IT'S NOT ALL ROSIE

Reviewer: Vicky Roach.

Parkland's is the cinematic equivalent of flicking through somebody's family album. The experience is so intimate, it's almost like eavesdropping on a private conversation.

When Rosie's father dies, prematurely, from a heart attack, she flies home to Adelaide for the funeral. There, fragments of her family history lie in wait on every street corner; a complicated collection of childhood images, shadowy half-truths and unresolved conferences.

One of those unresolved conflicts is Jean, the matronly woman Rosie's father left her mother for. When Jean entrusts her with Cliff's police diaries, Rosie begins an investigation of her own, and in doing so, becomes increasingly convinced that her detective father (Tony Martin) was corrupt.

Writer-director Kathryn Millard grew up in Adelaide and her father was a detective.

"These are the points of intersection between my life and Parklands. Beyond that we move into fiction," she says, in a director's note.
Millard is obviously on intimate terms with the faded, '60s suburban dream, the neatly clipped lawns and well-pruned rose bushes, and she paints it with a keen and sympathetic eye.

But Parklands is far from being an exercise in gentle nostalgia. At heart, it's a kind of personal mystery story, where ghosts lurk in the shadows and one is never quite sure whether the danger is psychological or physical.

Cate Blanchett plays Rosie with intense understatement and Tony Martin is solidly familiar as an old-style detective.

This one hour drama was produced by Helen Bowden, who collaborated with Jan Chapman on the Naked: Stories Of Men series which screened on the ABC. Parklands is like a female equivalent of the very best of that series. It deserves a similar audience.
RATING: 7/10.

The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, 13th March, 1997.

---

Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.