15 Amore

(Maurice Murphy, Australia, 2000)

This low-budget project – set, like so many modest local productions, largely within the confines of a single house – is an autobiographical labour of love from writer-director Maurice Murphy (part of the original team behind the Aunty Jack and Norman Gunston TV shows).

It is a gentle, World War II story about two Italian prisoners, Alfredo (Steve Bastoni) and Joseph (Domenic Galati), who are sent to serve at the house of Dorothy (Lisa Hensley) and her three young children.

The tensions and possibilities unleashed by the fact that the father of the house is absent are further exacerbated when two Jewish refugees, Madame Guttman (Gertraud Ingeborg) and her daughter Rachel (Tara Jakszewicz), arrive as lodgers.

In some respects, 15 Amore reminded me of some unfairly overlooked Australian films of the 10BA funding era, including Ken Cameron's The Umbrella Woman (1987) and Tim Burstall's The Naked Country (1984). Like those movies, Murphy's finely places its detail within both a human and a social context. Melancholy alternates with exuberance – and a certain respectful distance with regards to those characters who live by a strict code of honour (especially Dorothy) is intriguingly preserved.

The lighter details of the film are, on the whole, the most successfully achieved, such as an enjoyable running gag involving Madame Guttman's ongoing struggle with a child and a rooster. The voice-over reminiscences of young Brendan (Nicholas Bryant), read on the soundtrack by Bill Hunter, sometimes break the delicate ambience; they spell out too much, too often.

Much else, however, is seriously misjudged, particularly as the film steps up its dramatic register. An excessive intensity mars the key scenes in which Alfredo sings to the assembled family, and Joseph and Rachel shyly cavort naked around a tree like Adam and Eve.

Confusion will momentarily reign in some viewers' minds when all the main characters are quizzed by army officials about the secret goings-on in this household. It seems, at this point, as if the movie has suddenly become a dark erotic thriller in the ludicrous vein of Gross Misconduct (1993) – an effect I do not think was intended.

Part of the problem with this gear-change is that we never really understand the motivations of Madame Guttman – a Jew who, even after suffering displacement during wartime, still considers herself "a German first", to the point of yelling at local cinemagoers that the patriotic newsreels they watch are vile propaganda. Her act of intimate betrayal is central to the film's drama, and yet it remains opaque and unreal, even as its effects are laboriously unfolded.

Murphy's personal journey into the past has the keenness of bittersweet, nostalgic recall, but lacks the necessary, deeper insight into the hearts and minds of its adult protagonists.

MORE gentle Australiana: Till Human Voices Wake Us, Dreams for Life

© Adrian Martin October 2000