Any Questions For Ben? (M) Director: Rob Sitch. Starring: Josh Lawson, Rachael Taylor, Daniel Henshall, Felicity Ward, Christian Clark, Rob Carlton, Lachy Hulme. 114 minutes
'Never mistake motion for action.' Hemingway's phrase appears as an epigraph to Any Questions For Ben?, the new Australian comedy from the veteran Working Dog creative team (The Castle), and reverberates throughout; an existential countermelody to the film's innocuous soft rock soundtrack.
Where 'action' connotes achievement, 'motion' merely implies activity. Ben's (Lawson) life is nothing if not active. He is a well paid marketing strategist, with a knack for reinvigorating tired brands. His social and sex lives are exuberant. He's forever looking towards the next item on his unending recreational to-do list. Quite simply, Ben is constantly in motion: when we meet him he's onto but his latest girlfriend, his latest job, his latest apartment in a long line. Not bad for a 27-year-old.
But for Ben this is a glamorous yet vacuous existence. This point is driven home when he attends a careers evening at his former high school. He is upstaged by a fellow student, Alex (Taylor), who is nothing less than a human rights lawyer working for the UN. So sharply does Ben feel the contrast between her achievements and his (it's hard to compare selling socks and vodka with saving the lives of women and children in Yemen) that he begins to question whether his life has any meaning at all.
He turns to various confidantes for assistance. His dad (Carlton) means well, but is not really into all that self-examination stuff. His roommate Andy (Clark) is too easily distracted by TVs and other shiny objects that enter his field of vision. Ben's best friend Nick (Henshall) is contemplating marriage to his longtime girlfriend Emily (Ward), a path that Ben can't even begin to contemplate at his relatively tender age. As Ben's search for answers meets endless dead ends, his crisis deepens.
Tales of alienation and angst within materially obsessed societies are hardly a new phenomenon. What distinguishes Any Questions For Ben? is that it explores that particularly Gen Y phenomenon of the 'quarter life crisis'; the epiphany (justified or otherwise) that, despite a dedication to 'experience' and 'connection', one's life is hollow. In this, it is very much a film for its time: one of the signifiers of Ben's crisis is that he doesn't own any physical photos, only digital ones stored in his phone.
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