☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
The
Butterfly Tree (2017) – P. Cameron
Last night I had the opportunity to attend
the world premiere of this new Australian film at the Melbourne International
Film Festival. The film was produced by
my good friend Bridget Callow-Wright (with production support from Simon
Callow-Wright). Deceptively complex, the
film details the relationships between a son (Ed Oxenbould), his single father
(Ewen Leslie), and the woman who bewitches them both (Melissa George). It would be tempting to provide a Freudian
reading of the family dynamic that would suggest that the young boy needs to
kill off his father to possess the mother (surrogate) – i.e., the Oedipus
Complex. Those tensions are there but
the film adds other themes having to do with loss and transformation – how do
we grow and change as people as a result of challenging life events? Can we achieve mutual understanding? But all
this makes the film sound sombre, which it assuredly is not. Instead, there is
a captivating and surreal sense of magical realism at play here, with director
Priscilla Cameron inserting hallucinatory and sometimes comic sequences straight
into the flow of the narrative. The look
of the film (shot in tropical Queensland) is lush with over-saturated colours;
I didn’t realize it was set in the early 1990s until someone mentioned this
afterward (I guess the absence of computers and smartphones was the
giveaway). The plot sees Oxenbould and
Leslie stumble into George’s flower shop, entranced by her open friendly manner
(and her sexy burlesque roller-skating background). How they resolve their competition, overcome
their own complications (romantic and maternal), and end up in (presumed)
harmony – post transformation – is the journey we’re on. And
like all of life’s journeys, this one is unpredictable and worth taking. I hope
you get a chance to see it.
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