Closed For Winter

Synopsis: Elise (Natalie Imbruglia) lives in a ramshackle house with her mother, Dorothy (Deborah Kennedy) in a relationship dominated by the mysterious disappearance of Elise’s older sister, Frances (Danielle Catanzariti) twenty years earlier.

There is something deeply affecting at the heart of Closed For Winter and that is no doubt to be found in Georgia Blain’s novel of the same name about a young woman’s unquenchable sense of loss for her sister. Unfortunately writer-director James Bogle’s transposition of it to the big screen does not do it any favours. What the film does get right is the sense of place and time in the young girl’s lives one lazy Australian beachside summer. Danielle Catanzariti gives a remarkably spirited performance as the headstrong Frances whilst a wide-eyed Tiahn Green is charming as her doting young sister. Deborah Kennedy is also interesting as the slightly crazy mother, her interpretation somewhat mannered at times yet not pushing her eccentricities into caricature.

If the spirit of the film is commendable, it is its craft which lets it down, which is surprising as Bogle directed the under-rated In The Winter Dark, as the similar title suggests, another melancholy tale, this time based on a Tim Winton novel, 10 years ago. Since then he has been working in television and this film is not likely to change that state of affairs.

Unquestionably the biggest problem with the film is the casting of former pop princess Natalie Imbruglia in the lead. This seems to be a matter of great significance simply because Bogle insists on so many close-ups of her. Aside from the sheer repetitiveness of the device there are two causes to complain about this. One is that she has that emaciated celebrity look that is so exacerbated by the colourless palette and grainy stock used that for most of the film she looks like the “before” part of a TV ad for a high priced beauty cream (and in one odd scene involving her friend’s portrait of her she appears more like one of the walking dead). The other is that, however brave she was to take on this lead role, she is not a very good actress, Neighbours is not NIDA and her attempts to show inner emotion too often come down to facial tics. As for her tinnily Strine accent one can only think of two words: “voice coach”. Heck, Kylie did it, didn’t she?

As is clear from In The Winter Dark, Bogle favours frequently cutting back and forth between time frames and tying together the two halves of his story with a voice-over. It didn’t work well in that film and it doesn’t work well here, the net result being a lack of engagement as we never stay in one zone long enough for it to become familiar. Particularly in its latter stages I could not help but think that Bogle would have benefited from an intensive study of those of David Lynch’s films that deal with the sense of unspeakable nightmare at the heart of American suburbia. That and a bit of Angelo Badalamenti-style music and this might have been a stronger film. As it is, it comes across as a collage of elements, many of which are separately interesting but that together do not coalesce into an effective whole. That, the banal script and the fact that there are too many clumsily realized scenes, like Tony Martin’s choked-back sobbing and a god-awful attempt at a veggie patch, means that Closed For Winter is simply not going to win many fans.

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