Sirens (film) - Reception

Reception

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: "Sirens is best watched as a soft-core, high-minded daydream about the liberating sensuality of art..... has an archly intelligent performance from Mr. Grant, who turns the priest's embarrassment into a real comic virtue. Ms. FitzGerald, who made a strong first impression in Hear My Song, is again a forceful presence, even when acting out the story's giddy erotic fantasies." Maslin said the film "often verges on silliness and desperately overworks the symbolic importance of snakes. Still, it's hard not to enjoy a film whose most intellectually daring character – Mr. Neill's stern Lindsay – claims to have spent a previous life in Atlantis."

Hal Hinson of The Washington Post was less forgiving: he called the ideas presented by the film "warmed-over D. H. Lawrence" and the film, a "peculiar, not entirely undesirable sort of art-house hybrid, like a marriage between Masterpiece Theatre and Baywatch", citing "scenes, like the one in which Estella is brought to orgasm by the tender, knowing hands of a blind laborer, are almost laughable."

Roger Ebert, guessing incorrectly that the inspiration for Neill's character was Augustus John, noted that Sirens has "no particular plot"; he also called it a "good-hearted, whimsical movie which makes no apologies for the beauty of the human body and yet never feels sexually obsessed."