MIFF Session 5: SHARE

Sixteen year old Mandy wakes up the worse for wear on her front lawn. Someone shares a video with her from the previous night. It looks like the beginning of a sexual assault. She has no recollection. While she tries to keep control of the process and make her own enquiries the video is discovered by her parents and it becomes a police matter and then a legal case. Meanwhile, she is dismissed from her basketball team and suspended from school. She has entered the aftermath of a rape survivor. She can't face her friends but can't live without them. The law hangs overhead but seems to grind to a halt.

Because of the explosive nature of the subject the treatment by writer/director Pippa Bianco is kept sober and observational. While there are significant revelations that appear throughout they are met with the stunned acknowledgement of Many and a family that is immediately supportive but increasingly powerless to move the forces she needs. Meanwhile, she goes through her days, trying to make sense of what happened and how it is affecting her life so profoundly and there is a crushing sense that the law is drifting from her as effortlessly as it does in a Kafka story, far beyond her control.

Bianco's suburban normal is concrete in contrast to the thick ethereal cloud of the law and at its centre young Rhianne Baretto as Mandy cuts holes into the light with her wonder and anger, constrained to continue living the same way despite everything changing. Early scenes with her friends and teammates feel natural, both joyous and contemplative. Encounters with them after the case has begun (including the accused) have an unnerving truth to them as they can swing from shunning and meaningless pranks to flashes of genuine affection. Everyone's living in the same place and getting their cherry slushies from the same 711 and the way those pockets of memory can open with riches or stay zipped up on a caprice gives an uneasy memory. And then there is the near constant pealing pings of the phone messages that might be salvation or just more uploadable, sharable violence.

There is a hint of Bresson's Mouchette in the deceptive plainness on show here which leads up to Mandy's final action which involves a potent choice. We see her make it but still feel strange. That's it, the best a narrative like this can do when it insists against mainstream histrionics, is to plant a question in us which must linger.