Furlough
Two colourfully bewigged teenage sisters escape their lives to spend one night cutting loose, making mistakes, and helping each other back up again.
Phoebe Tonkin has been a mainstay of Australian television for over a decade, and here she makes her impressive directorial debut on the beautifully neon-tinted drama Furlough. What appears to be a story about a night of soaking in the extreme highs and lows of adolescence is revealed to be driven by a more poignant, bittersweet motive than initially expected. Through the evening and into the early hours of the morning we see time distort, with slow-motion and jump cuts underscoring the significance of every second to these sisters. Tonkin swathes them in stunning fluorescent reds and blues that wrap them up in the night’s heightened emotions, but gradually these neons give way to a sunrise, returning the girls to the real world.
The moment that justifies the girls’ motivation for this night is forced a little hard and for too long, as it really could have been distilled in a single powerful image. But once Tonkin moves past this, she reassures us that the joy the sisters experienced is still intact. The peach-orange skies and blue waters are much more soothing than the night of raucous partying, but it is no less filled with joy. Tonkin’s use of colours in her visual storytelling is simply remarkable.
The Immortal
A man discovers the secret to immortality, but eventually comes to learn its curses outweigh its blessings.
The Immortal treads the line between the epic and the personal, though it is at its weakest when it lays too much into the former. Its impressively majestic visuals ultimately feel a little hollow when so much is stuffed into a 15-minute short film and then quickly discarded with to move onto the next plot point. The voiceover that connects these huge jumps in time becomes exceedingly expository, betraying a lack of confidence in the visual storytelling.
It is when both the narration and the visual effects drop away in the middle act that director Carl Firth properly makes the most of its short film format, allowing a more intimate and involving exploration of the devastating impact of immortality on one’s psyche. But the epic and the personal still don’t quite mesh until the final minutes, when the infinite life finally becomes the biggest, most significant thing in the universe. And when there is nothing left to dwarf it, that is when the existential loneliness can be felt the deepest.
Audio Guide
A woman discovers an art gallery audio guide that gives information about whatever person or object it is pointed at.
The shift from light comedy to a dark realisation of this device’s power is handled skillfully by director Chris Elena, but it is also in no small part thanks to Emma Wright’s performance as Audrey. Starting off as mildly curious, she soon becomes consumed by the excitement and horror of its potential. She slyly slides next to strangers to feed her innocent desire for more knowledge, and she visibly grows more agitated as her nosiness starts to lead her down a path of existential anxiety.
The gradual shift in this short film’s mise-en-scene must be applauded as well, as it reflects the protagonist’s own unravelling mental state back at her. Audio Guide starts in an art gallery flooded with pastel hues and neatly arranged frames, yet as Audrey’s world takes a dark turn so do her surroundings, filling her life with chaotic, messy graffiti. From the production design to the central performance, the impressive attention to visual detail is what makes Audio Guide stand out.
The Diver
A young man finds his erratic behavior starting to strain his relationship with his father.
The thin narrative thread that links the sequence of bizarrely unexplained events in The Diver is not enough to create a cohesive story, nor is it enough to compel the audience to consider the multitude of unanswered questions it poses. The son in question exhibits strange behaviour with little justification, such as reacting badly to finding out his father is giving away homegrown vegetables for free, or scaring off a woman who may or may not be his father’s new love interest. Some odd performance choices in these moments ultimately make for an unconvincing and confusing watch.
The cinematography makes the most of magic hour lighting that allows for some beautiful shots of the father heading off to work, and of the lake where the son goes diving. But it is hard to completely stand by the technical aspects of the film when the sound mixing is so poor, with clearly dubbed audio not matching up to the environment. The Diver has neither a clear vision of what it is trying to be, nor the technical acumen that might have otherwise saved it from being a muddled jumble of ideas.
The Recordist
A film sound recordist uses his set of tools to blackmail a colleague and feed his own perverted desires.
The hidden ears of a sound recordist can unexpectedly capture our most personal conversations or our most vulnerable moments, and what one chooses to do with this power can make for riveting character studies. Francis Ford Coppola used the premise as an examination of Cold War paranoia with The Conversation; Brian de Palma used it as the basis of a political thriller in Blow Out; and with The Recordist directors Indiana Bell and Josiah Allen turn the titular character into an obsessive voyeur.
Brendan Rock delivers a disturbing performance as Andrew, the sound recordist in question who works on a film set and uses his tools to listen in on unassuming colleagues. The recordings are used as blackmail, though his true intentions remain unclear until the final unsettling twist. Andrew is a man seeking stimulation, and the anxiety-inducing sound design and extreme close-ups allow us to experience his own sharply-tuned senses. The Recordist succeeds in establishing a sensual, disconcerting atmosphere, and then effectively follows through on that to its perverse conclusion.
Cloudy River
A young couple in an open relationship struggle with insecurities, boundaries, and uncertainty about their futures.
The relatively slow pace of this miniseries’ six short episodes instils its narrative with a relaxed confidence that the resilience and openness of its two lead characters will continue to win out over their hot-headedness. We spend time watching Emma and River party, hook up, and feed their passions, so that when they fall out we feel an uncomfortable disturbance. Their conflicts are nuanced, raising questions about where the boundaries of their open relationship lie. Is it acceptable to hook up with someone else in your shared bedroom? In the vegetable patch? If you’re having sex with others, what does that mean for your emotional involvement with each other?
The central performances by Rebecca Robertson and Rowan Davie are refreshingly honest, cutting their characters down with pettiness and ego only to build them back up with unexpected moments of genuine compassion. That Cloudy River feels so organic in its character dynamics is also a testament to the screenplay, which lets their unspoken motivations escalate their arguments until they find each other again in a delicate, sensual love. Emma and River are not a perfect pairing, but what relationship is?
