it's a pity this was filmed in Adelaide. no offense to Adelaide people - love your "city", very pretty place, but i think such a great film ought to have been made the way it was intended and this was intended to be a Melbourne movie. i read an article a couple of weeks ago about it and evidently quite a lot had to be changed to take into account the change of location. for some reason filming in Melbourne wasn't as feasible as in Adelaide. i can imagine what this film would have been like set in Melbourne. but still, my point is more that a film so great ought to have been unhampered by monetary concerns and shame on the Australian film industry (again) for hampering a local project through lack of vision. my other gripes with the film are some dodgy acting from the support roles and a rather too neat ending that was already upbeat enough. a bit of ambiguity would have left me feeling more satisfied than the neat little "wrap-up montage" at the end. but the main cast was brilliant. i wish more movies about the Australian summer were released at the end of winter - i could feel the heat watching it. my favourite artistic aspect of this movie was the fact that the partner of the guy who died on the train tracks and the driver of the train both remained silent for almost the entire film. the first time either of them spoke was when the driver came to the woman's house and said he was sorry and gave her a card and she said it wasn't his fault and almost cried for the first time and they pressed hands and he left. such poignancy. before that they were just images of grief, mimes acting out the turmoil of loss and trauma and guilt, at that moment they became people surviving life's losses, connected through that one tragic event. i love this film. it is flawed, but in its flaws it is strikingly beautiful and most important of all - real.
Review of Look Both Ways
