The lasting legacy of the film festival has been a snobby disdain for ordinary films. So yesterday, I ventured off to see the Swedish film You, the living with my fabulous film festival friend (FFFF). We had to see it because David Stratton described it as a ”must for serious cinema buffs” or words to that effect. We were in search of something different; beyond “nice little films”.
You, the living is a sort of shout of a title. It’s in your face in a way that the film is not. It’s demanding something of us. “Hey you” – it’s saying. “Take some notice. This is important.” Because the opposite is what – we, the dead? It comes from Goethe: “Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” Early in the film a tram pulls up. Its destination is "Lethe". People spill out and the tram moves on. I knew that Lethe meant “forgetfulness” but Wikipedia also says "In Classical Greek, Lethe literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment". It’s related to the Greek word for "truth", meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the several rivers of Hades: those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness." In the film’s context, I think it means “Don’t forget you are alive, be alive to the ephemeralness of our condition. Get off the tram!” Or maybe that’s just my current take on things.
Certainly the other part of the quote is at odds with much of the activity in the film. There is little in the film to suggest “delightfully warmed bed”. It’s shot in a limey institutional green; the interiors of houses, street scenes, bars and deserted office foyers tinged in a brooding green sepia. I loved the colour; it created a consistent link between the 50 vignettes of the film and added to the impression that I had of floating like a dust mote through the film. There is no grand plot although one reviewer I read quoted film maker Roy Andersson as saying the film is “about the vulnerability of human beings”.
I warmed to the film over time. Early scenes, such as a surreal china-smashing, execution-causing vignette seemed to try too hard; I was reminded of Monty Python but not in a good way. Similarly a singing scene where a son puts the hard word on his father for cash. And yet other much more ordinary scenes seemed filled with the pathos of being alive. The overweight woman with the beautiful mouth feels ugly and depressed. Nothing her partner can do or say will make her feel better. She tells him to piss off; we’ve all been there. The psychiatrist is tired of working with people who can’t be happy; they are mean at heart. The film allowed you thinking space; I floated off thinking about a friend whose middle name is schadenfreude. (I saw her recently and I was struck with how tiring it is to be with her because of her meanness.) The lack of a strong plot line allowed space for a much more significant personal interaction with the film while it was screening.
And the most beautiful scene for me is the wedding dream. A young girl tells the bar crowd “I dreamt that I married Micke” (the lead guitarist in a band). Her dream is the culmination of a series of fantasies about Micke and an actual meeting. Every teenager has had the “meet the rock star” gauche moment or has dreamt of it. Her post wedding fantasy has a lyrical beauty about it, she gorgeous in wedding dress, opening presents, he wedded to guitar, playing lovely, lovely music. The scene morphs into a surreal train journey and they pull into a station to be greeted by an adoring crowd. But also as Naomi, my FFFF pointed out, underneath the lyricism is a reality; he is much more in love with himself, his guitar and the crowd (in that order) than her so the relationship is pretty doomed.
I was reminded of many of the European films I saw in the 70s. I think the connection is the interest in the surreal and in the disturbance of the surburban veneer to uncover both the ordinariness and the vulnerability of the human condition. One wonderful scene illustrates this. A man is on a balcony as night falls. Across from him, through a window, we can see the tail-end of a bizarre silly scene that we, the film watchers have been up close to prior to this scene but the watcher seems largely oblivious to it. From another room, we hear his wife asking ”What are you thinking?” He is smoking. Not thinking, smoking. And probably scratching his balls. Again she pleads “What are you thinking?” We know that he is thinking of nothing, just daydreaming with his cigarette. She is seeking to connect. He is not deliberately evasive; just not on her wavelength. And she not on his. The human condition.
I thought a lot of Bunuel while I was watching the film and was pleased to read a similar thought in a review by Philip French in The Observer: “Some years later, after marrying a Swede, I gave myself a crash course in Scandinavian culture that revealed a conventional wisdom claimed not to exist - the Scandinavian sense of humour. This is a mordant, quirky, melancholic affair, exhibited by that archetypal malcontent Hamlet, and to be found in, among others, Ibsen, Hans Andersen, Strindberg, Bergman, Astrid Lindgren and Frans G Bengtsson's wonderful adventure novel The Long Ships. Both movies (he means this and Andersson’s third film) are tragicomedies. If they belong in an artistic tradition, it would be Surrealism or the theatre of the absurd and their particular affinities are with Buñuel and Ionesco.”
Lovely to see a film, even though I was irritated by parts of it, that let you float in a river of associations and feelings. It’s Andersson’s fourth in four decades; he is 64 and maybe that’s where Lethe’s ice-cold foot finds real bite.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Animating animation?
Is it a problem if a film, which is about terror and persecution and alienation, is also visually entrancing? When you sit there semi-glued, thinking that almost any scene would look good and/or striking, as a greeting card? I went to see the film Persepolis with my niece Grace. It is the story of a young Iranian girl who grows up in the time of the Shah in Tehran to left wing parents who live with some fear of persecution; relatives are in jail and have been tortured. The main character, Marjane, is bolshie and vulnerable when the revolution comes because of her outspokenness. As a teenager, she is sent to Vienna to school and thus begins a complex time in her life.
Like any outsider, she finds it hard to make friends and this is complicated by the fact that she finds it hard to organise a sympathetic place to live. One review I read said that the writer, Marjane Satrapi, is setting up Europe as hospitable on the surface but, in contrast with Iranians, there is no real sense of community and when the chips are down… Well home is better, whatever the politics. This sentiment is sort of belied by the ending and my sense that the dichotomy is false. An outsider in any society can have a pretty alienating time. And Marjane has an extreme reaction to some of the events, which take place in Europe.
The film provides a brief political history of the last 30 years in Iran, with a particular focus on what happens to women. It is great – really accessible, especially for my 15-year-old niece who is pretty savvy. But you don’t need to be really savvy to get it.
What I struggled with ultimately was the form of the film. It’s animated. It’s incredibly stylish to look at in its black and white simple 60’s style drawings. We see the white jasmine from the bra of Marjane’s wise old grannie tumble out of her clothes as she undresses. The flowers float across the screen like something out of a 60's film in a San Francisco park. A jail appears like the haunted house on the hill. Marjane’s unfaithful Austrian lover morphs from a handsome (in a polo-necked tosser-ish sort of way) to a snaggle-toothed user as she comes to see him more clearly. Lines on lines of men march in protest against the Shah, then we see one mown down by rifle fire. He crumples gracefully and we know that the seeping black is blood but it lacks the emotional impact, which we should feel when we see people being blasted away. Or is this too ubiquitous an image now? I went to see the film Battle for Haditha at the film festival. In this film, many civilians are killed by soldier’s rifle fire as they are in Persepolis. Like the latter film, its based on real events but one is chilling in the extreme and one is not. I think the animation serves to distance us from the events and feelings on screen. I can’t quite rid myself of the sense that this is, after all, a cartoon. Perhaps this is generational but when I asked Grace about it, I think she felt the same way. One of her loves is the films of filmmaker Hiyeo Miyazake – I really like his work as well. But his subject matter is much more playful and suitable for the animation genre. I feel like an old person as I write this. I like The Simpsons; it’s a clever piece of work but I don’t watch it addictively. Something in me finds the genre wanting.
I really enjoyed the film. It’s told from the heart and we are with Marjane every step of the way. I’ve just had to work a bit harder and more consciously to feel the intensity of the events that the director is interested in.
Like any outsider, she finds it hard to make friends and this is complicated by the fact that she finds it hard to organise a sympathetic place to live. One review I read said that the writer, Marjane Satrapi, is setting up Europe as hospitable on the surface but, in contrast with Iranians, there is no real sense of community and when the chips are down… Well home is better, whatever the politics. This sentiment is sort of belied by the ending and my sense that the dichotomy is false. An outsider in any society can have a pretty alienating time. And Marjane has an extreme reaction to some of the events, which take place in Europe.
The film provides a brief political history of the last 30 years in Iran, with a particular focus on what happens to women. It is great – really accessible, especially for my 15-year-old niece who is pretty savvy. But you don’t need to be really savvy to get it.
What I struggled with ultimately was the form of the film. It’s animated. It’s incredibly stylish to look at in its black and white simple 60’s style drawings. We see the white jasmine from the bra of Marjane’s wise old grannie tumble out of her clothes as she undresses. The flowers float across the screen like something out of a 60's film in a San Francisco park. A jail appears like the haunted house on the hill. Marjane’s unfaithful Austrian lover morphs from a handsome (in a polo-necked tosser-ish sort of way) to a snaggle-toothed user as she comes to see him more clearly. Lines on lines of men march in protest against the Shah, then we see one mown down by rifle fire. He crumples gracefully and we know that the seeping black is blood but it lacks the emotional impact, which we should feel when we see people being blasted away. Or is this too ubiquitous an image now? I went to see the film Battle for Haditha at the film festival. In this film, many civilians are killed by soldier’s rifle fire as they are in Persepolis. Like the latter film, its based on real events but one is chilling in the extreme and one is not. I think the animation serves to distance us from the events and feelings on screen. I can’t quite rid myself of the sense that this is, after all, a cartoon. Perhaps this is generational but when I asked Grace about it, I think she felt the same way. One of her loves is the films of filmmaker Hiyeo Miyazake – I really like his work as well. But his subject matter is much more playful and suitable for the animation genre. I feel like an old person as I write this. I like The Simpsons; it’s a clever piece of work but I don’t watch it addictively. Something in me finds the genre wanting.
I really enjoyed the film. It’s told from the heart and we are with Marjane every step of the way. I’ve just had to work a bit harder and more consciously to feel the intensity of the events that the director is interested in.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Netherland Part 1
"It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick – that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I am beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning." Have a look at this. It's a 106 word sentence. I think it might be the longest one in the book but I selected it almost randomly when I was reading page 87 of Netherland and started to think about Joseph O'Neill's prose.
It has divided people that I know, one woman saying that it the next Gatsby ( and there could be no higher praise than this from her) and another saying that she really disliked it. I look forward to going to bed with Mr O'Neill. I love his character Hans and I think he is deliberately using this very careful circuitous Henry James type prose to set up Hans as a real Dutchman. It may be stereotypical but it works for me. He is a man to whom things happen, perhaps because he is bogged down by semi-colons, dashes, and colons. Actually not colons - no lists, just a lot of phrases that imply a certain predisposition.
On the weekend I also saw a film about a scenario which is the opposite of the one which Hans finds himself in. The film is Margot at the Wedding. Margot is the fraying at the edges older sister who comes to"celebrate" her sister's wedding. At one stage her sister says to her "Margot, when your sense of self hinges on your fuckability and that begins to wane, it's very hard." Margot is having a slightly ungrounded affair with a guy who is pretty horrible. Its a great statement and sort of made the film for me though I liked a lot about it. I also liked watching the interview with the director. He talked about how the film has almost no establishing shots so we are pivoted right into the uncomfortable family situation without much warning. Its a really effective idea. A lot of the action is seen indirectly or a characters head is cut off and we just see his or her body moving round the room like you are sitting on the couch or something. It works in such a different way to Netherland where a lot of the time we live in Hans' head.
It has divided people that I know, one woman saying that it the next Gatsby ( and there could be no higher praise than this from her) and another saying that she really disliked it. I look forward to going to bed with Mr O'Neill. I love his character Hans and I think he is deliberately using this very careful circuitous Henry James type prose to set up Hans as a real Dutchman. It may be stereotypical but it works for me. He is a man to whom things happen, perhaps because he is bogged down by semi-colons, dashes, and colons. Actually not colons - no lists, just a lot of phrases that imply a certain predisposition.
On the weekend I also saw a film about a scenario which is the opposite of the one which Hans finds himself in. The film is Margot at the Wedding. Margot is the fraying at the edges older sister who comes to"celebrate" her sister's wedding. At one stage her sister says to her "Margot, when your sense of self hinges on your fuckability and that begins to wane, it's very hard." Margot is having a slightly ungrounded affair with a guy who is pretty horrible. Its a great statement and sort of made the film for me though I liked a lot about it. I also liked watching the interview with the director. He talked about how the film has almost no establishing shots so we are pivoted right into the uncomfortable family situation without much warning. Its a really effective idea. A lot of the action is seen indirectly or a characters head is cut off and we just see his or her body moving round the room like you are sitting on the couch or something. It works in such a different way to Netherland where a lot of the time we live in Hans' head.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Boy A
What do we do with children who commit horrible crimes? I started thinking about this earlier this week apropos of the court case where 4 young men from Melton belted up a Sudanese boy. They embodied everything that is unseen about the underbelly of this society; racist, largely unrepentant, low levels of schooling and likely to breed way more kids than anyone in my bubble of acquaintance. The barrister representing one of them reckoned that he should be excused a jail term because his poor access to schooling had left him bereft of a value structure! I really don’t know what should happen in cases like this. One writer to The Age suggested that these boys should be sent to the Sudan to experience a community where schooling is really hard to access!
I saw the English film Boy A last night. It’s won some awards and will probably get a commercial release. It follows the experiences of a young man, in his early 20s, who has just been released from jail after committing some sort of horrible crime. We don’t find out immediately, which creates a level of tension and interest that combines with the tension and interest as to whether ‘Jack’ is going to be able to survive with a new identity in a new town.
He is likeable. The actor Andrew Garfield, does a fantastic job of playing this young guy who has missed out on some of the key milestones in a teenager’s life and doesn’t know how to behave. He is shy and gawky and easy to like but all the time, you’re wondering what he did and what will befall him. The film is also about families; ‘Jack’ is supported by a parole officer with a son of about the same age. To some extent, the film is about the old Philip Larkin ‘They fuck you up…’ riff. Fathers and sons. Abuse. To what extent can you use your family (or poor schooling) as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s a well-told story but I am no closer to having any idea what should happen to those Melton boguns…
I saw the English film Boy A last night. It’s won some awards and will probably get a commercial release. It follows the experiences of a young man, in his early 20s, who has just been released from jail after committing some sort of horrible crime. We don’t find out immediately, which creates a level of tension and interest that combines with the tension and interest as to whether ‘Jack’ is going to be able to survive with a new identity in a new town.
He is likeable. The actor Andrew Garfield, does a fantastic job of playing this young guy who has missed out on some of the key milestones in a teenager’s life and doesn’t know how to behave. He is shy and gawky and easy to like but all the time, you’re wondering what he did and what will befall him. The film is also about families; ‘Jack’ is supported by a parole officer with a son of about the same age. To some extent, the film is about the old Philip Larkin ‘They fuck you up…’ riff. Fathers and sons. Abuse. To what extent can you use your family (or poor schooling) as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s a well-told story but I am no closer to having any idea what should happen to those Melton boguns…
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Slow burn of embarrassment
“As I get older, I want life to slow down a little. Films move too fast. I want to stay in the moment and, if you wait, things reveal themselves.” The film maker is Joanna Hogg and she is talking about her latest film Unrelated which I really loved despite it being a little too long.
Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.
Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.
Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.
We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.
Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.
Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.
Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.
We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Vulnerability
Wendy and Lucy is the second film I have seen this year that explores life on the road. In both Into the Wild and this film, the perspective is that of a young American going north. I hadn’t been much interested in Into the Wild until a friend told me how much he’d loved it. That film followed the real life of Christopher McCandless who left home after graduating, heading towards Alaska, without telling his family of his plans. His plans. He didn’t seem to have plans, more a sort of disgust about the material and pressured life that seemed to be laid out for him as a young lawyer. In contrast, Wendy (Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain) has plans. She is also headed for Alaska, seeking work. The film begins with a long shot- we see her playing with her dog Lucy and humming tunelessly. The long shot feels voyeuristic and sets up the ongoing feeling that people with nastier intentions than the film audience will also be watching Wendy who is young and vulnerable. She is on the margins; the next shot takes us to a campfire of people who are passing though a town on Oregon. It’s a little bit scary but she gets some good advice about possible work in Alaska and is able to move on.
McCandless took on the name of ‘Alexander Supertramp' and shrugged off any trappings of comfort pretty quickly. When his car was wrecked in a flood, he burnt the number plate and all his remaining money and started hitchhiking and jumping trains. What he does is sort of shocking. His journey is set against the background of the most fabulous North American scenery; big skies, rivers, bird and animal life. You get a real sense of the attraction for him of being on the road. In Wendy’s case, she gets stuck in a town in Oregon and we linger with her as things get more and more desperate. In contract to the Supertramp character, her shrinking money is a real issue for her. I could describe the plot in about two sentences so the real skill of the film-maker is in taking time to let us feel her vulnerability and strength of character. I’m really interested, in this MIFF, in films which try to stay with the painful moments for characters, in how film makers create the space for us to feel what they are feeling. I’m not so interested in crying when there is a painful moment as in really being forced to sit in the horribleness of whatever is on the screen and feel it.
The director, Kelly Reichardt, does this in a couple of ways. There is no music to distract or artificially build emotion. The film is slow; we experience Wendy’s panic when she discovers her dog is missing in excruciating slow tension. Wendy is never melodramatic; she is tightly contained, like Supertramp, but so so vulnerable. And the film feels like real life because it is just a fragment from Wendy’s life. I loved the director’s willingness to have us sit with the pain and fear and loneliness of Wendy. It was hard to sit through but very real.
Supertramp’s sister provides part of the narrative voice of Into the Wild; through her comments we hear what the family is going through as their boy has effectively disappeared. The film is quite interested in exploring the pain for the family of his decision to disappear and the extent to which he can no longer really connect with anyone that he meets. Some film footage makes us wonder about his relationship with his parents, particular his father, and to think about what you owe you family in terms of communicating with them. When is it OK to say “enough is enough” and to simply drop out of a family? Is it ever OK? Is it OK to punish the whole family for the sins of some? In Wendy’s case we are exposed to a little of her family but it’s clear that there is a disconnect. We’re left to wonder about what has happened in her life. She and the dog are alone on the road and this small lovely, painful film is also a film about the love which Wendy and her dog share. And about vulnerability and choices – or lack of them. And about making brave choices - It’s a difficult film for dog-owners.
McCandless took on the name of ‘Alexander Supertramp' and shrugged off any trappings of comfort pretty quickly. When his car was wrecked in a flood, he burnt the number plate and all his remaining money and started hitchhiking and jumping trains. What he does is sort of shocking. His journey is set against the background of the most fabulous North American scenery; big skies, rivers, bird and animal life. You get a real sense of the attraction for him of being on the road. In Wendy’s case, she gets stuck in a town in Oregon and we linger with her as things get more and more desperate. In contract to the Supertramp character, her shrinking money is a real issue for her. I could describe the plot in about two sentences so the real skill of the film-maker is in taking time to let us feel her vulnerability and strength of character. I’m really interested, in this MIFF, in films which try to stay with the painful moments for characters, in how film makers create the space for us to feel what they are feeling. I’m not so interested in crying when there is a painful moment as in really being forced to sit in the horribleness of whatever is on the screen and feel it.
The director, Kelly Reichardt, does this in a couple of ways. There is no music to distract or artificially build emotion. The film is slow; we experience Wendy’s panic when she discovers her dog is missing in excruciating slow tension. Wendy is never melodramatic; she is tightly contained, like Supertramp, but so so vulnerable. And the film feels like real life because it is just a fragment from Wendy’s life. I loved the director’s willingness to have us sit with the pain and fear and loneliness of Wendy. It was hard to sit through but very real.
Supertramp’s sister provides part of the narrative voice of Into the Wild; through her comments we hear what the family is going through as their boy has effectively disappeared. The film is quite interested in exploring the pain for the family of his decision to disappear and the extent to which he can no longer really connect with anyone that he meets. Some film footage makes us wonder about his relationship with his parents, particular his father, and to think about what you owe you family in terms of communicating with them. When is it OK to say “enough is enough” and to simply drop out of a family? Is it ever OK? Is it OK to punish the whole family for the sins of some? In Wendy’s case we are exposed to a little of her family but it’s clear that there is a disconnect. We’re left to wonder about what has happened in her life. She and the dog are alone on the road and this small lovely, painful film is also a film about the love which Wendy and her dog share. And about vulnerability and choices – or lack of them. And about making brave choices - It’s a difficult film for dog-owners.
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