In the pretentious title stakes this one fall short of current incumbent Winter of Frozen Dreams but given it is all set in Sydney, Australia they couldn’t go with the ’frozen’ bit I assume. Bryan Brown stars as a renaissance man who runs a book shop and plays chess against his computer. He does of course drink beer and womanise so as not to turn off the bloke demographic. I doubt this would have been an easy sell to the average Ozzer so plenty of topless ladies are thrown into the mix, including some random topless sunbathers lying on a bit of grass.
Bryan is busy playing chess and selling books when he hears about a dead woman, who had been pulled from the harbour a week ago, being identified as a women he knew ten years ago. He used to be a political agitator but has now married and settled down with Gretel. The two have an open marriage which sees Gretel spend time with her young and hunky boyfriend. Not to be outdone Bryan wanders about with his shirt off most of the film but he doesn’t see much action between the sheets.
Anyway he goes to the girl’s funeral and later meets up with fellow attendee, prostitute Lou (Judy Davis). Bryan’s dead girlfriend had been on the game after they broke up and he is keen to learn about her decline and his involvement in her eventual demise. There is no murder angle as it is established early on it was suicide, but Bryan has to dig about his past to try and get some answers.
Some of these come from Lou who has the dead girl’s diaries, and unfortunately, her guitar. The focus alternates between the two leads with scenes of Bryan’s relationship interplayed with Judy struggling to get drugs and to understand her own life and prospects. She reads through the dead girl’s diaries and plays her maudlin music on some tapes.
Lou and Bryan spend a long weekend together where she gets off the junk and he rebukes her advances. Can these troubled souls find the answers they need to move on with their lives?
This was a decent slice of life but I didn’t learn anything or become invested in the characters. Judy Davis, who we know from Lewis Collins starrer Who Dares Wins, was good as Lou but I couldn’t get used to her tight ginger perm. She was pretty skuzzy as the drug addled whore, although I struggled to have sympathy for her character. Bryan did his usual serviceable performance but I got no emotional resonance from him and he seemed to be the same character he usually plays, chugging beer and being blokey.
It was fun to see Baz Luhrmann as Judy’s occasional flat mate who couldn’t get it on with the lady of the night. As an actor he makes a great director.
All in all this was an essay in damaged people trying to move on and therefore hardly what you’d consider to be classed as entertainment. There were decent performances, and sunny Australia looked nice, but overall you won’t learn much or invest in the largely one note characters.
Best Bit : Lou tries to pay her rent 13/23
No comments:
Post a Comment