9:27am Monday 24th July 2006
By David Parkinson
Alternately tough, desperate and vulnerable, Cate Blanchett contributes a deeply moving portrayal to Little Fish, a consistently disconcerting Sydney drama about a reformed junkie's fraught bid to put her life back on track.
Moreover, she's ably supported by Noni Hazlehurst, as her over-protective mother, and Hugo Weaving, as her bisexual stepfather, who relies on heroin provided by retiring gangster Sam Neill to cope with losing the fame that he once enjoyed as a rugby league star.
But while director Rowan Woods makes evocative use of the Little Saigon neighbourhood, he fails to integrate the drug deal subplot involving Blanchett's amputee brother, Ray Henderson, and her Vietnamese ex-boyfriend, Dustin Nguyen.
Consequently, this sombre study of wounded courage and misplaced affection ends on an anti-climactic contrivance.
Yet, such is the strength of his characterisation that Woods is able to prevent the interweaving storylines from becoming overly soap operatic, even when Jacquelin Perske's screenplay lapses into enigmatic ellipses that threaten to disrupt the meticulous pacing that often makes the picture feel like a calm between two storms, as the characters take stock of their mistakes and shruggingly decide to make some more.
A ruinously reflective air also pervades Philippe Garrel's Les Amants Reguliers. Following Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003), Louis Garrel revisits the Paris riots of May 1968 in this epic, but ultimately frustrating, treatise on politics, poetry and passion.
Garrel's father (who was part of the influential Zanzibar film group in the late 1960s) and cinematographer William Lubtchanski superbly capture the visual spirit of these post-nouvelle vague times and stage one exceptional sequence on the May Day barricades.
But Garrel Jr.'s discussions of ideology and art with the indolent Julien Lucas too often tail off into a drug-fuelled incoherence that is nowhere near as compelling as his touchingly hopeless crush on free-spirited student, Clotilde Hesme.
This is undoubtedly an evocative mood piece, which reveals that many Soixante-Huitards were merely trendy bourgeois kids seeking a little excitement. But, despite its ambition and integrity, it lacks the intensity to engross.
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