Sirens

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Following the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral, this prettified period piece came as something of a shock to fans of Hugh Grant's foppish Four Weddings hero. He plays a prudish clergyman whose first task in his new Australian parish is to prevent bohemian artist Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill) from exhibiting both his models and his portraits of them. Director John Duigan contents himself with a few gentle barbs and elegant bons mots, but rather loses his way once Grant's less inhibited wife, Tara FitzGerald, joins Elle Macpherson and her fellow poseurs. Visually pleasing, but films of this sort need to be more than just something to look at.