Maria Mercedes, Dreams for Life |
Kannava gives her film a leisurely pace, allowing time for highly textured attention to detail–faces, changing patterns of light, Ellen’s collections of shells and art objects. The mood is contemplative, of a state of being quietly played out to its full extent. But there are ample unexplained references to secrets, a death and illicit behaviour hinting at a barely submerged melodrama which sometimes surfaces: having spurned the younger brother, Ellen calls after him "I love you." But does she? It’s news to us.
I liked the ending for what I took to be sustained pathos; perhaps the filmmaker sees it as happiness. The older brother turns up out of the blue, post-marital breakup, just out of treatment for depression, and falls fully dressed into Ellen’s bed, wordless and exhausted. With a self-satisfied half-smile, Ellen slips slowly into bed after him, doubtless ecstatic that she’s waited for and got the right man. The concentrated duration of the scene places a question mark over that thought. Or does it?
Dreams for Life has enjoyed considerable critical praise and is steadily finding its way into festivals. I found its dialogue awkward, the plotting loaded and Ellen’s opacity too limiting. Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1987), a reverie on loss in which no one appears and the objects of a life are surveyed, is for me a more potent meditation on loss. But Dreams for Life certainly has its moments and a visual language to relish. KG
Dreams for Life, writer-director Anna Kannava, MusicArtsDance Films Pty Ltd
RealTime issue #66 April-May 2005 pg. 26
© Keith Gallasch; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]