Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways bears more than a passing
resemblance to Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money,
which I reviewed last
week. Both are ambitious ensemble pieces with multiple but
interlocking story lines, both have first-rate casts playing
likable and interesting characters, and both have a strong
authorial point of view that at times threatens to lapse into
preachiness. Above all, both are suffused not only with subtle wit
but with a feminine sensibility that may be redefining the chick
flick. Doubtless the soppy romantic comedy that ends with a wedding
will never go away completely, and both these films delight in
pairing up lonely single women with rather needy men. But both also
have ambitions that go far beyond the usual happy ending.
Miss Watt has a painter’s eye, and of the two films hers is the
more beautiful to look at. Set in Adelaide, South Australia, its
live action is intercut with animated sequences, drawn by the
director herself, which mostly illustrate the fearful fantasy life
of her heroine, Meryl (Justine Clarke) — who is also an
illustrator. The overt autobiographical element is one difference
from Friends With Money, as is the dominance of a single
point of view. Though there are other story lines that do not
involve her directly, we never stray far from the imagination of
Meryl, who has just returned home from her father’s funeral when
she witnesses an accident in which a man is killed by a train. She
tries to make light of it. “Everyone has to witness something
ghastly one day,” she says chirpily. “My fifteen minutes of
blecchh.” But the horror fits only too well with her constant
daydreams of disasters, deaths, and dismemberments that only we are
aware of.
On the scene of the accident soon afterwards are Nick (William
McInnes) and Andy (Anthony Hayes), photographer and reporter
respectively for the Southern Mail. Nick gets a
photographer’s dream shot, which ends up on the front page, of the
moment the victim’s wife is made aware of the tragedy. Andy, a
political sort with a chip on his shoulder, wonders in print if the
dead man had been driven to suicide by the injustice in the
world.
Such insensitivity to the bereaved woman is offered up for our
consideration, but immediately qualified. For Nick has just learned
that he has cancer of a life-threatening kind, and Andy, a divorced
father of two, has just been informed by his semi-detached
girlfriend, Anna (Lisa Flanagan), that she is pregnant. Andy’s own
suicidal tendencies are presently revealed. Thus, those who might
otherwise have been merely the jackals of the press, preying upon
the misery of another, are instead brought by their own misery into
her orbit, so to speak. Perhaps we need to have some sympathy not
only with those who experience death and bereavement directly, but
also with those whose imaginative closeness to the deaths of others
or of themselves falls not far short of experiencing it.
It is a sleepy summer Friday afternoon, and Nick has been told
that he will have to wait until Monday to see a specialist and find
out how serious his cancer is. But it doesn’t look good, as it has
metastasized. He starts having powerful and vivid memories of the
death of his father (Edwin Hodgeman) from cancer a year before.
Also, after going on the Internet to find out more about his own
cancer, he begins to fantasize visually about the malign processes
now going on inside his body. These sequences are credited to
something called the Visible Human Project at the University of
Maryland, and their abstract and visual richness create an obvious
link with Meryl’s lurid fantasies of accidental death. Naturally,
the two characters are drawn to each other by their common
anticipation of mortality, though Nick doesn’t tell Meryl of his
diagnosis right away.
Instead, they begin a love affair. The time-frame of the film is
limited to the weekend between Nick’s diagnosis and the fateful
visit to the specialist — whose outcome, like that of the love
affair, is only suggested by a closing photo-montage. The funniest
moment in the picture comes as Nick tries to break the news to
Meryl on Sunday afternoon by telling her that he “can’t start
anything” right now, and she assumes he’s breaking up with her.
“I met you on Friday, slept with you on Saturday. You took me to
meet your mother on Sunday and now you can’t start anything? This
is the tightest little relationship I’ve ever had.”
The tightness of the frame helps us to keep in focus not only
their relationship but what is going on with Anna and Andy, as well
as with their editor at the Mail, Phil (Andrew S.
Gilbert), who is badly shaken by Nick’s news, and also with the
train driver (Andreas Sobik) who is similarly traumatized by the
accident. The latter two characters are mainly limited to wordless
sequences in which their emotional turmoil is made manifest in
their faces and somnambulistic actions. They thus serve as a sort
of visual chorus, commenting on the imagination of death as we see
it in the lives of the speaking characters. That’s why it is so
moving when, near the end of the film, the train driver turns up at
the door of the train victim’s widow — who is also mainly a
portrait in mute grief — to say he’s sorry, carrying one of the
sympathy cards designed by Meryl.
At one level, this movie is a sort of hymn to feminine timidity
with which male viewers, particularly, may occasionally grow
impatient. But it is also engaging, gorgeous to look at and
undeniably powerful emotionally. I recommend it.
