3.5 stars (out of 5)
The latest from rarely-seen writer/director Sue Brooks (who must have taken time off after the failure of her lamely comic Subdivision), this jigsaw-plotted Aussie drama proves rather more like her Japanese Story with its sometimes unsettling atmosphere of desire, chance and fate.
We open with 16 year old Grace (Odessa Young) travelling into the remote Western Australian countryside on a bus with pal Sappho (Kenya Pearson) and listening and grooving to their iPods. It seems like they’re on holiday and well away from adult supervision, which means that when hunky stranger Jamie (Harry Richardson) boards, it’s no time at all before he and Grace are flirting and Sappho’s feeling distinctly like a third wheel.
However, Brooks turns things around several times to reveal the stories of other key players in this tale, each with their own particular perspective, and they include: Grace’s parents Denise (Radha Mitchell) and Dan (Richard Roxburgh), who wind up doing precisely what the title says; an old-school private investigator (Terry Norris as Tom) on the edge of retirement, whose wife (Norris’ offscreen missus Julia Blake) doesn’t want him to take on what should be his last case; and truckie Bruce (Myles Pollard), who the script seems to forget about.
Something of a tough one to discuss, Brooks’ pic has been accused of unevenness but surely the ambitious tone is one of its strongest suits, as we shift from teen lust to marital angst to unexpected comedy to wry character quirks to a sort of cosmic coincidence. And the performances are all strong, with Mitchell and Roxburgh (a long way from TV’s Rake) very fine, Norris sublime, cool cameos (notably Peter Rowsthron and Kelton Pell) and a breakthrough turn from Young, whose elusive Grace holds the subtle saga together.
I Wake Up Screening 