I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is a 1987 Canadian comedy-drama film written and directed by Patricia Rozema and starring Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, and Ann-Marie MacDonald. It was the first English-language Canadian feature film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Plot

Polly is a worker for a temporary secretarial agency. Polly serves as the narrator for the film, and there are frequent sequences portraying her whimsical fantasies. Polly lives alone, seems to have no friends and enjoys solitary bicycle rides to undertake her hobby of photography. Despite her clumsiness, lack of education, social awkwardness and inclination to take others' statements literally, all of which have resulted in scarce employment opportunities, Polly is placed as a secretary in a private art gallery owned by Gabrielle.

Ann-Marie MacDonald plays Mary, who is Gabrielle's former young lover, and also a painter. Mary returns after an absence, and she and Gabrielle rekindle their former relationship despite Gabrielle's misgivings that she is too old and Mary too young.

Polly, who's fallen a little bit in love with Gabrielle, is inspired to submit some of her own photographs anonymously to the gallery. She is crushed when Gabrielle dismisses her photos out of hand and calls them "simpleminded". Polly temporarily quits the gallery, and goes into a depression. She returns to the gallery, and revives a little when Mary notices one of her photos.

All the while, Mary and Gabrielle have been perpetrating a fraud. Gabrielle has been passing off Mary's work as her own. When Polly finds out, she becomes livid and tosses a cup of tea at Gabrielle. Believing she has done something unforgivable, Polly retreats to her flat in anguish.

Mary and Gabrielle later visit Polly at her flat, and realize that the discarded photographs were by Polly.

As the film ends, Gabrielle and Mary look at more of Polly's photographs and in a short fantasy sequence the three are transported together to an idyllic wooded glen, a metaphor for the beautiful world that supposedly plain and unnoticed people like Polly inhabit.

Cast

  • Sheila McCarthy as Polly Vandersma During this time period, she also took a five-week class on 16 mm film production at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto. The negative criticism of Passion and the personal rejection felt by Rozema compelled her to make Mermaids with its strong anti-authority motif

Rozema initially planned on making the film for television, but the script was 65 minutes long. Rather than cut the script, Rozema was advised by Debbie Nightingale from the then-new Ontario Film Development Corporation to expand the script by at least 15 minutes so it could be eligible for OFDC feature film funds. a different Star article stated the budget was $325,000. American newspapers also reported different budgets for the film. A San Francisco Chronicle article says the budget was US$273,000 which translated into $350,000; which was the same amount cited in a New York Times film review. The newspaper USA Today reported the budget as less than US$300,000. Michael Posner stated that the film was made on a budget of $362,109.

Pre-production

Rozema says she and Raffé worked in pre-production full-time between February 1986 and September 23, 1986.

Unlike McCarthy, who was unknown to Rozema prior to the making of the film, the director was already a friend of actress Ann-Marie MacDonald but Rozema still required her to audition for the role of Mary Joseph. The film's musical arranger was John Switzer, who was also Jane Siberry's bassist.

During the initial depiction of one of Polly's visions, the "Flower Duet" aria from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé is heard as background music; portions of this aria are heard multiple times throughout the film. Near the end of the film, Polly has a vision of conducting a small orchestra, performing selections from Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Release

The film was distributed by Cinephile in Canada, Miramax in the United States, and Films Transit elsewhere. Bennett sold the film to First Choice for $150,000 and the CBC for $120,000.

Cannes premiere

I've Heard the Mermaids Singing made its world premiere on May 10, 1987, at the Cannes Film Festival, as part of the Directors' Fortnight program. gave the film a six-minute standing ovation. Four additional screenings of the film were added to the Cannes schedule, and all sold out. the producers received numerous calls from American distributors who wanted private previews, but those requests were turned down. Raffé said of that decision "We decided we wouldn't screen it for anybody. You would see it in the theatre with a big audience, and we would either win big or lose big."

Following the successful Cannes premiere, the producers negotiated the sale of American distribution rights. At least seven American companies vied for the rights, including Orion Classics, Spectrafilm, and the eventual winner of the bidding war Miramax, represented at Cannes by Harvey Weinstein and Mark Silverman. Weinstein initially offered US$100,000 for the U.S. rights, but Raffé and Rozema rejected that offer and several subsequent ones from Miramax until they finally settled on US$350,000, which was the biggest number the producers could think of, as it represented the film's production budget.

By the end of the Cannes Film Festival, Rofekamp, Rozema and Raffé had negotiated sales to 32 countries including France, Germany, and the U.K. as well smaller countries such as Norway, Greece, Singapore, and South Africa. Rofekamp and the producers had earned advances on royalties worth $1.1 million, which made the film commercially successful before it was released.

The film made its Canadian premiere at the Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival) on September 10, 1987,

The United States premiere and first theatrical screening took place on September 11, 1987, at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City. including festivals in Moscow, Munich, Hong Kong, Jerusalem and Mexico.

Specific film festival screenings included:

  • Cannes Film Festival (10 May 1987)
  • Figueira da Foz Film Festival (7 September 1987)
  • Telluride Film Festival (September 1987)
  • London Film Festival (19 November 1987)
  • Istanbul Film Festival (April 1988)
  • Adelaide Film Event (July 1988)
  • Brno Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (16 November 2002)

However, in Vincent Canby's review in The New York Times, the critic wrote that watching the film "is like being cornered by a whimsical, 500-pound elf" and that it "takes itself more seriously than the screenplay warrants".

John Richardson from the Daily News of Los Angeles gave the film a grade of C, stating that the film is "basically a student work, and not a particularly good student work at that. It's not film making, it's film musing." The reviewer went on to say the film represents "feminism with a smile face".

Film critic Molly Haskell wrote in Vogue magazine that the film was a "smashing commercial directorial debut" and described it as "a feminist fairy tale masquerading as a satire".

An article by Graham Fuller in The Guardian stated that the film "is one of the outstanding directorial debuts of the year".

In his March 1988 review of the film, critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, and wrote that director Rozema "uses a seemingly simple style to make some quiet and deep observations". Ebert also described Sheila McCarthy's performance as "extraordinary" and said "she has one of those faces that speaks volumes, and she is able to be sad without being depressing, funny without being a clown". The film has no scores collected by Metacritic as of 2020.

Feminist analysis and criticism

Canadian film scholar Thomas Waugh described Rozema as "the most prominent of English Canadian lesbian filmmakers". In identifying a feminist approach to this film and understanding Rozema's artistic intentions, Rozema says in an interview from 1991 that she refuses to define her work as "distinctly feminist" and emphasizes that "gender is a category that does not interest her". However, in 1993, Rozema claimed that her films assume feminism, concluding that "it's in their foundation".

In Rozema's cinematic work, the main characters are predominantly women, in heterosexual or lesbian relationships, or single. Several of her film features portray or touch upon lesbian love, a theme quite apparently shown in Mermaids.

The critic Camille Paglia praised the film's "wonderful comedy and realism", commenting on the character Polly, "This girl's kind of aimless, yet plucky. It's the twentysomething problem with self-definition."

A November 1987 review of the film in the feminist newspaper Sojourner said that Mermaids "is a film that could only be made by a woman. It strikes deeply at the heart of women's experiences in a way that even serious and compassionate male directors never do." The review continues with "this film focuses on different kinds of love between women".

Yet within some gay and alternative media coverage, there was criticism that the film glossed over the lesbian relationship between two of the characters, as well as complaints that Rozema had made a "decision not to make a public declaration of her sexuality in interviews with the world press after Cannes". Hayes went on to describe the film as "an ambitious and thoroughly entertaining treatise on creativity and commercial success; it's an 'anti-authority' film with the nerd winning over the admiration of the elegant, rich, power-turkey".

The first essay on Mermaids in a prominent academic journal by a highly credentialed feminist film scholar was written by Teresa de Lauretis in 1990. In her Screen article, de Lauretis "applied a political rubric that she called 'alternative women's cinema', and Mermaids failed her test".

In her book about the film, scholar Julia Mendenhall claims that the de Lauretis article in Screen was the start of "the great divide in scholarly criticism"

For the beginning of its theatrical run in New York City, the distributor took out a full page advertisement in The New York Times, at a cost of US$25,000. After its first two weeks playing in New York, the film had earned more than $70,000.

The New York theatrical release led to a successful national roll-out, with the film eventually screening in approximately 50 American cities. It performed best in locations with dedicated art film audiences. Co-producer Raffé claimed that the film grossed about $2.5 million in the United States, despite Miramax's "inscrutable bookkeeping methods".

The film earned over $70,000 in the first ten days of its theatrical release in Ottawa and was played there for over three months. It was one of the top ten highest grossing films in Quebec in 1987. By May 1992, the film earned $644,000 in Canada with $264,965 coming from its theatrical release, $177,000 from pay television, $150,200 from free television, $41,000 from its video release, and $11,223 from non-theatrical. The film earned a net profit of $437,000 in Canada. According to Raffé, the film grossed over $10 million in worldwide receipts, earning more than twenty-five times its production costs.

  • Genie Award, 1988: Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, awarded to Sheila McCarthy
  • Genie Award, 1988: Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, awarded to Paule Baillargeon

In addition, the film garnered the following honors:

  • In 1993, the Toronto International Film Festival ranked the film ninth in its list of the Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time, with Rozema becoming the first female director to have a film on the list. The film did not appear on the updated 2004 or 2015 versions of the list.
  • Named a Top Ten Canadian Film of the 20th Century
  • Named as one of the Top 25 Films That Changed Our Lives by the Outfest Film Festival
  • Included in a 10-week festival of New Canadian Cinema, aired in late 1989 on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 television network

Home media

Mermaids was first released on VHS tape in Canada by Norstar Home Video. It was released on VHS tape in the United States during the last week of March, 1988 by Charter Entertainment.

It was first released on DVD in the United States by Miramax Home Entertainment in 2000 and in Canada by Alliance Atlantis in 2002. Both DVD releases include a director's commentary by Patricia Rozema. The US DVD also contains other special features including a theatrical trailer, biographies, and a photo gallery.