LIttle Fish: A FilmExposed Review

A FilmExposed Review

Little Fish (15)

Dir: Rowan Woods, 2005, Australia, 114 mins
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Martin Henderson, Sam Neill, Noni Hazlehurst

Tracy Heart (Blanchett) is a soul on the mend. Living with her single mother (Hazlehurst), Tracy ekes out an existence as the manager of a Vietnamese video store in Sydney's Little Saigon and dreams of taking control of her future. But Tracy's past constantly craves her attention: her mother's ex, ex-football star, Lionel Dawson (Weaving) is dragging himself off heroin and redefining his relationship with his supplier (Neill), and her brother Ray (Henderson) is branching out into dealing. As her past floods in around her Tracy is forced to confront the futility of her existence and must choose whether to sink or swim for her life.

Little Fish will undoubtedly draw comparisons with Cate Shortland's Sommersault (2004). Both films share a similar visual palette, a crystalline score and a concern with the urban character. Cinematographer Danny Ruhlmann makes full use of the colour of Sydney's Cabramatta. The night scenes are bathed in eerie greens and deep blues and marked with bleeding streetlights, imbuing the cement-ridden environment with a truly ethereal quality. Against this backdrop, the suburban concerns of Tracy and her family seem alien and otherworldly.

Little Fish is cinema on the slow burn. Director Rowan Woods walks the fine line between mood and listlessness, and not wholly successfully. At times the film stagnates in the lethargy of the subject matter, repeating and reinforcing the direness of Tracy's inner suburban life and the presence of her past rather than building on in. What saves the film from this mire are the beautifully drawn characters. There is a real sense of shared history threaded between the principle players and the urban landscape, a history that pulls them together even as they are aching to get away.

In Blanchett, Neill, Weaving, Hazelhurst and Henderson, Woods has secured a cast of Australian (and New Zealand) acting royalty and they all deliver gut-wrenching performances. Blanchett has been lauded above all for her desperate portrayal of Tracy Heart (taking home the Australian Film Institute award for Best Actress), and she is achingly good. Weaving (who also collected a Best Actor AFI) and Neill bring an equally textured quality to their roles, wavering between tenderness, exploitation and terrifying malice.

Much has been made of the Shakespearean qualities of script, and by the end of the second act, when the web has tightened and the underlying menace of the film steps out of into the daylight, the true scope of the tragedy becomes spine-chillingly clear. It is a beautiful and rare moment in cinema when a film can work an audience so subtly. Unfortunately Woods squanders the dramatic momentum and instead of a proscenium arch he delivers backyard melodrama.

Little Fish is a film that has captured the minds of the cinema going public in its homeland and sparked (once again) a celebration of the rebirth of Australian cinema. This is an accomplished and sometimes transcendental rendering of some desperate lives and, while it is unlikely to resonate quite as strongly outside of Australia, it is still a deeply compelling cinema experience.

Michael Scott

Tags: movie review, cinema, FilmExposed