The Well

Synopsis: Katherine (Miranda Otto) is hired by Hester (Pamela Rabe) to work as a domestic on an isolated farm run by Hester but owned by her father, Francis (Frank Wilson). When Francis dies, Hester decides to sell the farm for cash and Hester and Katherine move to small cottage on the edge of the farm, planning to go to Europe with the money. But a tragic accident and theft of their money change their plans.

The Well, Samantha Lang's first feature film, was Australia's official entry at Cannes in 1997 and received wide domestic and international critical praise. It's difficult to see why this was so, for although it has all the right credentials - a story of pain of suffering, painterly photography and a classical music score - it's also overwhelmingly laborious. Whilst Elizabeth Jolley's original book of the same name clearly had great potential as a powerful psychological drama, whether due to the AFI-winning screenplay by Laura Jones (Oscar And Lucinda, 1997; Portrait of a Lady,1996) or Lang's deferential direction this adaptation is dreadfully flat and sometimes embarrassingly heavy-handed (see, for example, the scene in which Katherine returns to the farm after her initial departure).

Neither Miranda Otto or Pamela Rabe as the diametrically opposed pair of women caught in a situation reminiscent of Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963) are particularly convincing, never managing to do more than illustrate the script. The shifts in the relationships between these two tends to happen on cue rather than as the result of any tangible dynamic. Whilst Otto is mis-cast, being too old for the part and playing youthful self-centredness like a form of autism, Rabe goes the whole film in some kind of dreamy detachment which is supposed to be read as self-avoiding repression and submissiveness (and which won her an AFI) but is hardly adequate to the lot of a woman whose whole life has been so radically transformed.

Cinematographer Mandy Walker gives the film a nice visual aspect but this is largely wasted as the film has been treated with a by-pass process that leaches it of most of the colour and gives everything a blue cast like the covers of books left in shop windows too long. As with the films of Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion, with which this will inevitably compared, not least because it is essentially a "woman's" film (Sandra Levy, the producer filling another key function), there is a tendency to pre- or overdetermine the story with meaning, an approach which in its controlling nature one will either affirm or reject (and gender lines may well be drawn here). It is ironic then that it is the film's closure with its narrative twist that retrospectively invests the film with an ambiguity and opens up possibilities which Lang was not able to capture for its duration.

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