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Australia 2003
Directed by
Georgina Willis
75 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Watermark (2003)

Synopsis: It's the 1970s on the NSW coast and Jim (Jai Koutrae) and Catherine (Ruth McDonald) are a young couple in love. Bring it forward 20 years and Jim is in a strained marriage with Louise (Sandra Stockley). How did things get this way?

Watermark is a remarkable film that although it is not without some prominent flaws has been too easily dismissed in some critical quarters (I am thinking here particularly of both Adrian Martin and Jim Schembri in The Age). It is an elliptically but cleverly structured film that tackles a serious issue, one that cannot be mentioned here because it is integral to the development of the plot. It also packs a powerful emotional punch. It is above all a "woman's film'', not in the sense of the Hollywood melodrama but rather in the fact that it is made by women and looks at the world from a woman's perspective.

Australian film not only has a reasonable inventory of well-known works in this area, principally the films of Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion, but there are also a number of more adventurous efforts such as Margot Nash's Vacant Possession (1994), Rachel Perkins' Radiance (1998) and Davida Allen's Feeling Sexy (1999), which concentrate more on personal feelings than narrative action and adopt a freer, more associative approach to telling their story. This implies a problematic relationship to conventional viewer expectations and hence commercial marginalisation but it is surprising, particularly since this film made it to the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes as well as the Athens and Mar Del Plata Film Festivals that this film has received such a critical savaging locally.

Admittedly the creative team of Georgina Willis, director and co-writer with producer Kerry Rock have made it difficult for themselves with a cast that are unable to lift the stilted dialogue off the page. Not only are the main performances sorely wanting but the strident Australian accents jar the ear. Whilst the earnest amateurism was presumably determined more by budget and/or the debut feature director's lack of experience than intent, the latter is aggravated by a sound design that amplifies the smallest ambient noise into an aural intrusion. The latter part of the film, which has little dialogue, demonstrates how much this misjudgement has detracted from what has gone before.

And yet, if the realization is far from perfect at a technical level what convinces here is the maker's success in leading the viewer on a voyage of discovery even though the boat and the distance travelled are small. Australia has produced, particularly recently, a sufficiency of films which deserve summary dismissal but this is not one of them. Support the cinemas which are brave enough to give films like this a showing and go and see it whilst they do.

 

 

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