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Tender
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Jessica Redenbach’s Tender is an acutely well
written, directed and acted short film.
It tackles
something which is very difficult in cinema: to tell the story of a new,
intimate relationship, not through dialogue or conventional scenes of
interaction, but almost solely through highly physical scenes of sexual
contact.
Redenbach succeeds where many other
filmmakers (including Michael Winterbottom with 9 Songs) have failed. Too often in cinema there is an
excessive mood-psychologisation of sex scenes (even
in Gaspar Noé’s Love, for instance): happy fuck, sad
fuck, vacant-eyes fuck, angry fuck …
Redenbach, by contrast, stays close to the palpable,
carnal reality of erotic encounters, but also manages to stylise and abstract
proceedings just enough to raise this brief tale to a higher plane of mood and
expression.
There is a
relationship drama here, but it is suggested, told in vivid fragments, rather
than laboriously spelt out for us.
Tender is graced by an especially
wonderful performance by Katie-Jean Harding, who also appears in an earlier,
notable work by Redenbach, Invasion (2009). This short captures well that weird zone of human
behaviour which strange or traumatic experiences can launch a person into – David Cronenberg territory, in a way. Some slightly blurred
moments in the cinematography give a good force to the piece. Tender is more accomplished direction-wise,
but the two films make a good double.
Tender is a triumph of the short form,
announcing in Jessica Redenbach (who has also done
scripting for TV series) an Australian writer-director of enormous promise.
© Adrian
Martin February 2012 / August 2017
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