I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

This was the most frustrating viewing experience I’ve had in a long time. Imagine a film that is so much like your life: your experience, your future, people you’ve known, feelings you’ve felt. It’s all there, except the character that would be you is INSUFFERABLE.

How personal shall I make this? I’m a bit drunk, and it’s my journal, so I’ll egotrip if I want to. Here we have… a red-haired woman, all right, who at 31 still has no ambition nor has found a meaningful romantic configuration; she begins to work as a temporary secretary (or “Person Friday”) for an older woman, a French-Canadian art gallery curator reminiscent of a slightly less glamorous Catherine Deneuve, and — she “thinks” — falls in love with her, but without “the kissing and stuff.” Oh, it’s all there, the curator is every professor I ever had a slightly perverse asexual crush on, but DAMMIT Sheila McCarthy, I will not identify myself with you!

It is so strange for me to read this was a breakthrough, much-heralded role for McCarthy. To me, her plucky, naive — no, rather: stupid, unfunny heroine is, yes, in a word, insufferable. I cannot tolerate her glib, hammy performance. I could probably make a case against her that isn’t so damnably subjective. Humor through the vessel of this character consists of ordering milk inappropriately at a sushi restaurant and getting a white mustache drinking it. Rolling Eyes That sort of thing, on and on, for 90 minutes.

Ugh. Axe McCarthy, recast this with me, see if Deneuve is available (though I’ll take this Paule Baillargeon), and then we’d be in business. I don’t know how to actually rate this film (it’s more than acceptable, really); I’m far too caught up in my Ultimate Fantasy Gone Freakishly Wrong.