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My second night's viewing at the 8th BIFF brought me somewhat closer to (my
adopted) home, combining as it did the Australian movie Strange
Planet (something of a followup to the hugely
successful Love and Other Catastrophes) and the New Zealand release
When Love Comes.
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Very fittingly, these two films were screened back to back at
the Festival: both explore romance and love in an urban setting, and
both happen to follow groups of six people struggling to come to terms with
their emotional, sexual, and professional identities. In both films, too,
pivotal scenes take place at the beach outside the busy-ness of (respectively) Sydney and
Auckland.
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I must be one of the last people in Australia not to have seen Love and
Other Catastrophes, so any direct links Strange Planet may have
to Emma-Kate Croghan's earlier work would have been lost on me.
Nevertheless, this romantic comedy turned out to be quite enjoyable on
its own, too. In saying that it follows the lives of three young women and
three young men over the course of one year, in a series of episodes, I'm
likely to give away the ending of the film to any but the most inexperienced
of viewers -- but, as always with such comedies, it's not the fact that
A does inevitably 'get' B in the end (as do C, D, E, and F, here)
but what happens on the way there that is the main focus of the movie.
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So, we first meet the characters on New Year's Eve, as they make their resolutions for
the new year -- the item highest on the agenda generally
being to find love at last. As the year progresses,
they go about their goals in frequently hilarious, but generally
ineffective ways: ambitious Judy (Claudia Karvan) hopes to finally find work
intelevision by sleeping with the estranged TV-executive husband (Hugo
Weaving) of her radio-host employer; Sarah (Alice Garner) goes through a
series of radical makeovers to discover what she really wants to do; and
Alice (Naomi Watts) struggles to find the strength to regain her sexuality
as well as return to university.
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At the same time, Joel (Aaron Jeffrey) gradually loses it after his wife
dumps him, almost on the stroke of midnight, that first New Year's Eve;
attractive lawyer Ewan (Felix Williamson) begins to question life and
changes everything in his after seeing Taxi Driver; and nerdy Neil
(Tom Long) puts his faith in science to find the perfect wife. As this
description may indicate, the film doesn't shy away from exploiting some
familiar clichés, but a witty and occasionally insightful script and very good
casting save the film from being merely 'more of the same',
and the audience from boredom. It's unashamedly romantic, but far from soppy.
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Despite some superficial similarities, When Love Comes is a different
kind of beast. It's clearly centred around Katie Keen (Rena Owen), a 1970s
New Zealand one-hit wonder who went on to play in the U.S. in venues of
increasingly dubious reputation, and who has now come back home to find a
way to recharge her batteries and come up with material for a new show her
American promoter-boyfriend Eddie (Simon Westaway) has already booked.
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She stays with her old friend Stephen (Simon Prast), who has troubles of his
own with his young love interest Mark (Dean O'Gorman), a troubled lyricist
who seems almost constantly drunk or drugged. Between binges, Mark works
with guitarist Sally (Sophia Hawthorne) and drummer Fig (Nancy Brunning),
two lovers who are desperate to record their first single.
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As Katie begins to question her entire life and Stephen increasingly turns
his attention to supporting her, the jealous and insecure Mark becomes
more and more unstable. Things get tearful as events come to a head
on a visit to Katie's home by the ocean which forces her to
confront her past -- and, when her boyfriend arrives (with the musicians in
tow), her present. With all six crammed into a small house,
the emotional and sexual tension becomes palpable, and all must finally
come to grips with their own identity.
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While the choice of portraying three couples -- one gay, one lesbian, one
straight -- may seem somewhat too neat and formulaic, and while the film
occasionally tries to do too much in too short a time (writer-director Garth
Maxwell explained that the script was cut from its original three hours to
just over 90 minutes), it generally succeeds on the strength of the
performances of its main actors.
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Rena Owen, whose excellence in Once Were Warriors has already been
noted widely, is devastating as Katie Keen: she fills the screen in a scene
where Katie sings backing vocals for the girls (although Owen doesn't sing
herself here), and holds nothing back at the times when Katie is most
vulnerable; Prast and O'Gorman are also very good at portraying the sexual
frustration between the hopelessly in-love Stephen and the emotional and
insecure Mark. Brunning and Hawthorne are somewhat less central to the
plot -- some of their scenes, which frame the movie and introduce its main
action as a series of flashbacks, seemed somewhat haphazard and extraneous,
which again might be explained by the considerable cutting of the script in
pre-production.
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Nonetheless, despite its much more serious treatment of its subject matter,
in comparison with Strange Planet, When Love Comes too is
an ultimately uplifting movie experience.
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Details
Strange Planet, by Newvision 1999.
Director: Emma-Kate Croghan.
Writers: Emma-Kate Croghan, Stavros Kazantzidis.
Cinematographer: Justin Brickle.
Cast: Claudia Karvan, Alice Garner, Naomi Watts, Tom Long, Felix Williamson, Aaron Jeffrey, Hugo Weaving.
When Love Comes, by MF Films 1998.
Director: Garth Maxwell.
Writers: Garth Maxwell, Rex Pilgrim, Peter Wells.
Cinematographer: Darryl Ward.
Cast: Rena Owen, Simon Prast, Dean O'Gorman, Nancy Brunning, Sophia Hawthorne, Simon Westaway.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Axel Bruns. "The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution: 'Strange Planet'/'When Love Comes' (BIFF #2)." M/C Reviews 31 July 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/strange.html>.
Chicago style:
Axel Bruns, "The Ocean Is the Ultimate Solution: 'Strange Planet'/'When Love Comes' (BIFF #2)," M/C Reviews 31 July 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/strange.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Axel Bruns. (1999) The ocean is the ultimate solution: 'Strange planet'/'When love comes' (BIFF #2). M/C Reviews 31 July 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/screen/strange.html> ([your date of access]).
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