A revival of the ever-popular sport of cheek-tweaking the uptight Brits, or uptight anybodies. The playing field this time is wild, savage, lusty Australia of the 1930s, where a "progressive" Oxford clergyman (Hugh Grant, a good sport indeed) has been dispatched in hopes of prevailing upon painter Norman Lindsay -- no longer infamous, simply not famous -- to withdraw his blasphemous Crucified Venus from a travelling art show. Shades of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Jesse Helms, all that. The lopsided polemic is fleshed out, so to speak, on about the level of a supermarket-paperback pastiche of D.H. Lawrence, with the clergyman's repressed wife (Tara Fitzgerald) guided ineluctably from timid voyeurism to torrid daydreams (stark naked in church, etc. ) to actual touchie-feelie with a swarthy stallion-riding Adonis. There is a great deal of good-cause body-baring, and supermodel -- to use the official epithet -- Elle MacPherson shows off a bit more of herself than she has shown in any Sports Illustrated "Swimsuit Issue." But liberation, of which she's the most belligerent voice, would be so much more attractive a state, not to mention believable a state, unaccompanied by so much bragging and bullying. With Sam Neill; directed by John Duigan. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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