Reviewed by Peter Calder
Cast: Rachael Maza, Deborah Mailman, Trisha Morton-Thomas
Director: Rachel Perkins
Louis Nowra, who penned Map Of The Human Heart for Vincent Ward and the raucously good-natured Cosi, rewrote his 1993 play into this, the first commercial feature to be directed by an Aboriginal woman, which was voted audience favourite
at film festivals in Melbourne and Sydney.
Its makers emphasise that it is not an "aboriginal" film; they want it to be seen for its universality. And, apart from a plot element which ties into the shameful history of the "stolen children" child resettlement policy, it is a familiar dramatic concept - Richard Franklin's Hotel Sorrento was a white Australian version of the same idea - which needs to be judged more for its execution than originality.
In a ramshackle seaside house on Queensland's north coast, three sisters gather for the funeral of their mother. Cressy (Maza) an internationally successful opera singer, regards the reunion as a distasteful duty; Nona (Mailman), the boastfully promiscuous youngster, revels in her power to scandalise with her profanity and her appetite for alcohol; and between the two, Mae (Morton-Thomas) simmers and scowls, swamping her sisters with resentment about how she grew old tending the ailing mother.
Over a day and a night, the women dissect the past and give the family closet a good shaking with the unsurprising result that a particularly large skeleton falls out.
They're dense and potent roles in which the three actors - all of whom have performed in stage versions - exult and Perkins, a documentary maker who has long headed up the ABC's Indigenous Programme Unit, directs with assurance and restraint.
But, despite the rewriting of the original's bleak and inconclusive ending into something more upbeat, the film seems stilted and stagebound. While it's undeniably entertaining, it never flies.
* * *
-- Peter Calder, Weekend TimeOut
Pictured: Deborah Mailman
