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Watermark
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Whatever one's opinion of Somersault, the Australian success story of 2004, one thing is certain – compared to Georgina Willis' Watermark, the other local release of the week to score a berth at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, Cate Shortland's debut feature seems like a fully achieved masterpiece. This only goes to show that some films must play better with subtitles. Because the first grievous assault that Watermark makes is upon the viewer's ears: flat, banal voices cued to a droning, ultra-cheesy synth score by Allyson Newman. This is an inept, abysmal movie in every department. The wooden cast (including Jai Koutrae, Ruth McDonald and Sandra Stockley) struggle to make a poorly crafted tale of love, loss, duplicity and repression comprehensible. Not a single moment of any scene flows in a natural way; the film's clunkiness is so comprehensive that it makes one appreciate the baseline skill of even the most ordinary commercial assignment. In the curiously worded credits, Willis attributes "visual imagery and design" to herself – over and above the director, co-writer and co-editor tags. Direction, one assumes, normally should include "imagery and design"; in this case, the extra credit paradoxically indicates that it goes hardly any further than that. Everything to do with the guidance of actors and the staging of scenes is left at the most primitive, unformed level. All that can be said in Watermark's favour is that Willis is attempting something rare in Australian cinema: an arthouse drama told in a convoluted and hopefully lyrical way, leaping freely between different time-frames and subjective experiences. It is thus a shot at what Pier Paolo Pasolini once called the cinema of poetry. But it takes more than endless shots of water – the most clichéd metaphor in contemporary movies – or inserts of paintings to achieve such poetry. Watermark merely provides another case study of what can go so terribly wrong in Australian movies. © Adrian Martin September 2004 |
