Beautiful Kate (MA). Running time: 90 minutes. Director: Rachel Ward. Starring: Rachel Griffiths, Bryan Brown, Ben Mendelsohn, Sophie Lowe, Maeve Dermody
The 'tastefully nude' young woman is surrounded by cloudy blackness. These shadows evoke at once a sense of mystery and of menace as they gnarl around her milky form. Is she emerging from that darkness, or receding into it? Is she the predator or the prey? Do youth and beauty personify strength or vulnerability?
The publicity poster for Beautiful Kate is as ambiguous as the controversial Bill Henson photographs it so blatantly references. The film unpacks these ambiguities, not solving but exacerbating them and making them sing with empathy for the angst of family trauma, the pain of growing up, and the ripping, gripping claws of unresolved guilt.
Rachel Ward has written and directed a sensitive film, adapted from Newton Thornburg's eponymous novel, that makes an accessible and compelling story out of a scenario that might otherwise evoke moral indignation if not revulsion — namely, sibling incest.
Incest is but one of a cluster of dark secrets that have swollen and festered between 30-something writer Ned (Mendelsohn) and his father (Brown). When Ned returns to the rural Australian family homestead after a 20-year estrangement, these familial boils must be located and lanced if there's to be a chance of redemption for either Ned or the ailing patriarch.
When Ned arrives at the house with his nubile and flaky young lover (Dermody), he is initially reluctant to address the old wounds. But returning to the site of past traumas must necessarily awaken dormant memories. Dreamlike flashback sequences mete out the pertinent aspects of Ned's troubled back story.
We learn that there was an inappropriateness to Ned's relationship with his twin sister Kate. The extent of this aspect of their relationship — the part it played in Kate's death at a young age and Ned's subsequent escape from the family home — is revealed gradually and graphically. The simultaneous menace and mystery of youth and beauty comes into play. But there is also a sweet innocence to the scenes, so that while they are shocking, they are not sleazy.
Kate (Lowe), lively, lithe and passionate, remains an elusive figure. Many of her scenes are filmed from Ned's point of view, and our understanding of her is limited by his limited perspective. It is unclear what motivated her to pursue such a relationship with her brother, although social isolation,