Dir. Ana Kokkinos, Australia, 2006, 118 mins
Cast: Tom Long, Greta Scacchi, Colin Friels
Review by Carol Allen
Daniel (Long) is the lead dancer in a company led by his friend and mentor Isabel (Scacchi) and has a cool, somewhat detached relationship with his dance partner and live in lover Bridget (Anna Torv). One day, he goes out to buy cigarettes for Anna and is abducted by three women, who sexually abuse and torture him. When he reappears after twelve days, he is traumatised, unable to talk about his experience and no longer able to dance. When he eventually goes to the police, they treat it as a joke, so he disappears from his former life, takes a job in a bar and devotes himself to trying to track down the three women and, as the filmmakers describe it, "regain his lost self".
This is a strange movie, part psychological drama, part erotic thriller with not always successful pretensions to be an art movie. Long, who at times has an uncanny facial resemblance in this to the late Rudolf Nureyev, is rather good in the central role - changing from a confident man, who has totally immersed himself in his dance career, to one who is lost, confused and ultimately violent. The details of his experience are revealed in increasingly sexually explicit and often disturbing flashbacks. Apart from one sequence of body nudity, the three women are mostly seen heavily robed and masked, with only their eyes visible, so like Tom we have no idea what they look like. The role reversal of a man being physically abused by women as opposed to the more common situation of the other way round enables Kokkinos to examine sexual politics and sex as a weapon for power and revenge, though without satisfactorily exploring them, in that we never discover the motivation of the three "weird sisters'".
Both Scacchi and Friels are good as the artistically passionate Isabel and her former husband, a policeman, who comes to Tom's aid and there's a delightful performance from Deborah Mailman (Kelly from the Australian telly soap "The Secret Life of Us") as Julie, the sweet and down to earth girl with whom Tom forms a relationship in the latter part of the film. Melbourne, which provides the backdrop to the story, is interestingly presented as a city now subject both to extensive development and graffiti. The film also accurately captures the obsessional, focused discipline of the dance world and the dance sequences themselves, while secondary to the main thrust of the story, are impressively virile.
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