|
BENEATH
CLOUDS
2/10
Australia
2002 : Ivan Sen : 87 mins
Fed
up with her home town in the remote wilds of New South Wales, teenager
Lena (Dannielle Hall) dreams of escaping to live with her Irish father
in Sydney – she’s inherited her Dad’s blue eyes and fair hair, hiding
the fact that her mother is Aborigine. When she finally sets off for the
big city, she meets up with native-Australian Vaughn (Damian Pitt), a
surly tearaway constantly in trouble with the local cops, who are mostly
white and racist. The pair overcome their initial hostility and make their
way through a countryside where the people are often no less hostile and
forbidding than the spectacular natural world that surrounds them…
Sen’s
debut is, frankly, an embarrassment – not so much ‘Beneath Clouds’ as
badly ‘under the weather’. His script is a stilted collection of awkward,
entirely phoney confrontations that explore some powerful ideas (racism,
identity, the transition to adulthood, the impact of environment, etc)
with an unremittingly heavy hand. Incompetence is no crime, of course
– but Sen insults his audience by making Lena ostensibly ‘white’, as if
we’d be unable to sympathise or connect with a more dark-skinned ‘surrogate.’
Pitt
is, at least, capable of radiating blasts of angry energy – and he does
have one good scene (the only one in the picture) early on where he squares
off against a racist fellow-inmate on a work camp. As the racist, the
suitably Aryan-named, blazing-blue-eyed Oden Waters does somehow manage
to make his lines sound convincing, but his screen time is all too brief.
The other performances are so uniformly wooden that the fault must lie
with the supervision the actors received from Sen, rather than their own
deficiencies.
And
while his script is atrocious, Sen’s direction is scarcely much better
– every point is ponderously rammed home with some grindingly predictable
cut, reaction shot or music cue. He’s also responsible for the music,
and the soundtrack is the only area where Sen shows any promise at all
– his score is moodily effective in Michael Mann-ish kind of way, but,
as in every other regard, he goes way over the top far too often. Allan
Collins’ cinematography, meanwhile, is the film’s one redeeming feature
– though, given the spectacular nature of the New South Wales countryside,
it might have been harder to come up with a film that wasn’t occasionally
striking to look at.
9th
March, 2002
(seen 8th February, Berlinale-Palast - Berlin
Film Festival)
For
other films rated 1/10 and 2/10 check out our Diorama
of Dishonour
by Neil
Young
-
|
