Festivalia
Having enjoyed Little Fish so much, we took in an early session of the other notable current Australian release, Look Both Ways, which has won a prize in Toronto. M. and I both came away with serious reservations, yet somehow agree that in the end this is indeed a good movie. Neither of us thought the acting was particularly good, and even when it was, the lines given to the characters would be cliched. The animation and photo montage segments were only intrusive in the first fifteen to thirty minutes or so, when the director seemed incapable of letting them go long enough to let the story progress of its own, but were otherwise visually interesting, even stunning, and a nice device into the characters’ minds. The supporting characters, however, were generally briefly drawn and one dimensional or unlikable. As is the fashion lately, it’s a movie with intersecting story lines, like Grand Canyon and Magnolia and . . . I forget the other, more recent examples, but you get the ones I mean. Like those, it relies on artifice and is only as successful as its devices can make it. Yet somehow it ends up feeling bigger than the sum of its badly fitting parts. Maybe that’s the appeal of these kinds of movies: the synergy they create. The narrow field of play never feels small, and even the small-minded characters have their focus on larger things. I don’t expect this to do well in America, but it will likely, as in Toronto, do well enough overseas in general. While I think it leaves out a lot it would have done well to include, for a small budget production, it’s worth seeing.