      Huge thanks to the Queer Film Classic Series creators, my shepherds, Thomas Waugh and Matthew Hays, and to the tenacious Arsenal Pulp Press team: Brian Lam, Robert Ballantyne, Gerilee McBride, Susan Safyan, and Cynara Geissler.

      This book was propelled by a United States Department of State Fulbright Traditional Student Scholarship. Thank you to my heroes at Fulbright Canada, Michelle Emond and Michael Hawes.

      Thank you to my dear Canadian friends, for your gifts of conversation and good food: Kay Armatage, Lynne Fernie, Theresa Rowat, Alex Raffé, Anna Stratton, Patricia Chastang, Ernest Mathijs, Bryan Pang, Eric Minoli, Marusya Bociurkiw, Murray Markowitz, Von Rowatt, Barbara Tranter, and Ann-Marie MacDonald.

      Many thanks to the Toronto International Film Festival Group and the Toronto International Film Reference Library: Sylvia Frank, Eve Goldin, and Julie Lofthouse.

      Enduring thanks to my teachers: Patricia D. Hale, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Caserio, Timothy Corrigan, Sally Mitchell, and Patricia White.

      Kind thanks to my support system at Temple University: Jenifer Baldwin, Pamela Barnett, Aurelia Nicole Bizamcer, Denise Connerty, Stephanie Laggini Fiore, Eric Jeitner, Laura Levitt, Ruth Ost, Brian Boling, Katherine Henry, and Kristina De Voe.

      A special thank you to my primary inspirations and motivators: to all of my Temple University students, especially the Honors Transnational Cinema classes; Women in Literature classes; Senior Seminar: Transgressive Sexuality in Transnational Cinema; the Feminist Theory classes; Special Topics in Film Class: Love in Cinema, Then and Now; and lastly, my Spring 2014 Analytical Reading and Writing composition students. You all make the world a vastly better place.

      One million thanks to my cherished friends: Susan Balée, Steve Belle, Joe Bilancio, Duane Binkley, Chadê Biney-Amissah, D.A. Boxwell, Rachel Weeks Bright, Siobhan Brooks, Betsy Casañas, Mary Conway, Veronique Courtois, Jenn Whittendale Crowe, Ann Dean, Shekhar Deshpande, Tom DiNardo, Dana Downs, Joan Doyle, Robert Eberhart, Maria Fanelli, Kamili Okweni Feelings, Joshua Fernandez, Joan Grassbaugh Forry, Alexander Gonzalez, Rachael Groner, Jeff Hibbert, Denise Ingram, Holly-Katharine Johnson, Elizabeth Kimball, Gary Kramer, Byron Lee, Anthony Lioi, April Logan, Meta Mazaj, Gerry Malek, Karl McCool, Margaret McLaughlin, Cathleen Miller, Niela Orr, Jessica Restaino, Diane Rizzo, Margaret Rakus, Kathryn Ramey, Lisa Rhodes, Samantha Rushford, Cynthia Schmidt, Abby Shepherd, Michael Shore, Megan Whitman, Samantha Wiggins, Michael P. Williams, Andrew J. Young, Maria Zankey, and Magdalena Zurawski.

      To my family, for their patience and love: Annette Bork, Ellen Bork; Brenda and Mario Miralles; Eden Balmaz; Betsy and Mike Dill; Windsor and Leslie Mendenhall; Bonnie, Sophia, and Kim West; Dr Mary Beth and Laurie Herner-Brown; Phil, Kellyn, and Allyson Herner-Betts; Chelie Harrell; Nancie Seeley; my dear aunts: Teresa Randolph Ott, Martha R. Harrell, Nancy Randolph, Sally Brindle; and my loving mother, Joyce R. Herner and her partner, Dr Albert Herner.

      And lastly, thank you to my beloved, Carol Denise Bork, PhD. For everything.

      Synopsis

      Engaging the direct address technique of documentary film and presented as a videotaped confession, Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing tells the story of Polly Vandersma, a distracted, good-humored, and unpretentious temporary secretary.¹ Polly starts a new temporary assignment at the Church Gallery, a Toronto art gallery run by the sophisticated French-Canadian Gabrielle St. Peres, whom Polly always calls the Curator. Polly seems to fall in love with the authoritative art dealer and critic who, despite all of her successes—she has a profitable business, a lover who loves her, and acclaimed publications—wants nothing more than to create a painting that would be canonized by the art establishment.

      In vivid contrast, Polly is an amateur photographer. When she is not at work, Polly gleefully rides her pink bicycle around Toronto taking pictures of people and sights that delight her. Polly then develops her photos in her studio apartment bathroom, and while she gazes deeply at them, she goes into a trance where she imagines herself in various pleasing visions, as she calls them. These visions are black-and-white mini-films within the film in which Polly envisions enhanced versions of herself. In these visions, Polly is an action figure of sorts—while climbing the Royal Bank Building, she falls, but then starts flying, Superman-style; in another scene, she lectures the Curator about Freud’s concept of polymorphous perversity while miraculously walking on water; and in another vignette, Polly hears mermaids singing while standing at Toronto’s Scarborough Bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario.

      Polly is soon promoted to permanent part-time secretary and settles into her job. Out of the blue, Mary Joseph, a painter and the Curator’s former lover, returns to Toronto, and Polly witnesses Mary’s re-seduction of Gabrielle via the surveillance camera hidden within a gallery sculpture.

      In a pivotal scene, Polly arrives late to the Curator’s birthday party, where the drunken Curator tells Polly that she paints and divulges her secret ambitions and fears about painting. When Polly asks to see the Curator’s paintings, the Curator does not show Polly her own work, instead showing her Mary’s glowing, light-filled canvases. Polly takes one, puts it in the gallery, and shows it to Carl, an art critic who immediately writes a review. The Curator becomes the sensation of the Toronto art world. As the positive reviews roll in and the paintings sell, the Curator and Mary tell no one the truth, not even Polly.

      Meanwhile, Polly mails some of her own photographs to the gallery, under the pseudo name of Penelope, and when the Curator harshly criticizes the photos, Polly is devastated. She burns her own photos, stops taking and developing them, stops having her visions, and sinks into a deep depression.

      One evening, while Polly is working late, the Curator and Mary unexpectedly arrive, and Polly hears the truth—that the paintings were made by Mary and not the Curator, who was acting as Mary’s pseudonym, as her public persona. Polly accidently throws a cup of hot tea onto the Curator’s face, but after Mary and the Curator leave, Polly imagines a triumphant, cathartic vision in which she conducts Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to its conclusion and then takes the surveillance camera from the sculpture to use for her video confession, which she starts in the next scene.

      A few days later, without forewarning, Gabrielle and Mary come to Polly’s apartment and discover that Polly has borrowed the gallery’s camera to make a video and that little Penelope’s photos were actually Polly’s. The women effect a rapprochement, and Polly responds, Come here, I’ll show you some more. She leads the Curator and Mary into her bathroom, where they see a fantastical, glittery autumn forest of trees. Polly goes back to her studio, gives a satisfied smile to the camera, and turns it off.

      1 Videotaped confession is Rozema’s own description. See her interview with Cameron Bailey for the Independent Film Channel Canada contained on Alliance Atlantis’s Patricia Rozema: A Retrospective Look

      DVD

      set.

      Credits

      I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Le chant des sirènes), 1987

      Canada, English, 83 min.

      Color and black-and-white;

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