In the opening moments of the terrific new Australian film Look Both
Ways, an artist named Meryl (Justine Clark) witnesses a train
accident. Meryl is already in a dark mood. Two weeks earlier her
father died suddenly with no advance warning, and heading home from
her mother’s house, where she’s been since his funeral, Meryl’s mind
is filled with dreadful images. When the police question her, she
must struggle to focus. She knows she did not imagine the accident.
She saw a man playing with his dog, and that man is now dead.
Two journalists arrive, a reporter named Andy (Anthony Hayes) and a
photographer named Nick (William McInnes). Although they’ve never
met before, Nick is Meryl’s neighbor, so they leave the scene
together, each of them pretending to engage in normal conversation
despite the tragedy that’s brought them together. But like Meryl,
Nick is primarily absorbed in a personal shock of his own; he’s
recently been diagnosed with testicular cancer.
These are the elements, death and disease, around which
writer/director Sarah Watt builds her narrative. But something
magical happens in the telling: instead of doom and gloom, Watt
somehow creates one of the most life-affirming films of the year.
Look Both Ways is a down-under version of Crash, and its polar
opposite in every way: subtle where Crash is bombastic, true to the
little moments of real people’s lives where Crash manufactures big
moments of melodramatic overstatement. The characters in Crash are
enraged by their circumstances. The characters in Look Both Ways
understand that, as residents of the “first world,” their personal
catastrophes are simply the stuff of life. There are only two
options: draw comfort from your connection with those around you or
live in lonely misery.
Like her heroine, Watt studied art but failed to make a living as a
painter. Meryl takes the practical step of working for a greeting
card company. Watt turned to animation. Her breakthrough came with
the 1995 animated short Small Treasures which won the OCIC Award at
the Melbourne International Film Festival (given to “the most
outstanding Australian film [of the year] promoting human values”),
and went on to win the “Baby Lion” for Best Short Film at that
year’s Venice Film Festival. Clocking in at 15 minutes, Small
Treasures is the story of Jane (voiced by Rachel Griffiths) who is
pregnant with her first child. Like Meryl, Jane sees danger
everywhere, but she still embraces life with all its inherent
tragedy. Jane is clearly Meryl’s precursor.
One of the most welcome features of Look Both Ways is its sexual
balance. In addition to Meryl, Nick, and Andy, there are three more
primary characters, Anna (Lisa Flanagan), who is Andy’s pregnant
girlfriend, the widow of the man killed in the accident (Daniella
Farinacci), and the man who was driving the train at the time of the
accident (Andreas Sobik). These six individuals are surrounded by a
rich ensemble of colleagues, family members, and friends, comprising
a cross-section of Adelaide (located near the center of Australia’s
southern coastline) but representing small “first world” cities
everywhere.
(In contrast, Los Angeles, as depicted in Crash, is a male-dominated
world with relatively few women. Furthermore, while the male
characters in Crash have three-dimensional lives, the women in Crash are
primarily defined by their roles in the lives of the male
characters. None of the female characters in Crash has a backstory.)
Andy and Anna are the most verbal characters in Look Both Ways, and
as they make their big decisions (keep the baby? stay together?),
they have the most amount of dialogue. Meryl and Nick are both more
visually than verbally-oriented, and that’s the first thing they
come to appreciate about each other. The morning after the accident,
Nick, out for an early run, rescues one of Meryl’s rejected
watercolors from her trash bin at almost the same moment Meryl is
scrutinizing Nick’s photograph of the accident scene (which
dominates page one of her local newspaper).
Meryl’s vivid inner life is depicted in fluid animated sequences.
She doesn’t just imagine disasters. A trip to a local swimming pool
with her girlfriend finds her gliding past reefs and
brilliantly-colored tropical fish with her mind’s eye. Nick, on the
other hand, runs through huge stacks of still photographs in his
mind. They provide background on his extensive travels as well as
insight into the systematic research he does when he learns about
his condition. These staccato collages also add an element of
suspense. Does Nick have the capacity to connect dots?
The widow and the driver have no dialogue. Their two stories are
presented in separate arcs; as the other characters resume their
daily lives, hushed scenes of the widow and the driver add
punctuation marks of grief, reconciliation, and hope. All six lives
have been forever changed by the accidental death of a man hit by a
train. The widow and the driver must face each other before either
can begin to heal.
The obvious message of Look Both Ways is that there are no easy
answers for any of us. There is no way to make our parents, friends,
or family immortal. There is no way to keep our children safe. There
is no way to protect ourselves from death’s inevitability. Whether
the end of one specific life is caused by disease, accident, or
whatever, at some point, every life will end.
In itself, this is trite, of course, but Watt’s message comes at a
critical time. Westerners in general, and Americans in particular,
have been so traumatized by terrorism since 9/11, that we’ve
willingly traded precious civil liberties in the attempt to make our
world safer. Watt insists that we face the truth. The more we
attempt to protect ourselves, the more we cripple ourselves, making
the life we actually have less worth living. It’s a difficult
message to fully absorb, but it’s the message that we most need to
hear right now.
Our thanks to the editors of The Digital Filmmaker for granting permission to repost this review. To access The Digital Filmmaker please click here.
Photo of Justine Clark in Look Both Ways courtesy of Kino International. All Rights Reserved.
© Jan Lisa Huttner (3/31/06)
|
