snaunton

Joy is fifteen, good looking, living in a Sydney suburb and ready to hit the excitement of the local shopping mall. There is a theft, a chase, a clinch with a boy, a fight and a homecoming. The hard-edged, choppy cutting allows little dialogue, but words are important: Joy's thoughts during the casual clinch (or is it coitus?) first bring forward the longing and loneliness beneath her self-assurance. Words are there from the start, also, in bold overlain strips of commentary, of parental admonitions and in one instance, ambiguously, possibly, Joy's own words. This highly effective device, as ironic as any Greek chorus, leads naturally to the screaming argument about her that erupts between her parents when Joy returns home. She is, in the end, a lonely girl sitting on her bed, hearing her parents' arguing, looking rather lost. At first this film seems at a distance from the issues it is raising, seems to adopt a position of moral neutrality towards her behaviour, but then the Joy's alienation and the reasons for it start to appear. The theme is serious, but this film is a lot of fun, in its action and visually. Deborah Clay is splendid as Joy, with all the attitude the part requires and with an energy, especially in the chase, that put me in mind of another athletic female lead, Franka Potente in Lola rennt (1998). Watch it if you can.

David Lodge's prize-winning short presents Charles Bukowski's poem on a visit to the dentist by an elderly man. There is boredom, threat (the black trees seen through the surgery window) and even sex (the attractive female dentist), all captured in the brief compass of some ten minutes. This is a film of old age, reflected in the slightly self-conscious retro sepia monochrome with spots and scratches specially added, and titles in ageing typewriter style (thus conforming to the contemporary principle that credits are not there to be read and are therefore made semi-legible). A good watch in a brief time.

This astonishing film, with its screen split between positive and negative (and which is which?), evolves primaeval single-celled nuclear forms into living, rhythmic chains of existence and then, beyond, into creatures of tribal consciousness, both ancient and utterly contemporary. This film captures the mutability of existence, the ambiguity between fertile penetration and aggression, absorption and synthesis. To watch it is an exquisite experience.