Sarah Watt says freely that many of her films, including her earlier short animations, are really explorations of anxiety. Humour is certainly one way of keeping terror at bay, and of bonding families just dogpaddling in order to stay afloat. But Watt is also tackling some pretty important questions here, about ethics, consumerism, coping with fear and living with grace. She does so with emotional intelligence as well.
I'm going to stick my neck out here. The directors whose work I most enjoy are those who bring close tender observations to the mundane, and who put it on screen with empathy and playfulness. It's no accident so many are women: Agnes Varda, for example, Jane Campion at her best; Shirley Barret at times, Sarah Watt. To downplay the importance of such films, because of their domestic settings, is to make a grave mistake: the kind once used, for example, to downplay the importance of the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, because his subjects were domestic.
..........In a country where taking the piss is a standard defence against just about everything major, including death, God and your football team letting you down, Watt's humour cuts through. She is a a filmmaker to treasure.
If may leave you feeling a bit melancholy, as it did me:
With his latest short-term girlfriend in tow, long-absent son Ned (Ben Mendelsohn) returns to the troubled family homestead where his ageing father Bruce (Bryan Brown) is dying. After a warm embrace from his sister Sally (Rachel Griffiths) and a rough welcome from his grumbling, bedridden dad, tensions rise.
For Ned, the whole place is a landscape of unsettling memory triggers involving his older brother Cliff (Josh McFarlane) and his younger sister Kate (Sophie Lowe), with whom he shared a close relationship. As Ned involuntarily flashes back through a series of disturbing and tragic events, his hardened feelings towards his father become increasingly strained and spiteful.
In traversing a dramatic terrain fraught with taboo topics and moral tripwires, Ward, in an impressive feature debut, proves a master of tact and understatement by side-stepping sensationalism as she delicately explores the conflicted soul of a middle-aged man forced to face the demons of his past.... <cont>
Haven't felt up to Samson and Delilah, that's for sure!
Storytelling in this film becomes tense and, at times, shocking. We've seen war footage, we have even seen massacres on film. But the deaths of the five; and the sequences on the wharf at Dili two months later, are gut-wrenching.
It's a film deliberately designed to provoke debate. Should they have pulled out earlier? The young journalists, as portrayed hy Damien Gameau, Gyton Grantley, Mark Winter, Nathan Phillips and Thomas Wright, are innocent to the point of naivety, driven by a sense of competitiveness and perhaps adventure but, gradually, as the reality of the imminent invasion sinks home, by something more.
There is a scene, described by Greg Shackleton in a famous piece to camera, which Connolly recreates beautifully, as the group sit awkwardly in a hut the night before they arrive in Balibo, and try to answer the questions of the Timorese who have taken them in.
This really ratchets up the emotional stakes. As do the preparations and the responses of the five as the Fretilin troops withdraw, and the crew insist they will stay to get their story.
As Roger East " overweight, out of condition, dogged, dogmatic, floundering through rugged terrain " LaPaglia gives a performance without vanity.
But he is more than matched by Oscar Isaac, a young Cuban-American actor who plays a complex man, Jose Ramos Horta, with both lightness and substance. He doesn't look like the youthful Ramos Horta. But he has captured the man's arrogance, his charm, his manipulativeness, and his idealism. He materialises and dematerialises throughout the film like a genie in jungle fatigues. It's an impressive performance and provides the necessary counterweight to East's dogged bluster.
The film is bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue in which Bea Viega, as fictional character Juliana, gives evidence to a United Nations Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the liberation in 1999. How do you weigh the deaths of six journalists against the deaths of between 100,000 and 183,000 Timorese who died in the 34 years of Indonesian occupation? As Ramos Horta said at the film's premiere, who will remember their names?
Balibo is a strong film, and Connolly's best to date. Despite the plaudits of many of my fellow critics, it's not a perfect film. There are some moments, such as a fight in a swimming pool, and Horta's farewell speech, which felt to me unnecessarily melodramatic, or declamatory. But it's a bloody good one.
It doesn't pursue too far the questions posed in Jill Joliffe's book Cover Up, about Australian government complicity in covering up the journalists' murders. Or indeed the issue of whether the Whitlam Government, with its listening posts, could have got the journalists out.
But the questions are there, and unavoidable. Despite declarations in opposition, Kevin Rudd's government has been slow to act on the findings of the NSW Deputy Coroner two years ago that the five were murdered and not, as the Indonesian and Australian governments insisted, caught in crossfire.
Finally, Australian feature films have got up off the couch this year and begun to ask important questions. You owe it to yourself to see this film.
Watching with interest.
, i like a nice outback period drama 