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Topless Women Talk About Their Lives
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I giggled
twice during this film. The first titter happened within about the first
minute, as a German tourist in
That adds
up to around thirty seconds of slight comedy.
The other
eighty-eight and a half minutes are dull, witless, shapeless and ugly. Topless Women has been widely compared
to the Australian romantic, twentysomething comedy Love and Other Catastrophes (1996), but the comparison does this
Harry
Sinclair's feature debut, written and shot on the run after the success of his
TV series of the same name, tries to be goofy and poignant by turns. It fails
on all levels. We follow the messy love lives of a pack of young things, with
special attention paid to the pregnant and confused Liz (Danielle Cormack).
I am all
for the presentation of unusual human behaviour on screen but, psychologically
speaking, most of the action in Topless
Women makes no sense at all. A newly married couple decides to separate on
their wedding night because of a minor tiff involving a friend. A woman is
stabbed in the stomach by a dangerous nut, and then politely pretends nothing
has happened. Couples break up and make up without the slightest rhyme or
reason.
Alarmingly,
budding NZ filmmakers seem even fonder of the British director Mike Leigh (Career Girls,
1996) than
Australia’s
own hopefuls. This film apes Leigh's sloppy cinematic technique and his casual,
groundless misanthropy. It is a painfully de-glamourised milieu full of
completely unlikeable people.
Sinclair's
use of Leigh's improvisational methods leaves the cast floundering, and results
in a void both comically and dramatically.
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