I've Heard the Mermaids Singing

Patricia Rozema's film is set in Toronto. Polly, played by Sheila McCarthy, is a temp secretary who is incompetent, talks to herself and takes photographs in secret. She takes a job at an art gallery and begins to feel toward Gabrielle, who runs it, both admiration and a closeness she does not understand. The film proceeds through Polly addressing the camera; what she is producing is a record of her own life, constantly interrupted by fantasy sequences, black and white images of her flying, walking underwater, running across treetops. Rozema uses that doubling not as escape but as information about how a person sees herself. The question at the centre is whose work the art world agrees to call real. The difference between Polly's photographs and what hangs on the gallery wall has less to do with talent than with who knows how to talk. It won the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes in 1987, the first English-language Canadian film to win there. McCarthy took Best Actress at the Genies. Who it is for: viewers who like small, odd, fragile independent films. Who it is not for: anyone wanting event or a conventional narrative.