This week a couple new Australian releases, both shepherded by Jane Campion (whose Piano script won an Oscar in 1994), illustrate the idea that the best place to find something different this summer continues to be the video store.

Campion served as executive producer on Soft Fruit, the first film from writer/director protege Christina Andreef. It chronicles a few crucial months in the life of the Petrov family, who...yeesh, I hate to call them dysfunctional now that the word has become as ubiquitous in common usage as “bread” and “nine” and “carbon fiber,” but by comparison these folks sincerely do make the Mussolini clan look like the kind of folks you’d be happy to have on neighborhood watch. The ditzy mother is dying from liver cancer. The alternately caring and abusive Russian father spends his time lovingly tending his fruit trees and insouciantly shooting songbirds he perceives as a personal affront to his quiet. Coming to their modest but lushly wooded property to lend comfort are estranged self-mutilating parolee biker/druggie son Bo and daughters Josie, who prattles incessantly about her life in San Diego raising genius offspring; Nadia, who continues an compulsive sexual relationship with her ex-husband; and Vera, who hopes a child conceived artificially will put an end to her loneliness. The only thing they have in common is excess weight, which inspires the daughters to attempt losing kilograms faster than their chemo-treated mum.

As frightfully dreary as this sounds, Soft Fruit is quite a gentle, humorous film, much lighter in both look and content than would be an American movie treading similar ground (such as Meryl Streep’s One True Thing). Although Bo and Nadia seem to be the most accommodating to their mother’s needs -- whether showing a not entirely selfish willingness to share her oral morphine, or to act out passages from Jackie Oh (probably not unrelated behavior) -- every character shows at least one good quality. It’s how you imagine a Road Warrior family reunion might go if only they could get together someplace nice like Paris Mtn. State Park instead of in the middle of the desert. B

Far less agreeable is Campion’s latest directorial project, co-written with sister Anna, Holy Smoke. This tale of a young Australian woman (Kate Winslet) whose family hires a “cult exiter” (Harvey Keitel) after she falls in with a Dehli guru looks like a feature-length Madonna video. Cross-dressing, sexual obsession, poorly established characters, and quasi-Eastern pseudo-mysticism run amuck in a dreary, directionless morass -- Oy’s Wide Shut. I will say, however, that it was somewhat interesting to see Keitel lounging around the outback wearing lipstick, a red dress, and one snakeskin cowboy boot. D

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page