In Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), Polly Vandersma does not announce herself.
She enters spaces without urgency or polish, carrying no clear plan for who she is meant to become—or whether she needs one. She speaks softly, moves tentatively, and seems prepared—at all times—to be underestimated. The film does not rush to correct this impression. It does not reframe her as a hidden genius, nor does it arrange a moment where her worth must be decisively proven.
Instead, Polly is allowed to remain exactly as she appears.
The film itself is structured as a kind of confession—Polly (played by Sheila McCarthy) speaking into a camera, narrating her experiences after the fact. This framing matters. What we see is already filtered through reflection, curiosity, and feeling, rather than through ambition or self-justification. Polly is not trying to impress the viewer. She is simply recounting what moved her.
This is not the same as neglect. The camera watches her closely. The film attends to her rhythms, her silences, her distracted wonder. She is not invisible; she is simply not scaled up. Nothing insists that her presence be converted into authority, confidence, or success.
There is a difference between being overlooked and refusing to perform significance. Polly does not compete for attention, and the film does not punish her for that refusal. As a temp secretary, she drifts into the Toronto art world less as an aspirant climbing toward recognition than as a curious observer—absorbing textures, images, and personalities that speak to her privately.
Her fascination with private art gallery owner Gabrielle St. Peres (played by Paule Baillargeon) grows out of this posture. Gabrielle is polished, articulate, and socially fluent, the kind of woman who seems to belong effortlessly to institutions. Polly admires her art, but she is also drawn to the space Gabrielle occupies—to what confidence looks like from the outside, when observed rather than inhabited. As Polly becomes entangled in Gabrielle’s life, and in her relationship with Mary Joseph (played by Ann-Marie MacDonald), the film resists easy oppositions. Attraction, admiration, and erotic curiosity circulate without demanding clarity or conquest.
Crucially, Polly is never asked to resolve these tensions by becoming someone else.
The narrative mirrors this refusal of transformation. There is no decisive turn toward ambition, no sharpening of purpose that would make Polly legible on institutional terms. She does not “arrive.” She does not master the gallery, the camera, or the social world she brushes up against. The film withholds the familiar arc of improvement, allowing her to remain slightly out of step with expectations.
What fills that space is imagination.
Polly’s inner visions—her photographic fantasies, her dreamlike sequences—are not framed as delusions or compensations for failure. They are presented plainly, even joyfully, as extensions of how she experiences the world. Fantasy and reality sit side by side, neither correcting nor subordinating the other. The film does not suggest that her creativity must be refined into professionalism or rewarded with status in order to matter.
Nothing is extracted from it. Her imagination is not optimized. It is allowed to remain playful, private, and incomplete.
When the film ends, Polly has not been transformed. She has not been exposed, corrected, or elevated. What remains is the sense of a life continuing on its own terms—still curious, still open, still unremarkable in the most literal sense. The film resists the urge to name this as triumph or failure.
Seen now, that restraint feels increasingly rare. In a culture that equates visibility with validation and aspiration with virtue, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing offers something quieter: a woman who does not optimize herself, and a film that never asks her to.
It does not argue for unremarkableness.
It simply allows it to stand.
And that allowance remains its most enduring gesture.
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Scott Bryant 
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