Dir. Sarah Watt, Australia, 2005, 100 mins
Cast: William McInnes, Justine Clarke, Anthony Hayes
Review by Richard Mellor
It’s easy to tire of the unpleasant whiff of superficiality that accompanies most glossy blockbusters. The most recent offender, Miami Vice, was also one of the worst: the film seemed to lack any sense of character whatsoever. Fortunately, an antidote has arrived in the form of Look Both Ways, an Australian film with precisely zero star names and a wealth of well-drawn protagonists keen to make your acquaintance.
Though three take slight precedence over the rest in terms of screen time, Sarah Watt’s debut chiefly operates in an Altman-esque movie world, where every character is equally worthy of attention. In Look Both Ways, all co-exist and mingle on a particularly balmy weekend in Adelaide, a city under the shadow of a recent train derailment tragedy.
Weary photographer Nick (a dopey William McInnes) unites the characters. Look Both Ways gets underway as Nick is told he has a rather hopeless testicular cancer. After informing his emotionally inept boss at the local paper where he works, Nick’s forced out to cover another train track accident, in the company of pious reporter Andy (Anthony Hayes, outraged, pathetic and particularly excellent).
Once at the scene, Nick meets witness Meryl (Justine Clarke), a greetings card artist who spends her days uncontrollably imagining scenes of grisly deaths, before painting them on canvas. As Nick and Meryl embark on a somewhat quixotic romance, Andy returns home to find his sometime girlfriend pregnant. Andy has two kids and a failed marriage in the bank already, and fears any more grief.
Memories for all these characters resemble a series of Nick’s spools – standout moments to flick idly through in a spate of melancholy or terror. Each struggles to come to terms with the cruel blows they suffer, as well as a mounting fear of death fuelled by an absence of achievement or satisfaction. Secretly, each wants to hatch out of their day-to-day social shell and tell the world what they really think.
Such a torturous emotional landscape equates to well-trodden indie-film terrain. Look Both Ways is the type of picture often labelled ‘well-observed’ – i.e. the writer is a pervert who spends too much time in cafés people-watching. But Watt’s movie truly is well-observed; Look Both Ways is very easily related to or empathised with, and can dexterously pluck the most cynical of heartstrings.
To lighten this rather sombre tale, Watt injects a deft, gentle humour verging on the tragicomic. The deaths that Meryl can’t help but envisage are shown to us by way of macabre, but playful and childlike, cartoon illustrations. A witty line is never far away, and the film closes with various characters laughing in tandem: it’s reminiscent of Magnolia’s conclusion, when the whole cast unite to sing “Wise Up”.
Alas but here, music serves as Look Both Ways’ chief weakness, so misused is it as a tool. Suddenly, dialogue is abandoned, a whimsical song fills the air and a five-minute musical montage, of withered looks and wrinkled brows, fills the screen. This happens far too regularly – drama, music, drama, music, comparable to a rigidly-structured musical – and quickly becomes frustrating.
Talking of frustrating, Look Both Ways also joins a growing club of films that offer little or no resolution (other recent offenders include Little Fish and Don’t Come Knocking). There’s no definitive ending here, just a sudden cessation, a cut-off point as though the film has run out of time. It’s an interactive experience to take home, kick around and ponder, rather than a story going from A to B.
Are neat conclusions, unexpected outcomes and predictable denouements a dying breed? Look Both Ways certainly conforms to a philosophy that the world isn’t so straightforward, and that life doesn’t begin and end as neatly as film would have us believe. That’s probably true – but it’s also, when you’ve been slouched in a cinema seat for 90 minutes, deeply dissatisfying.
Performances!
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