Desert bloom
Japanese Story, dir. Sue Brooks.
Japanese Story seemingly starts out as just another road movie—the laziest and most overdone of all the genres in Australian cinema—but it soon turns into a very
satisfying journey of the heart.
Sandy (Toni Collette) is a geologist working in the masculine world of the Western Australian mining industry. She’s a workaholic singleton, so wrapped up in her career that she can’t see her life is idling in neutral. Somehow she finds herself chauffeuring a Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima), around the outback, in the vain hope he’ll purchase her company’s software package. This odd couple in a four-wheel drive eventually discover a rapport that blossoms into an affair after the Australian desert nearly destroys them.
And then, just when you think you’ve got the film sussed, the film-makers supply a twist which is so elemental and frightening that it flies off in another direction entirely. Many Australian films have no third act, no reason to keep you in the cinema for a further 20 minutes—thankfully Japanese Story does.
The script by Brooks’ long-time collaborator, Alison Tilson, is beautifully structured, but unfortunately it does suffer from some wooden dialogue and a couple of speeches about the Australia-Japan
relationship do little to advance the drama. The film overcomes these problems: partly due to Sue Brooks’s wonderful eye for the strangeness and beauty of the Pilbara, and partly because of Toni Collette’s work as the female lead.
At the moment of the story’s key turning point she pulls off a performance of such rawness and truthfulness that it transcends acting. Without recourse to any tricks of the trade, Collette makes you think that you’ve stumbled inadvertently upon a woman in genuine distress.
In a year full of inept Australian films, at last we have one worth recommending. Instead of a lame, commercially driven, so-called ‘comedy’, Japanese Story offers a mature and insightful film for adults, not unlike that other recent Australian classic, Lantana. Though maybe not as good as Ray Lawrence’s multi-layered drama, Japanese Story runs a damn close second.
Brett Evans
Shyster’s paradise
Gettin’ Square, dir. Jonathan Teplitzky.
My favourite scene in this film is when ex-crim Dabba and his hardman Crusher go all gooey over Dabba’s twin baby daughters—the effin byootiful ones. Timothy Spall makes such a good ex-crim and Richard Carter (better known in White Collar Blue) is such a great old granite face that the scene has the effect of