The story of abortion rackets in Victoria in the 60s and the efforts of one man, a Scottish doctor, to stop it. This starts brilliantly, with a horrid backyard abortion, and it's a rich world with some incredibly powerful sequences such as the raid on the abortion clinic. But as a drama it doesn't quite work.
Jeremy Sims' performance feels off with his "this is an accent" accent; the filmmakers can't resist the temptation to make the cops pure black hats instead of going for any ambiguity (William McInnes makes some potentially interesting counter arguments but they burn his character by having him beat up Susie Porter). For a film about abortion it concentrates an awful lot on people who don't have abortions - Sims' crusading doctor (we never really get a sense of what is driving this for him), McInnes' tight arse cop, Susie Porter's assistant (who I kept expecting to get pregnant but no... she gets cancer, though), Maeve Dermody's hot girl with false eyelashes (I thought she was fictional so she could get pregnant because she spends most of the time just hanging around holding hands... but it turns out she was a real character. Which makes me wonder why her romance with Jeremy Sims is so undercooked.)
I know the above people were real, and they didn't get pregnant, but still - it felt like a cheat. Like making a film about the 60s civil rights era that focuses on white people or something. To compound it the movie gets increasingly silly as it goes on - all these disjointed scenes of confrontations in alley ways, and cars taking potshots, and Sims being a super detective. I get they were going for film noir, I'm aware a lot of it really happened, but it doesn't feel real, or realistic.
There's a lot of good stuff on display: the production design is immensely enjoyable, the cast is a dream (Gary Sweet pops up among many others), it's a different look at Australian history. I just wish it had been better.
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