Romulus My Father

Romulus My Father is disguised as a visual feast, but is fatally disjointed underneath it all.

Herald rating: * * *

Much less than the sum of its often-impressive parts, this debut-as-director for Australian jobbing actor Roxburgh (who played Dracula in Van Helsing) is a ravishingly filmed tale of childhood misery whose success is undermined by a frustrating disjointedness.

In part, that is probably down to the source material - an episodic memoir by German-born, Australian-raised Raimond Gaita, who is now a respected philosopher. His life success is certainly a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, if the film is any guide. We follow young Rai (Smit-McPhee) through his childhood years in the early 60s, on a farm in rural Queensland where he lived with his Romanian-speaking Yugoslav father (Bana) and, occasionally, his German mother Christina (Potente).

The beautiful Christina has trouble adjusting to the new sunburnt life and soon takes up with Romulus' best mate and heads off for the city. The complications that ensue, which include her getting pregnant, make for a story that describes a remorselessly downward arc.

There is no denying the film's technical quality: a sumptuous production design, Geoffrey Simpson's sublime photography and the endless Outback skies make for a visual treat and young Smit-McPhee creates a character of real texture, at once indomitably optimistic and deeply troubled. The busy Kiwi actor Csokas, taking a break from bad-guy roles, is surprisingly sympathetic as Rai's uncle.

But in its fractured, episodic style, it feels a lot more like variations on a theme than a story, and struggles to achieve anything like emotional coherence. Fatally, Nick Drake's script has not actually decided whose story it is: it adopts Rai's point of view but most of the time we are watching a woman go off the rails while her husband stands rather helplessly by. Bana's Romulus, who is given to pronouncements like "a man's work is his dignity", seems to regard his status as a cuckold as some sort of destiny - and as a result, he's hard to empathise with.

The film compares unfavourably with a similar festival attraction, Tony Ayres' Home Song Stories, another immigrant tale with a flaky mum who is a fully rounded character. That Gaita's book is on the school curriculum in Victoria will probably make this the more successful film, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it looks a lot better than it is.

Cast: Eric Bana, Franka Potente, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Marton Csokas
Director: Richard Roxburgh
Running time: 103 mins
Rating: M, sex scenes and offensive language
Screening: Rialto
Verdict: Memoir of childhood in the Aussie Outback is downbeat and disjointed but ravishing to look at and with a fine child performance