Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Lisa Hensley, Steve Bastoni
Director: Maurice Murphy
Rating: M
Running time: 92 mins
Screening: Bridgeway
Review: Peter Calder
A sundrenched idyll set in the Hunter Valley, this self-financed feature is a memory of its maker's childhood when 17,000 Italian prisoners of war were brought to Australia and "we were given two."
The father of the McLennan house is fighting in the Pacific but peace reigns here. The Italians, Alfredo and Joseph, revel in their new-found paradise, bustling to oblige as cooks or gardeners or ball-boys on the lawn tennis court (the title refers to a tennis score but is rich in connotations).
It's a small world - from its child's-eye view the streams are full of tadpoles and the grass full of insects - but its isolation has a poignant edge. The absent father never writes and at breakfast Alfredo (Bastoni) checks the casualty lists in the paper before pronouncing that the day may proceed.
When mother-and-daughter Jewish refugees arrive - she is a proud and belligerent defender of the fatherland - the story takes a darker turn.
Like the French offering The Children of the Marshland, this is a film in which small incidents spin into rich veins of narrative: a scene when Alfredo gets a tick in a tender spot has a pay-off line to die for.
Adult hindsight allows the film-maker to be alive to manifold ironies. "You are an upside down people in an upside down country," says Alfredo. It might well be a description of a film set in wartime where the "enemy" is the lieutenant from the local barracks.
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