Sydney Film Festival 2009

By Jonathan Fisher, June 15th, 2009

Sophie Lowe stars in Rachel Ward's engrossing family drama Beautiful Kate

I returned last night from the Sydney Film Festival, my first in two years (I missed last year's because I was out of the country) having crammed six films into two days. Usually I like to spend a week up there seeing a dozen or so movies but this year I have work commitments and could only manage a weekend trip. It was a weekend very heavy on the Steven Soderbergh, as three of the films I saw were directed by him and another was produced. Most of the films I saw will be arriving theatres at some point in the next few months, and extended reviews can wait until then, but

By many accounts, 2009 was a rather lean year for good movies at the Sydney Film Festival. From my admittedly limited selection, I would concur. The first film I saw was Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, a documentary-style examination of the inner life of a high-class escort who offers more than just sex to her clients and, more than one would imagine, often does everything but have sex with her clients during her meetings. The escort is played by porn star Sasha Grey, whose acting talents I'm still not convinced by. She delivers a convincing enough performance as the guarded Chelsea, who is well-versed in politics, art and general girlfriendy chit-chat. The Girlfriend Experience is a better experiment than film, attempting with some success to delve into today's high-end society's obsession with the fabrication of relationships over real relationships, and not just with regards to sex. Chelsea's profession is mirrored by her boyfriend's, who is a personal trainer -- another person who sells his talent and forges artificially intimate relationships with his clients.

The second film I saw was Henry Selick's Coraline, based on the book by Neil Gaiman. This was the best movie I saw at the festival, a wonderfully imagined, perfectly realised and exciting blend of children's horror and fantasy. A kind of twisted take on the "Alice in Wonderland" story, it concerns a young girl named Coraline who discovers a door in her family's delapidated new house that transports her to a world inhabited by her 'other' mother and father -- almost identical to their drab, lifeless counterparts who concentrate on work at the expense of entertaining Coraline, except they strive to make their little girl happy. And have buttons for eyes. There is, of course, something slightly wonky lurking beneath the surface of this 'other' world, and the true twisted nature of this dimension is revealed to us in a truly gripping way.

My next film was a dreadful little Portuguese comedy called Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Woman about a man who falls in love with a young woman living across the street from him. The story of the film chronicles the difficult path to their union, and beyond. This movie sucked. It had the pacing of an Antarctic glacier, the subtlety of a wolf-whistling builder, and the self-importance of Robert Wilonsky (look up that reference if you didn't get it). I won't write any more because hardly anyone else on the planet will see it, and the less said about it, the better.

Next up for me was the world premiere of Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate, an engrossing family drama about a man named Ned (Ben Mendelsohn) who returns to his family's rural South Australian farm as his father (Bryan Brown) lies on his death-bed. There is an implication of a deep, dark secret between Ned, his late sister Kate (Sophie Lowe) and late brother Cliff. Ned's only living sibling, played by Rachel Griffiths, takes care of their father, with whom Ned has a very strained relationship. Through the course of the movie, flashbacks fill in the blanks about what really happened between Ned and his two late siblings, and the movie that emerges is a touching one about emerging sexuality, festering regret and the sad tendency in life of the sins and suffering of the father to be relived again and again by the son.

(To geek out a bit here, I had no idea that the session of Beautiful Kate I attended was the world premiere, and as such boasted an impressive array of Australian movie industry figures. I lined up just a few people behind Margaret Pomeranz, sat two rows behind Matt Newton, met Rachel Ward and Bryan Brown and got an eyeful of Toni Collette as she walked down the red carpet. I also managed to briefly congratulate Sophie Lowe for her heartbreaking performance as Kate, and was greeted with a pleasant smile and thanks. I was hoping to stop Ms. Lowe to briefly talk to her about the film and her performance but she charged right past me. Oh well, maybe one day when I'm famous...)

On Sunday, the day began with the well-made, intriguing and rather disturbing documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. This film is a peculiar one, an analysis of Roman Polanski's 1977 trial for rape that ultimately led to him abandoning the United States in favour of the much more forgiving France. What struck me as interesting about this film was not that it had an axe to grind, pro or con, with regards to Polanski, but that it instead focused on the mechanics of the trial, and how deeply flawed the whole proceedings were. At some points of the film I found myself thinking Polanski received a small fraction of the punishment he should have received. When it looked as if justice was finally to be served, I found myself again conflicted because the motives of the judge in harshly sentencing Polanski were entirely for the wrong reasons -- something that both the prosecuting and defending lawyers agree on. This is not a particularly pleasant movie, but it is a fascinating one.

Finally, I strapped myself in for Steven Soderbergh's 4-hour biopic Che, about Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. This was such a difficult film to sit through, but was not necessarily a bad one. The first half is the superior one, chronicling the rise of Che's fame in the Cuban revolution, with a parallel narrative about his addressal of the United Nations. Told in an entirely objective manner, it succeeds to neither sanctify or vilify Che, and with an exceptional performance by Benicio Del Toro as Guevara, paints an intimate and no-frills portrait of the revolutionary. The second half is where Soderbergh's piece lost me. It tells nearly exactly the same story as the first half, following Che's attempt to liberate Bolivia from what he and many other perceived as an oppressive regime. The only difference between the second and first halves is the ending. In one, Che wins, in the other, Che loses. He lives by the sword and ultimately dies by it. My problems with Che, despite finding it interesting, is that it is far too long. It's a good two and a half hour movie stretched out into a pretentious, self-indulgent four-hour one. There is very little character development in the second half. Soderbergh draws Guevara's character in the first half, and just hits 'repeat'. Ultimately I found Che a big disappointment.

That's it for the film festival for another year. One big frustration of mine is that Pixar's Up was not on offer, and we have to wait here in Australia until September to see it, while much of the rest of the world is enjoying it as I type. And the studios wonder why they're losing the battle against internet piracy...