Maybe it was meant to be essay...

Question

on the movies Look both ways. what could be some things that i could discuss int he essay?

Answer 1

Look Both Ways isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I could have drunk the whole pot. It made seeing an Australian film pleasurable again, and it's a while since I could say that.

It's a comedy, but so oblique and sad to begin with that it takes a while to recognise. And it's about death, or fear of it, which might scare some people away, thinking it's going to be hard work. It isn't, but it isn't dumb either. The script is mysterious and sophisticated. It's perhaps a film for people who have tasted life's seasoning, good and bad.

The script is built on what people are thinking, rather than what they're saying. Sarah Watt is an animator and her short films (Small Treasures, Living With Happiness) were intimate and internal, like daydreams. This is her first feature and she throws in a couple of richly painted animated sequences to take us inside her characters' thoughts. The animations are meant to disrupt our view of what's normal and connect us directly to the characters' deepest emotions. Once we know these things, the events of their daily lives become heightened: funnier, sadder, scarier.

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AdvertisementAn example: Meryl (Justine Clarke), a young illustrator, is riding a suburban train home when she has a vision of the train lurching off a bridge into the street below. She daydreams three separate and horrible accidents, all of which are shown by animation. By the time she gets off the train, we know her imagination is uncontrollable and unpredictable and slightly morbid. We also know she's right - this could happen. It already has: at the start of the film, Mary Kostakidis from SBS announces a terrible rail accident on the news.

Meryl has other reasons for feeling mortal - she is returning from her father's funeral. By now we share her anxiety - we know something bad is going to happen. She watches a man in a park, throwing a stick for his dog.

Elsewhere in the city, Nick (William McInnes) sits in a doctor's office, looking stunned. He has just learned he has cancer. He is a newspaper photographer and his thoughts flash by in a rapid photomontage. Back at the office, he tells his editor, Phil (Andrew S. Gilbert), who has a peculiarly Australian reaction. "Christ! You only went for a travel medical!" (One of the best things about the film is the way it captures, with gentle humour, the great Australian masculine inarticulacy, particularly at times of stress.)

As Nick is heading home for a weekend of cancer panic, he is collared by Andy (Anthony Hayes), a pushy young reporter. Someone has gone under a train near Nick's place. He can take the pictures on his way home. That's how Nick meets Meryl - she is a witness. The man with the dog has been killed. So a man who fears he is going to die is sent to take pictures of a man who died without warning, and there meets a woman whose father has just died. Did I mention it's a film about life and death issues?

On the scene, Nick watches a woman approach. The dog recognises her and she drops her shopping, as she realises what has happened. Nick shoots a few frames with a long lens - a grief shot that makes page one the next day. When Andy the reporter arrives home later, a young woman (Lisa Flanagan) is on the doorstep, waiting to tell him she's pregnant. Andy behaves badly. The theme now encompasses hatch, as well as dispatch. Match isn't far behind.

The script concentrates on these three characters - Nick, Meryl and Andy - over the course of a very hot and difficult weekend. It's partly a love story, as Nick and Meryl fall for each other, and it's partly about forms of grief, although not in a sombre way. At one point Meryl asks Nick if he's familiar with the seven stages of grief. "What's the point of knowing about them when you've still got to go through them?" she wonders.

The performances in this movie are exceptional, a sort of strained realism heading towards mild hysteria. In SeaChange, where he came in to fill David Wenham's shoes, McInnes had an unflappable charm that was partly an illusion. Here, he is shattered, trying desperately to hold it together. Watt has written a part (for her husband) where she can observe the great Australian stoicism under real stress. It's not just masculine either: part of what makes Clarke so good as Meryl is her heroic struggle to find the right tone for what she's feeling. Her father is dead, she will lose her job on Monday if she doesn't work all weekend and she's falling for a man who seems on the verge of tears all the time. No wonder she's confused.

Look Both Ways reminded me at times of Ray Lawrence's Lantana, for its ensemble structure, its care with characterisation and its underlying seriousness, but Lantana wasn't a comedy. Look Both Ways isn't a thigh-slapper either, but it is full of wry observation about the mysteries of human behaviour. It has a very individual consciousness behind it, an off-centre intelligence that makes it a pleasure to watch.