Review: LADIES IN BLACK

Teenaged Lisa starts work on the cocktail frock floor of a big department store in Sydney at the end of the '50s. She quickly proves more capable than the slave status normally accorded a fresh school leaver and is soon head hunted by the even ritzier section of model gowns, presided over by the mysterious mittel European Magda (a superb Julia Ormond) whose quotable savoir faire promise much more and tastier wisdom than the Anglos at the cocktail dress counter. Things look good.

At home Lisa is Leslie, girl from the suburbs whose mum (Susie Porter) makes her clothes for her using the same patterns she used when Leslie was ten. Dad is a burly lug (Shane Jacobsen) who needs a little schooling if he is to survive the decade to come. Leslie eventually must decloset herself about her name change but for the nonce she lives a double life.

Elsewhere at the counter Myra is having trouble getting her husband interested in her and we will hear the gamut of the euphemisms for homosexuality suitable for mixed company until matters get crucial. Her counter mate Fay is bored with the oafs she encounters but doesn't quite know what she wants. Magda's homelife is a pleasantly managed continental European series of fine breakfasts and soirees. The 2018 audience knows the reffo tag for racism and the story will negate the power of it through love of various kinds.

Even the darkest of these themes is blended like the ingredients of mock chicken in an old Home Ec text but lest I give the impression that this is a twee piece I should point out that veteran Bruce Beresford keeps a firm hand on the helm and takes what is essentially a feelgood tale of a girl watching the times around her change and smuggles in a fair amount of contemporary observation to allow some harder corners to poke through.

The xenophobia is not surprising of itself but its casualness might remind an Australian audience of recent speeches on the floor of the Senate that might well have been made during the film's setting. The scenes of mother and daughter negotiation feel natural and pointed clarifying the kind of sexual politics to come. The sexuality of Myra's Frank has a bizarre conclusion, all the more considering that the source novel was not written in the '50s but he '90s. The subplot's wrap-up could have come out of a British grim-oop-north family saga. Source material or hasty writing? It's hard to tell.

Beresford stitches a lot of post war Sydney on film into the palette and we're allowed to see enough of the work to mentally comment. It's a pleasant way of letting us join the real past with the detailed construction of it for most of the screen time.

I kept wincing at the score, though. The mallet approach to emotive orchestral scoring with a piano tinkling in cutely came so close to being embarrassing I wondered if it were irony. But, no, I suspect that the '70s chick flick tweets on the 1001 strings of Bartholemew Cubbins were paid for and delivered without a smirk. I can't fault it for not sounding like John Carpenter but couldn't help feeling that most of the intimate and weighty moments between characters would have meant more if the music was ditched. This kind of jobbing film music neither serves the period of the setting nor this one.

However, I wonder how many people will care about that. Why should they? What they get is a radiant cast performing a frequently amusing and engaging story about a society on the turn that ends, as it must, on a note of naive optimism. Cynicism need not apply here. It's just the adaptation at work. I wasted neither my time nor money on this ticket. I just kept thinking of the similar and more exhilarating earlier Beresford film The Getting of Wisdom. I guess I missed the struggle.

Review: BEAST

Moll is a young tour guide on the Isle of Jersey, bored but boxed into mundanity by a mother who treats her like hired help while the other daughter is showered with favour. Even Moll's birthday party is deflated by sis who announces a pregnancy. Moll strays to a dance, stays all night and is saved from date rape by a man who seems to have appeared from under the soil. His name is Pascal and he is everything Moll's mother hates and fears with an equal fury. Pascal is nature. Moll is in love.

Oh, and there's a murderer on the loose, abducting teenaged girls, raping and killing them and leaving them in shallow graves for later discovery. When they're not betting on the Portuguese farm worker their money's on Pascal. Pascal is golden blonde, sweaty and as dangerous as all freedom but understands he must earn Moll's trust. Both of the pair have a past and it's violent and guilty. But ... is he the killer?

Michael Pearce's intense debut feature is a study in contrasts. It's not just the wild nature vs corsetted civilisation on either side of the love story. It's also in the stiff and brutal motion of the fearful villagers and the strange balletic movement of the lovers when they are alone. And, while Pearce strives for a balance between these elements he seems to have found a need to prefer to write the symbols large. This never feels clumsy, though, it gives more of a sense of these things, images and actions, needing to be stated with strength. When you see the scene with the rabbit you know you'll see it again with higher stakes in allegory. This is not the self-conscious severity of a Bruno Dumont but neither is it subtle. It assumes you recognise it plainly. The gleeful shaky cam moment on the golf lawn with the roaring nocturnal beach punched in does what a lazy film leaves to an orchestral score. The nuance is elsewhere.

Most of it is in performance. Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn in the lead roles stun with their range and can be at their most menacing or eerie in the quietest exchanges. Geraldine James as Moll's mother is the embodiment of interpersonal domination, changing course on a five cent piece to control the mood and output of everything living within every cubic centimetre she surveys. Her interactions with Moll are sobering in their efficacy. In one of those unsubtle but strong touches mentioned above Moll's mother has another incarnation in the form of a flown-in police officer whose gothic interrogation scene comes from an even deeper nightmare. Yes, Moll is seeing and hearing her mother in the interrogator. We know. But we are still compelled.

When I see any film I look for its statements. Sometimes these can be and remain obscure but now and then they are so certain that the next task of seeing how the film expresses them is part of a more unconscious process. And then at the third act I wake this up and prepare to relish the taste of it. An '80s horror movie ends with the wink that that monster is still with us. A good rom com gives us a sting that the reconciled lovers have issues they haven't even dreamed of. But here, following each unfolding revelation I honestly had no idea of where it was going. It did. I didn't. Because of that alone it will be among my best of this year. But there's so much more. It's beautiful. It's ugly. It's good.