In it, Rachel Griffiths plays Anne-Mary, an introverted, repressed small town girl with a big voice, kept under the mysogynistic thumb of her father, Jack Pugh, played by Jonathan Pryce. As the town baker, he delivers his loaves in a Luciano Pavarotti mask. Whenever his feet get cold, he uses Annie-Mary as a human sleeping bottle.
Funnily enough, while listening to the BBC Radio's The Strand, a recent movie of Griffiths came up. Beautiful Kate is directed by Rachel Ward, and set in the Australian outback. It is about impossible love, comming of age and family secrets. The interesting thing about the film is that Ward has set it in the present, with flashbacks tot he 80's; what she has attempted to recreate is an impossible romance for a cynical audience in a permissive society.
I love films set in the outback; I love minimalist films set in bumfuck no-where in general. They are always beautiful and exotic, infused with a sense of the Edenic utopia gone awry. The remind me of my childhood, where life was slow, the days were always warm and humid, nothing ever changed -not even the weather- and that little neighbourhood was all there was to life.
Another one I watched recently was Down in the Valley, where Edward Norton plays a delusional cowboy who falls in love with a teenage girl, played by Evan Rachel Wood (the "Queen" in True Blood).
I think about these films are that because there's less going on, a lot more attention is paid to simple details, like how the light would fall througha flower vase or how people say their words, and all those other little details that are in our lives, everday, that we fail to notice.
