The only feature film directed by Scott Murray of Cinema Papers despite him being of that generation where there was all this money going around. Did he not want to do theatre, TV, genre stuff? Was he just writing applications to the AFC and getting indignant at being rejected? There are other ways of telling stories.
Anyway this is an interesting movie. Adaptation of a classic French text which had been filmed. It's about the affair between a teenage boy and a married woman whose husband is interned.
In the original she was a women whose husband was away at the front, which Murray could've done but instead he made her a French woman whose Italian husband is interned. Which felt a little odd. I think Murray just wanted the girl to be French.
There's a lack of known actors in the film. Maybe Murray was keen to discover people. The two leads aren't really up to it - they try, they're not bad, but this sort of film needs stars, if not actual ones then potential stars. There's some nudity from the leads - plus also a model the guy hooks up with. Clearly catnip. Oz movies did a witty piece on this movie about "where is this country town".
The dialogue feels like translated subtitles. It's hard to care about the leads or their dilemma. It's wartime and they're happily shagging. He looks too old to be a student. She looks young. They seem around the same age. You don't get a tense of societal taboo or even that there's a way on because there's no real sense of small town Australia - there are all these people with foreign accents.
It's good critics make films but watching is not the same as practising. Peter Bogdanovich made very good feature film out of the gate but he'd had a long apprenticeship as an actor and theatre director, and did a stint under Roger Corman.
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