Review: THE BUTTERFLY TREE

Teenage boy Fin spends his days deep in nature, stealing to the forest surrounding his town, collecting butterflies and imagining himself being lifted to the clean rustic light by hordes of them. He also daydreams lying with his inert mother on a picnic blanket as pixelated leaves cover their bodies. Today his departed mother would have been a year older and Fin creates a shrine of candles and pictures at an altar carved from a tree. Back home, his father Al beds one of his students.

One day Fin stops on his ride home from school at the sight of a display case left for the taking outside a house. He makes a mental note to come back for it but is cut short when he looks up at the window of the house to see a beautiful woman swathed in a stylised butterfly costume. We've already seen her in the opening credits, an ageless Melissa George gliding through a burlesque routine in slow motion. Now she's here. Fin tears himself away and rides home. Cut to the upstairs room. The woman is performing for a camera. Reverse shot; it's an autoshutter. This is not the glamour of a photo shoot. It's a lone woman in a costume taking selfies.

The next day, having discovered that Al and Fin maintain an arm's-length worth of ice between them, we see Al stop at the same house and note the display case. Al's thinking of his son but is surprised by our butterfly dancer Evelyn. A lightly flirtatious conversation later, she helps him put the case in the boot of his car and they make a platonic-sounding date for cake the next morning (she has already refused his impulsive invitation for a ride in his convertible). So, guess who else is in love.

Fin meets her face to face, is shown a flame red rare blossom which resembles an idealised vulva which he is told to get close to (Evelyn had traded burlesque for a florist business). She empowers him with a film camera (as opposed to a digital one) and he delightedly uses it on her. He also swipes a few cartridges which he correctly guesses are from her topless self portraiture before. Al, struggles to wrest himself from his dodgy affair (his student racks him in class with an embarrassingly candid poem about "fifty plus lust"). He realises his mistake with the affair but has not counted on his student's ardour. He takes up the offer of a morning tea date. Fin goes to Evelyn's as well. Evelyn's violent ex pays a visit. Things are getting mixy.

Ok, that's far more plot than I'd usually put in a review but there's a reason for that. What have you imagined from those details? A quirky love triangle with a father and son rivalry? A poignant comedy about growing up? A fable about grief and healing? Well, it's all and less. This frequently sumptuous film piles its buffet plate so high that the lime jelly with cream is being crushed by a square of lasagna, itself flattened by some cucumber salad.

The nature boy thread works as long as Fin remains naive but his worldliness appears as smoothly as a lounge singer during a sequence which only barely makes it into fantasy territory. Also, we don't see him at school. Fine, he's solitary and in tune with the trees but a little, just a little of how he handles the difference between the severe judgement of fellow teenagers might give us more to support him with. The one exception is the girl at the chemist. She provides some real adolescent warmth which he is blind to (as he believes he's in with a chance with Evelyn).

Al is either aware of the dodginess of his affair or just wants to escape the threat of peer judgement. He is given scenes that might have lent him some explanatory pain but instead have him rejecting the student clumsily. If you don't find yourself wanting her to slap him senseless and storm off screen for a real life then you shouldn't be going to movies. This renders him into a precious moper that not even his soft edged son becomes. At a twisted point in the plot Fin performs a punishing act against his father which is given an energetic treatment and funny music but is followed up by a disproportionately grave retaliation (I wondered, as I watched, if what happened wasn't in some way cleverly staged and would earn a disclaimer in the credits). So, is it a comedy, a dark coming of age or ... or what?

We're left with Evelyn herself, a  role given the best performance of the film by a seasoned actor clearly enjoying a decent role in a local film. It is a treat to hear her flint-glass voice shaped by its native accent (kudos here, also, to some confident dialogue which sounds genuinely Australian with nary a cliche in a line). Her fall from the glamour of the stage to a point below her new life in a house blooming with life and colour is told with real emotive power. Yet we are being asked to care about a pair of increasingly narcissistic monsters more.

The reason that Harold and Maude works on everyone and Wes Andersons shallow copies of it don't is because Ashby put into his masterpiece a pedal note of mortality audible beneath the heartiest of the laughter. We never get too much of Maude's hippy pontification because we suspect she has escaped from darkness. Her refulgent affirmation of life collides with the decades younger man's churlish ennui and, always, under every line or move, the big black grind of death and concentration camps. Nothing is too sudden. If grief there be it shall be without needing to beg our indlugence.

The Butterfly Tree is more like Wes Anderson in that it doesn't commit to its own themes until it has to. We don't quite know why we are expected to offer Al any empathy. Fin seems to get treasures without working for them. In the midst of this is a woman who struggles against her own narrative's capsule to give us something to care about and when she confronts her worst we are swept away to the thing we should have been far more curious about from the first scenes. It's poignant but it's sudden. It's grave but it's not surprising. It has precedent but it feels like it's come from out of nowhere. The revelation is well staged but we know we won't be caring as much as we should about it when the next scene starts. And we don't. After a feature length running time we watch the construction of the harmonious end the way we might watch an origami master fold a sheet of A4 into a swan.

This is a shame as The Butterfly Tree is one of the most gloriously beautiful new films I've seen for a long time. But the most glowing magical realism must be balanced by mortality. Mortality is at the centre of these themes. The task of meeting grief on the field and surmounting its challenge is a universal one. Could we have seen, instead, the colour and the gleam in service of the colourless dark? Maybe next time.

Review: HAPPY DEATH DAY

Time loop stories are redemption stories. The protagonists are forced to understand themselves through repetition, allowing them a luxurious self-reflection that no one gets in real life. In this one a female uni student is murdered at the end of the repeated day. She has to solve her own murder to stop it and get to the next day. This can't go on forever; each time she wakes some of the effects of the previous murder remain with her, giving her two clocks to beat.

This is told with the big colour palette of a teen movie and is led by the bright and electric Jessica Rothe who reveals her core bitchiness in the first scene of the film by doing no more than opening her eyes. She brings a speed, physicality and lightness to the role which does a lot to fend off the fatigue of the repetition, developing from bewilderment through opportunism, terror and some light but genuine poignancy. Tone her performance down a hair and it will plod, tone it up and it will exhaust; a Goldilocks performance.

There might be a laboured moment here or there from the supporting cast but the pace is sustained and the running time kept to a civilised ninety-six minutes. What else can be said? The director does comedy and suspense with equal confidence, blending the two and serving some fun twists using both. More than just the resemblance between Rothe and a young Sarah Michelle Gellar and the smartarse dialogue this has the same feel as a good Buffy episode before the series started getting weighty.

Earlier this year there was Before I Fall with a similar premise where an alpha chick rolled around the same day avoiding her own death and coming to understand the worst of what she was. The sombreness of that piece make it seem compared to this like a remake of Groundhog Day by Paul Thomas Anderson. Really, though, the tales are basically the same it's just that the treatment of it in the earlier film comes from sober experience (though its narrator is younger) and the latter has a bitchy energy that doesn't stop to trample the roses. Be an interesting double bill.

So why should you see something that implicates you in its Groundhog Day premise yet again? (That film and its star are namechecked with very funny results, btw.) No reason except that it keeps to its plan with enough style and vigour and lets you just sit back and take it. Sometimes a choctop is just a choctop and I looooove choctops.

Review: INGRID GOES WEST

There is no like on Instagram. Facebook has long added the sophistication of grades or reasons for liking a status. You can be sad or angry or add flavour to your like with a big red heart. On instagram there's just the heart or nothing. The prologue of this satirical fable takes us on a whirlwind course a woman runs from a few hearts to a violent wedding invasion. Cut to a few months later, Ingrid, the invader, gets out of psychiatric care and finds that her mother, whom she nursed to the end before her meltdown, left her a small fortune. That's why it's a fable, big barrier out of the way. So, when she reads in a paper magazine about the newest Instagram star, Taylor, and her fixation engine revs like a top fuel car she does what it says in the title, renting an impressive apartment in L.A. and going on full stalk until she makes contact. This is on the strength of a couple of return hearts from Taylor.

If you know her work and I tell you that Ingrid is played by Aubrey Plaza you might get a good idea of how this will play out. Hold that thought. As fortune (really, sheer creepy guile) has it Ingrid finds a way to throw herself into Taylor's inner circle and gets enough of a chance to show her real life heartability that the pair are soon friends for real, Ingrid folding herself into Taylor's marriage and realm. Ingrid's nurture of the connection, a blend of invention and petty criminality, tells reassuringly that achieving this goal seems to be giving her shaky self-esteem a promising boost. Then comes the fly in the ointment: Taylor's brother, a kind of drug monster from the one percent, provides the kind of combustible threat that Ingrid feels all too keenly and from that point things start getting a tad noir.

Rather than the upward mobility aspired by a Mildred Pierce Ingrid easily prefers something more like outward mobility, a mini cosmos of smartphone applause, hearts and followers. This is why the theme of this one doesn't stop at identity hunger of something like Single White Female (namechecked for completeness in the dialogue) and shows us through the riches of what might as well be the approval of the population of the Milky Way, and what lies beneath such a claim when the flesh and blood behind the #nofilter beauty of the life on screen has to account for itself for real. The horror of this is played under the comedy but seethes beneath the air kissing, smiles and California cool.

Given the skills of the two leads, what might have struggled as satire gathers strength through confident character study. Plaza minus her deadly deadpan schtick and Olsen light years away from the traumatised or innocent she has played make this work and work the way it needs to. Social media is both young enough but worn enough to still be prey to a starker satire than this but the aspirations that motivate it are on display here. Plaza's Ingrid is constantly struggling to achieve a point where this is normal for her and finding the means to keep her persona and her real anxiety-ridden self at least fluid is a feat. Her near constant selfie taking is from both of these points and can be as pitiable as it can funny. Elizabeth Olsen as Taylor lets us see the fragility of Taylor's ascended self that seems a forced pealing laugh away from a course of Xanax. We will see something of her real face and the moment is quiet and dark.

The laughs keep coming and most of the them are recognition humour (Ingrid redrafting the closing of an Instagram post until forced to something remote but easy has a warm familiarity) but the performances of a smart and well directed screenplay allow for a lot of subtlety we might not expect from a film that plays the satire hand from the word go. There is a very funny take on Chekov's loaded gun rule, and some well turned parallels between fan fiction and social media fandom (and the perceived hierarchy in the difference) that attest to the ideas on show here but nowhere does this tale get more gutpunching than the second-thought demanding final shot. Is it a happy ending? Is it the first image of a nightmare? Turn your phone back on when you leave the cinema (you DID turn it off, didn't you?) and notice where you go first.