Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015. The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered. There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time. I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above). It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise. Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies. The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.
That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life. She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery. She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle. The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture. Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.” Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life. Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky. Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera. Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities. Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol. Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes. It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.
I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city. Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly. McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet. She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness. She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her. Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies. It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival. I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere. It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 