Woman's Tale, A

Paul Cox is always a difficult director to assess critically for although usually staying well within the conventions of narrative cinema, on the one hand he has a commendable commitment to tackling issues that film-makers with an eye on their audience would not go near but on the other hand he is inclined to treat his subjects with a heavy-handed dose of literariness, leaving his work stranded between credible realism and artistic pretension.

Here the subject is old age and approaching death and Cox confronts these unpalatable truths straight in the story of Martha (Sheila Florance) a feisty old woman who lives alone in her Melbourne flat and her 30-something carer (Gosia Dobrowolska). Florance, who was herself terminally ill from cancer at the time of making this her final film and is thus in many ways Cox's source material, gives what is commonly called a "brave" performance as is she is effectively playing out her own demise. Opposite her Dobrowolska and Cox regulars, Norman Kaye and Chris Haywood, are all very good in their roles although the script by the director with Barry Dickens, tends to the laboured (not least with the oft-repeated gag involving a caged bird named Jesus). The result is, as is so often the case with this director, that we must suffer for his art.

 

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