Review: BLAZE

As twelve year old Blaze is walking home from school she witnesses a brutal rape that ends with the victim's death. Back home she withdraws into shock under her doona until her father tries, unsuccessfully, to get her up for dinner. Eventually, she approaches him and tells him what she saw. A police and then medical examination later push her further into a tangle of rage in which she blames herself for not trying to stop or at least report the crime. A heavily intimidating pre-trail examination seals the deal and, however loving and supportive her father is, nothing can wrest her from the inner life that has brought the dragon into her room and the grotesque nightmare world that appears as soon as she closes her eyes. "Long is the way and hard the path that leads up to the light."

Most of this film is a visual show of what Blaze is going through, difficult flashes of memory, grasping attempts by a child to normalise her world and the effects of the failure of that to heal. Puppet dragons, stop motion figurines, psychotropic journeys inward are told in a dazzling array of colour and form that tell quite accurately the child's creative reaction against what feels like betrayal by the entire world. This is not a film mostly composed of nor even reliant upon fantasy sequences. The very earthly official and legal procedures have the sick feeling gravity to them and even the relatively safe haven of Blaze chatting to her friend suffers some dark shading. I write that and realise I might be giving the impression that this is a grim film. Its central subject is certainly grim but it is so deftly engineered as to deliver the moments that horrify or sadden with poignancy as the peaks of action, not the troughs which allows relief and a sense of assurance that we are not be pummelled by didactic sermons. It is this kind of trust that appears to have bonded Julia Savage with director Del Kathryn Barton. For all its apparent minimalism, Savage's performance is one of palpable commitment.

Del Kathryn Barton is a high profile Australian artist and this is her first feature film. She has incorporated her aesthetic heavily into it, creating variously a charming and artless vision of a child to the fiery nightmarish visions of Blaze's pain to the means of her way to strength. By keeping the emotive force high we are spared an artist's showreel and get, instead, something powerful enough to grasp and keep after the credits roll. I had to miss this one at MIFF but was glad it appeared straight away after the festival in cinemas. I didn't know how glad I would be, though, which made seeing it at a normal ol' choctop cinema a treat that will push it into my top titles  of the year. If you were skeptical about how an art-heavy movie can also be a good conventional narrative, AND make you well up in the best way, go and see Blaze.