Spring Part 1: Just Like Me

The days grow longer and brighter as the green buds burst and the sneezes splash the air. It's spring and our thoughts turn to attraction ... to the difficult and irresistible ones in our lives, the ones we can neither live with or without, who'll be the death of us and to whom we are always extending one last chance. So, don't get too blithe with the sprigs and puffy eyes: summer's on the way and spring is smirking and saying, "that's just like me."

Season trailer

A New Leaf (USA 1971, Elaine May)

One of the funniest rom coms ever from the dark, satirical mind of Elaine May. Walter Matthau's upper crust bachelor must marry or forego a fortune so plans to find a future victim of a planned honeymoon accident. She is the klutzy Henrietta, played by May herself. For all the toughness of its social satire it yet retains a strange goodness of nature. From the year that brought us the obscure gem Little Murders and the deathless classic Harold and Maude.

Diary (Hong Kong 2006, Pang Brothers)

The Pang brothers output has appeared uneven but really they've just been trying different things and they are to be applauded for straying from the expectation that they should just keep remaking The Eye. Diary is the tale of a young woman grieving from rejection meets the object of her obsession's doppelganger and they start their own romance. But what is really going on? The mystery intensifies so much that the film has to begin all over, the second part having it's own opening credits. Not fun but deep and dark and worth your while.

Dead Ringers  (Canada 1988, David Cronenberg)

As with The Dead Zone David Cronenberg showed he was happy to broaden out from his trademark body horror into terror more psychological. Dead Ringers' tale of the intimidating intimacy of a pair of twins who use their societal clout to get what they want and their knowledge of each other to keep things interesting ... and disturbing. Jeremy Irons thanked David Cronenberg in his Oscar victory speech years after this film, adding that some of us would know why. "Why" was being lifted from the talent-obscuring aristocrat roles that he had been getting that promised a career of blandness. Cronenberg clearly saw much more in him and the results are anything but bland.

The Innocents (U.K. 1960, Jack Clayton)

Spooky go at the oft adapted Turn of the Screw has proven the most durable due to casting and some very canny depictions of the weird. You want ghosts? Ditch the mist and bedsheet look and show them how the were in life. There are scenes in this film that can still go right through you. And that's before you get to the brooding psychological undercurrent which, depending on how you flip it, can lead to even more disturbing images. A must.

The Ugly (New Zealand, 1997, Scott Reynolds)

A nightmarish mental hospital on a dark and stormy night. A young hot shot psyche visits a troubling patient, a serial killer with the demeanour of a quiet young bloke who doesn't always understand his crimes. The shrink wants a career-making triumph, an expose and cure of the monster's disorder. But it just isn't going to go that way. That goes for us. We think we have this film pegged from the urban gothic opening but we're going to need some presence of mind as those on screen seem destined for perdition. An extraordinary genre-warping entry into the 1990's fascination with serial killers on screen The Ugly is unjustly little seen. Let's change that.

Eyes Wide Shut (U.K./U.S.A, 1999, Stanley Kubrick)

Often dismissed as a transitional effort for Kubrick on his way to A.I., his final film has both substance and depth. The cinemaster is having some winking fun with the casting of the golden couple of Cruise and Kidman but his examination of the double standard at the centre of the story is rigorous. The ad campaign led to expectations of debauchery when Kubrick had made elegance. And eloquence: the final word of the film and his screen career might well have been his own last words.

Apologies for the lateness of this season. Life catches up and gets in the way. But it's here. Have fun finding some of these and enjoy everyone. Sooner than I would have wanted, spring part 2 will be up. So, take your antihistamines and buckle in.

Review: ANIMALS

Laura and Tyler are BFFs. They party all night, every night and crawl by day through hangovers to jobs they don't care about. As Tyler says, all days are the same forever which is why we need nights to divide them. Laura has been failing to write a novel for ten years which is as long as she's known Tyler. Family and friends ask her about it but by now it's as earnest a query as "how are you?" One night she picks up hunky young pianist Jim who is perfect. Things are about to change.

This is a film about friendship, real friendship, solid intimacy, the kind of friendship where memories of it are created every day. The film begins with Tyler asking Laura how they met. The dialogue is constructed of impressions without context; the speakers know what they mean and we can imagine. That kind of friendship. But it's also about the kind of friendship where the closeness means knowledge of weakness and temptation and what happens when its triggers are left untouched, even for a moment.

Under the images and the words and the music and the fun there runs a current which proves (without spoilers) to be the central journey. It does have to do with friendship but it also has to do with the recognition of its boundaries, how a lifestyle of fun as an expression of life has become a yolk. Laura really might have that novel in her but it won't get written until the present stops looking so much like the past. That dialogue about their first meeting appears twice in the film but never in real time; we hear the conversation but see the women who spoke it or are yet to speak it in vignettes of their shared experience. The arc is Laura's. These are her memories. For all the bracing declamation Tyler performs, the more stagy the more pertinent, it is the novelist Laura tuning her memory into prose.

There are many montages of the women partying and at first it feels repetitive. But there are so many the it soon becomes recognisable as part of the film's weave. With a lot of the sequences we hear dialogue between them in voice over. It's not just economical filmmaking it's quite accurate in that it indicates the difference between the words we use to construct memories and the images that appear to us more immediately are distinct. And we begin to understand that this is Laura's experience replaying, from the first frenetic and boisterous montage early on to the magnificent celebration towards the end. It is a cinematic realisation of a writer playing her capital of experience and eventually discovering her own voice.

Holliday Grainger gives us a Laura who is struggling against the wasting time but still resentful of what is expected of her as a young, bright woman. What we see most in her is doubt and even in the most gut chugging scenes of interminable boozing and snorting she brings a barely controlled self-loathing at yet another occasion where she has buckled rather than take control. One moment is told with intimidating truth: she surmises infidelity and flees the scene to privacy in a cubicle as her insides seem to be dissolving; she knows the worst is true and has no power to reverse it. It's exactly how that feels.

Alia Shawkat, whose team has included me since Search Party, takes a little more effort to fit into the more showy and declaiming Tyler. To be fair some of her rants (lifted by the source novelist) are more fashioned than natural but she does smooth it out and adds depth with some subtle pathos. If anything, her role is driven by denial and its friction with inevitability. A little stagy? Sure but she's just like that. Laura begins with a foundation whereas Tyler is on 11 from the start. It's a hard gig but Shawkat gives enough self-realisation to let us in before she turns into a pillar of caricature.

Fra Fee shows more than meets the eye and adds presence by (this will read like faint praise) being believably nice. Dermot Murphy as as the dark 'n' charismatic poet Marty has fun with his seducer-in-chief, offering clear allure and queasy danger.

This film has been called Withnail and I for girls. Hmm. Couple of things. Withnail and I was released in the '80s but set in the '60s. The two men face the prospect of having to grow up while the "greatest decade in the history of mankind" comes to a shambling, exhausted close. It's not entirely nostalgia; the '70s await with hard times and if these boys are actors they are going to have to start acting. That theme of youth's shelf life is common to both films but Laura and Tyler are lodged deeply into a social environment that is not about to reject them, those own-bootstraps are going to take a lot more pulling. Absent from the friendship of Tyler and Laura is the male reserve that prevents declaration of it: they love each other enough never to need to utter the "as friends" qualification. This, tellingly, is clearest when they are bickering which they do increasingly and with increasing stakes. Withnail and I is a deserved modern classic, effortlessly quotable and always enjoyable on a re-watch. Animals is a different case, using the language of cinema more delicately and getting in closer. The comparison doesn't hurt either film but is unhelpful.

I was hungover at the Nova (rhyme! well, in an Australian accent) and the sight of all that drinking was making me wince so perhaps I was well placed to sweep the infection of the fun from the slide and look more closely at the story of the women and how they were going to cope with that scission that must affect every relationship that starts in youth and continues to maturity. Also, I had a guilty recognition watching Laura tinker at her writing and frequently feeling like an impostor. Did that for a little over a decade with about the same to show for it. It was really meant to be something to start with  but in time it turned into a social introduction. And I was younger and rallying around with the same kind of fun folk. A drink always sounded better than editing. It had a painful resonance.

Pain and resonance are real flavours in the mix here but so are so much else. Animals is neither the jolly japes of young bohemians larking about as laddish ladies but nor is it a chick flick. Just as the greatest children's cinema works because everyone who watches it is or has been a child, everyone who knows the fear of leaving youth will find something here. I personally maintain that we are far better able to deal with accounts of our own lives if we dispense with nostalgia and recall the instruction of the years, for good and ill (this can be easier said than done, though). This story involves a lot of weakness but it is a tale of strength.

Review: THE NIGHTINGALE

Clare, a young wife, mother and ex-convict in Van Diemen's Land is legally bound to a young psycho in a uniform who delays letting her go with a ticket of leave. Lieutenant Hawkins likes to show her off to the mess hall as a singer ("our little nightingale") and later violate her as a rapist of an evening. After her husband in a rage breaches the line by assaulting Hawkins the latter seeks drunken revenge which escalates into murder, even more rape and then infanticide. The next day, Lt. Hawkins decamps for Launceston (pronounced Lonston, as well it might have been) cutting through the wilderness with a small expedition. He's not escaping guilt, he feels none and his position puts him outside of retribution anyway. He's chasing a promotion and a ticket out of the backwater he oversees. Clare, lone survivor of an atrocity that will leave you shaking to watch, swears revenge, picks up a local tracker and goes in pursuit.

So far this is a revenge western (or southern). The constant stand off between Clare and Billy will inevitably soften or be forced into trust and a bond will ensue. The baddy toy soldier will get some bullets for lunch and the credits will roll. But the best revenge plots put their enraged protagonists through an ethical wringer and end unpredictably. Even John Wayne's Ethan in The Searchers had to stand back from his primeval hatred and take some serious stock. After the opening of this story we have no greater wish than for nasty, lingering deaths for Hawkins and his crew. Until a big and almost eerie spoil-able moment, we expect that very thing will be happening if we just sit tight and wait.

But this is a Jennifer Kent film. Her first feature, The Babadook, showed us grief, survivor guilt and depression as a monster movie where the monster was just a thought made manifest but grew into terrifying power. It remains one of my favourite films of the decade and one of the best ever made in this country. When I heard that her second would not be horror but revenge I was nothing but intrigued. She'd only made one feature film but I was eager to see her take on the subject. It was worth the wait.

There's a lot going on here. First, the setting. Van Diemen's Land, the most brutal of the Australian penal colonies. While there is little direct depiction of convict life Clare and her family are convict caste and we are in no doubt as to where they sit in the social order. They are also Irish which puts them into near untouchable status: it wasn't just bodies that got transported to the southern colonies.

Billy, an indigenous man living where the most complete exercise of Australian genocide was enacted. During the second act he learns that all of his people have been exterminated by the British. So, it's not just the rape, the murder and the child killing, but the violation of most of the people on the island. From the off, we are looking at a hunt we know to be bigger than its parts and one that we, against ourselves, want to end in retributive violence ... in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful country on the planet.

This is shot in 4 x 3 which keeps us all close together in the bush which looks tall rather than scenic and gives a strong sense of lowered visibility. It's this rather than an affectation for the classic cinema shot before widescreen formats that its plot might suggest. That's another thing, there is no cuteness in this film. Even in The Babadook we got quite a lot of winks from classic and obscure horror movies showing on tvs in the house. It wasn't intrusive but it gave the film a slight distraction it suffered from. Here, we are in a place at a time and that's it. Well, of course it isn't, it does have a great deal to say to any time but within that tight 1.37:1 frame it's 1825.

And then there's reconciliation. Clare's lower caste state and Billy's even lower one fuel the beginnings of an understanding between them. But Kent knows, as do we, that she cannot deliver what hasn't happened unless it is through fantasy. Never say never, perhaps, but it won't be happening here where the violence is so easy to get away with and where few, if any, care to change that. That is the world we are in right up to the end credits.

And then there's the central driver which at first just looked like revenge but increasingly just looks like damage. Both Clare and Billy are bound by their trauma and whether it has been administered personally or through military invasion it can be hard for them to discern the difference between retribution and relief. We have been asking exactly what she has in mind in chasing seasoned soldiers through difficult terrain, outnumbered and outskilled. A pivotal moment sees Clare confronted with the very question of what she should do and it is life or death. She is fresh from an act of like-for-like brutality which tells us she is capable but when we see her in this (no spoilers) moment her and our most frantic thought is for survival, not justice. Billy couldn't just say a thing or two about that he has been. What was a serviceable vengeance plot now has a scary depth to it.

Irish actor Ainsling Franciosi holds the centre of the screen, in fury here and shivering vulnerability there bearing almost visible weight in her every move. Baykali Ganambarr keeps his gravity against Clare's tempest with a passivity that feels practised from the experience of pummelling authority. When he breaks from it the sense of his freedom can draw tears. Surrounded by bush that can variously soothe the eye but scream like a lost soul at night and settlers and cruelty-driven convicts on the way a kind of balance is struck but it's delicate and ready at the slightest touch to topple and kill.

Jennifer Kent has made another film of great depth that stretches out from its closest genre to shock us into thought. Reports of walkouts during early festival screenings are understandable but create their own questions. The violence is rough and hard to watch but its real ugliness comes from motivation rather than gore (though there is some of that). If what you've heard worries you I wish I knew how to assure you that the tougher parts of this ride are part of something transcendent that is worth every minute of screen time. Mind you, I sat through the entire end credits if only to feel soothed by the Irish lament that played over them. If you do see this film and don't feel an overwhelming urge to go forth and do something good for someone then you really have some hard questions for yourself.