Cartwheels.

Somersault came pretty much at the most recent nadir of the Australian film industry. That year, the percentage of box office commanded by local product in the Australian industry was pretty much at its lowest ever, if my memory serves me correctly. There were very, very few films of any interest released that year, meaning that Somersault also swept the board at the Australian Film Institute Awards (AFIs), winning thirteen statues in every single category from fifteen nominations, beating the previous record held by the eleven wins for The Piano a decade or so earlier. Is it a better film than The Piano? Hell no! Is it a bad film? No, it is not.

I'm glad I rewatched it. I've been meaning to for years, because my initial impression was so tempered by the press surrounding it and the awards it was winning, which would suggest that it is the best Australian film of all time, something it clearly isn't. It was the best film of that year, however, but still. And it did herald the arrival on the scene of current bright young things Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington, so that's something.


Cate Shortland wrote and directed this coming of age film set around Jindabyne, in one of the very few areas in Australia where you can consistently play in the snow. During winter at least. It really is a desert continent. Heidi (Cornish) is sixteen and caught up in desire for her mother's boyfriend (Damien de Montemas), causing her swift evacuation from her home in Canberra, taking herself to the lake town of Jindabyne. She finds a job, is helped out by motel proprietor Irene (Lynette Curran) and begins to explore her sexuality in self-destructive ways, though she always comes back to Joe (Worthington), with whom she begins a relationship of sorts. Joe has his own issues to deal with, including a brief homo one with older Richard (Erik Thomson), but the two are inexplicably drawn to the damaged nature of the other. Eventually, Heidi's ways get to Irene and she tries to kick her out, but Heidi breaks down and is instead rescued by her mother.


I've stated before that I'm not a huge Abbie Cornish fan, with the exception of Candy where I did quite love her by the end of it, and Somersault is no exception. Worthington is capable in his role, but there are no fireworks. He's actually better than I remembered him (probably my memory was affected by the subsequent dire Macbeth, which was truly terrible in so many ways), quite enjoyable really. Curran is great, playing that older, wiser Australian woman nailed by Noni Hazlehurst but also pulled off here, and I quite like Thomson in most anything he does - he seemed to channel a lot of the qualities brought to the older, gentler gay man by Peter Phelps in Lantana: his affectations are very similar.


Two points the film really, really has going for it. Firstly, the cinematography is spectacular, truly luscious. Robert Humphreys won everything going, with good reason, for his stunning work in the snow, playing with white and colour, making the landscape and then the details inside a true character in the story. Secondly, the score by Decoder Ring is phenomenal. I forgot how much I loved it and had it on repeat back when the film was out, but I'm reloving it now. Seriously, check it out. And then go and buy the soundtrack. Extraordinary.


All in all, I remembered the film as maybe 2.5 stars, but I'm giving it 3.5 stars. It's a solid effort, a vignette and a bit messy, but there are enough elements to make it worthwhile.

I Have Been CLenching My Fucking Fists Since I Was Six Years Old.

I have a copy of this film back home in Australia, but I never watched it completely. It took me a long time to get around to watching it in the first place, and then my DVD screwed up about two thirds of the way through and I gave up, figuring I'd give it another shot a few days later, and then never putting it back on. I hadn't overly enjoyed the opening of Candy, you see, and I think I was unfavourably comparing it to Little Fish, which had come out the year and was a better film.

The Candy of the title is played by Abbie Cornish, a couple of years after her mammoth breakout with Somersault. She has met Dan, a heroin addict, a loser, played be Heath Ledger, and dives into the scene, starting off snorting and ending up arguing over needles. Deeply in love with each other they keep falling deeper and deeper into drugs, unable to keep themselves together, unable to pay rent, unable to come up with any money, stealing, begging off family, prostituting themselves, anything they can to get one more hit. Candy gets pregnant and they decide the have to stop, preparing themselves and locking themselves in their room, telling their friends not to answer their calls, falling to pieces in scenes reminiscent of what Ewan McGregor goes through in Trainspotting a decade earlier. When Candy miscarries the two fall apart even more, deciding on a move to the country and a stint on methadone to try and get themselves clean.


It all starts off ok, they're distraught but they're together and trying to rebuild something new and clean together, but Candy quickly starts a fling with a neighbour, before descending into madness, writing their life story in paints and crayons all over the walls of the house before finding herself in an institution. After rehab she tracks Dan down, but Dan doesn't want to drag her back into his world and knows their relationship was only ever functional with drugs, so lets her go.


This, I've decided, is my favourite Cornish role. She starts it with the same problems as I have with her in most other films, but her breakdown towards the end, her screaming match with her mother in the country after a ruined lunch, showed me depth I haven't really seen in her. I was more impressed than I expected to be. Ledger was solid if not exemplary, and I think he just went from strength to strength over the last couple of years of his life, becoming something truly sensational. Geoffrey Rush, as their gay confidant, camps it up but that kind of works here, and Noni Hazlehurst as Candy's mother is extraordinary. (Sidenote: I grew up watching her on Playschool and for years didn't realise she was an accomplished actress earlier in her career, so when I saw her first in Little Fish and then here, both times playing the swearing, hysterical mother of a drug addict, I found it amazingly confronting. She is truly incredible as an actress.) Tony Wilson as her father gives a nice, calm antidote to the wound up mother, and Tom Budge as Candy and Dan's friend is, as always, a revelation. He keeps going from strength to strength, with roles in films like Ten Empty and Last Train To Freo really cementing himself as a talent to keep your eye out for. Plus he can bring the same intensity to the stage - brilliant.


Candy isn't the debut feature from director Neil Armfield, but it was 16 years after his previous effort, so I'm kind of counting it. He's a huge stage director in Australia, creative director of the well-respected Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, and his love of theatrics shows in the film. While the book on which the film is based, by Luke Davies, is very dark, very real, the film isn't. The fairytale love aspect comes through in heightened reality, but the trauma it leads to never hits home. Dan never looked like a drug addict, Candy never felt skanky enough, it all just remained a little airbrushed, a little safe, a drug story for the upper-middle class dreaming of the romance of the gutter. It's not bad, but it's not great, though I did find myself a little more affected at the end than I thought. It passed, though, and it passed quickly. So 3 stars it shall be.

Stop-Loss

The term 'stop-loss' in the American military refers to fine print a serviceman's (or servicewoman's) contract allowing for them to be recalled past their discharge date, involuntarily, should they be required by the military. It is this clause, and the repercussions on three Iraq war veterans (Iraq War the Second, Jr's war, not Snr's) and one girlfriend that form the titular premise of this film.

There's something about war movies directed by women. Not that there are many. Or, really, any. The shamefully unseen by me The Hurt Locker is really the only other one I can come up with off the top of my head, and that is, by all accounts, exceptional.

Kimberley Peirce's film (her first since her Oscar-winning debut, 1999's Boys Don't Cry) doesn't really tackle war, however. There are scenes in Iraq, both battle scenes (which are very accomplished) and behind-the-scenes scenes (wow, that's an awkward phrase) of the boys playing around, sending letters home, all that jazz. And they all look great. The primary thrust of the film, however, is dealing with this stop-loss notion.

The cast is fairly exceptional. Ryan Phillippe plays the Staff Sergeant who is stop-lossed (stop-lost?), Brandon King, with Channing Tatum (the weakest link, I think) playing his best friend Sergeant Steve Shriver. My future husband and the incredible Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Private Tommy Burgess, and our dear friend Abbie Cornish plays Shriver's girlfriend Michelle - King and Michelle have known each other pretty much their entire lives.

All three servicemen are on leave and partying hard. Shriver freaks and starts digging bunkers in his front yard when drunk, Burgess gets kicked out by his new wife... the only one who seems to have it together is King. They go out to the ranch, they shoot things up. King is meant to be being discharged, but when he goes to sign it all out he is told to report back later that month. He disobeys the direct order (yelling 'with all due respect, fuck the president', something I'm sure we all wanted to say back in 2007) and is arrested, only to escape and go on the run, with Michelle agreeing to drive him out of Texas.

What follows are attempts to bring him back, explorations of what options he has (there are none, apparently), and tragedy striking. The notion that you can sign up to serve for a certain number of years, do your time amid the horrors and trauma of war, want to get out and then be called back against your will is terrifying, and the cast pull it off for the most part. Ryan Phillippe has been proving himself to have chops of late, and after my Bright Star review regarding Abbie Cornish, this is probably my favourite role of hers so far - I believed her entirely. Joseph Gordon-Levitt can do absolutely no wrong in my eyes, but I don't think anyone would say his performance was anything but grand. Channing Tatum, though, can't hold his own against this cast with so much talent behind them. He's not terrible, but you do notice that he is weaker.

Peirce explores this injustice with anger. It shows that this law pisses her off. She doesn't like it, and she's wearing that quite apparently on her sleeve, and maybe that's why the film wasn't particularly successful. I think it's a terrible clause, and i think more people should know about it, and I congratulate her for taking up this cause. Iraq films haven't been working in the States commercially anyway, so you may as well ram your point home.

I'm glad I finally watched Stop-Loss. I've been meaning to for a while, and missed it last year at the Sydney Film Festival where it played in their inaugural competition. It's a bold piece of filmmaking, and here's hoping that Peirce doesn't have to wait the better part of another decade to let us know what's pissing her off now. 4 stars.

Bright Star

So, I was going to go and see An Education this evening, but was distracted and missed it, and took myself instead to see Bright Star. I wasn't entirely convinced this would be a good idea - I was quite tired and I thought a period drama, no matter how good, may have put me to sleep. I was proven wrong, however.

Jane Campion's latest, her first feature since 2003's In The Cut, bore some semblance in the striking cinematography from Greig Fraser, a relative newcomer of considerable talent (this is only his third feature after The Caterpillar Wish, where I first noticed him, and Out of the Blue, both 2006 titles.) While his lensing has strong similarities to that of the similarly exceptional Dion Beebe (and I shall note that they are both from Down Under) in its use of focus, his work on this film is simply stunning, letting the design, story and acting speak for itself when it needs to, but adding a certain beauty to lift all elements beyond their own individual merit and into something particularly stunning. His work in this film deserves to be noted - as always, from his shorts (which I'm more familiar with), he tends to make me wet in places one shouldn't talk about publicly.

Abbie Cornish is someone I've always found to be a strange one. Something about her eyes makes me not trust her, and there were a number of points in the film where this rang true. She does, however, shine and shine strongly in many points throughout the story, which is indeed one of simplicity, beauty and tragedy, something you might expect. It is the story, ostensibly, of Cornish's character Fanny Brawne, and her relationship with the young John Keats in the lead up to his untimely death at the age of 25, a period when he was writing to no acclaim or fortune, despite the esteem in which he is held now. Of course, love conquers his poverty and all social obstacles standing in the way (including the rubber-armed Kerry Fox as Fanny's very abiding mother, a good performance though I was not entirely enamoured with her accent.) Their love cannot, however, conquer the illness that eventually proves Keats' downfall.

Whishaw's portrayal, which is not really being spoken of, is one that I found quite disarming, not to mention surprising. He brought a graceful levity to the intensity of the poet with quite simple movements and actions - a cheeky, flirty glance up here, a simple fleeting smile there. His humour resonated and lifted the entire film, without it ever feeling like he was trying to bring down the stakes that propelled the story. Fun-loving, loyal, but ultimately a romantic, Keats' poetry felt entirely real and natural coming out of his mouth. While I understand that my reservations about Cornish may be mine alone, and are not limited to this film, Whishaw, for me, was the brightest star (oh yes I did.) Though it should be noted that the two did play off each other perfectly - while I feel he was the character I was more drawn to, he never overplayed Cornish, and I can't imagine the one without the other.

While these elements, with the total design of the piece, were generally perfect, I did struggle with some aspects of the handling of the narrative, with some of the beats in the film and general direction. There were occasional jarring transitions, and moments that I think could have been handled better. So it was definitely not Campion's best work (her oeuvre includes The Piano, after all), but all in all a fine film. The final scene was understatedly powerful, and Keats' words over the closing credits kept everyone in their seats, and I must say that I feel it is worth the film if only for that, though there is a lot more to find in the two hours preceding.