April 2025

Oscar and Lucinda

Directed by Gillian Armstrong
Adapted from the novel Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, and Richard Roxburgh
Release date 31 December 1997
Running time 132 minutes
Rated M Low-level violence and low-level sex scene

Oscar and Lucinda, directed by Jillian Armstrong and based on the novel by Peter Carey, is an unlikely romance, another Australian classic film set in the mid-nineteenth century that explores the connection between belonging and identity in a brave new world.  
 
Our two main characters are introduced as young people whose personalities have been formed by the death of a parental figure. Oscar Hopkins, the child of a Plymouth Brethren minister and amateur biologist, is brought up destined for the ministry. Oscar believes in God but leaves the direction of his spiritual path to chance. He runs away from his father to join the Anglican church and its local minister, Mr Stratton, who rears him and later sends him to university to complete his vocation. There, Oscar meets a friend who introduces him to gambling, and his success leads him to a deep addiction that puts him at odds with his Anglican mentor. Oscar is determined to rid himself of the gambling demon by emigrating to the colony of New South Wales as a teacher. On his journey there he meets Lucinda Leplastrier, a colonial heiress whose parents’ demise has left her with a fortune, but little guidance on what to do with it. When she reaches her majority, she moves to Sydney and upon seeing the Prince Rupert Glassworks, is determined to buy it to fulfil her childhood obsession with glass. She visits London on business and meets Oscar on the return trip. Lucinda is a compulsive gambler and the two strike up a friendship that engages their mutual interests.  
 
Upon arriving back in the colony, Lucinda discovers her friend and mentor, the Reverend Mr Hassett, has been sent away to the northern township of Bellingen to avoid the scandal of been associated with her and her known gambling habit. Soon after, Oscar is dismissed from his position in the Church for the same reason. Lucinda then employs him at the Glassworks and Oscar—believing Lucinda is in love with her mentor—proposes an astonishing idea: to create Lucinda’s glass pavilion as a church and to send it to Reverend Hassett in Bellingen. They bet their mutual inheritances that it can be done in five weeks.  
 
The journey to Bellingen sees Oscar travel overland through the harsh terrain. Ultimately, he is forced to face his fear of water, when his traveling companions abandon him following a violent incident, and he builds a boat to deliver the church and to fulfil his promise to Lucinda.  
This is an unexpected romance between two unusual characters who cannot make their idiosyncrasies fit into convention, nor can they demonstrate their affection in the usual way. Oscar’s obsessive personality encourages the most extreme emotional offering. Just as he abandoned his father on the random outcomes of a thrown rock, so too does he hazard his love for Lucinda through a life-threatening act of devotion, one that does not take into consideration how the random, selfish acts of others might undermine his vision and purpose. The backdrop of the brutal reality of colonial Australia—Victorian moralism, violence towards the original inhabitants, and the self-interested actions of the colonists—not only emphasises the oddball nature of our main characters, but also their innocence and optimism.
 
Some beautiful sweeping landscape shots mixed with tight interiors demonstrate the manic energy of the main characters, as they are driven together by their desire to gamble their luck and fortune, hazarding all on the ultimate outcome.

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March 2025

Only Lovers Left Alive

Directed by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Jeffrey Wright, and John Hurt
Release date 25 May 2013 (Cannes), 21 February 2014 (United Kingdom), and 11 April 2014 (United States)
Running time 123 minutes
Rated M Supernatural themes, course language, and nudity

Some films are a conversation about the human condition. In this film, our main characters deal with both the joy and the burden of life, the importance of art, of connection with others, and with the quintessential aspect of existence—survival. Only Lovers Left Alive, by Jim Jarmusch, is an art-house vampire film starring Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, as the titular characters who experience immortality shadowed by the constant threat of exposure and redeemed by their reciprocal love.  
 
The film is set in the late 20th century, although Adam and Eve have been lovers for centuries. Adam lives in Detroit, collecting rare instruments and making music that reflects his melancholy mood. He distributes his music through his agent, Ian, while maintaining his absolute anonymity. Eve lives in Tangiers, surrounding herself with books and poetry and flitting through the streets at night. Both vampires have their regular supplier of "the good stuff”, Adam from a hospital blood doctor, and Eve from the ancient playwright, Christopher Marlowe. Like Adam, Marlowe is responsible for some of the world's greatest art throughout the centuries, delivered through others to prevent their immortality from being discovered. However, Adam is on the brink of despair. as time rolls on he wonders what the point of it all is. Eve, ever devoted, comes to his aid and they share in the moments of complete togetherness. Into this situation comes Ava, Eve’s younger sister, who desires all kinds of pleasure without a care for the cost to others. During a night out with Adam’s agent, Ava takes what she needs and Adam and Eve are left to clean up the mess. This element of exposure has consequences that reveal how fragile the vampiric existence is, and at the end, the two lovers do what they have to, to survive.
 
This film explores what it is to be human, and how our humanity is fully experienced through our connection with others. It also explores what happens when those connections are one sided. Adam hides from others with determination, focusing his art on the experience of his inner life. Eve on the other hand, moves through the streets of Tangiers, barely disguised and fully conscious of her movement in the world of others. She points out to Adam that being truly present in the moment is the point he is missing and this is probably why she convinces Adam to go out with herself and Ava, risking exposure.  
 
This film is beautifully shot, with the darkness of the night scenes being both moody and oppressive and concealing and liberating at the same time. The scenes are lavish, with aerial shots and camera tilts that give the camera an artistic—rather than voyeuristic—gaze; the camera tilt as we watch the vampires experience the rapture of drinking blood, forces us to look down on the characters at their most vulnerable. This observation of pleasure demonstrates their needs and their weaknesses as similar to our own; their lust is not for so much blood, as it is for the depths of human experience and creative output.  
 
Only Lovers Left Alive is hardly a horror film, but instead follows our protagonists through their sensual worlds, accompanied by an attractive soundtrack and moody visuals, while delicately revolving around that kernel of truth about existence, that death is inevitable.

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February 2025

The Holdovers

Directed by Alexander Payne
Starring Paul Giamatti, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa
Release date October 27 2023 (United States)
Running time 133 minutes
Rated M, Mature themes and course language

The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne, is a Christmas movie that isn’t about Christmas, but about the nobility of spirit that comes with relationships built under the pressure cooker of personal tragedy. Recommended by a co-worker and described by a friend as “a more cynical Dead Poet’s Society,” The Holdovers is the story of a young man, a disillusioned teacher, and the head cook at Barton College—the prestigious boarding school they all attend. Our main character, Angus Tully, is a smart but surly teen, a bully with an underlying anger that manifests as a superiority complex. When he learns that his mother wants to spend Christmas with her new husband, he is grouped with five other boys who cannot go home for the holidays. They are kept under the supervision of Mr Paul Hunham, an ancient history teacher whose reputation for academic excellence is known and resented by both students and teachers. When one of the boys convinces his rich father to take him and the other boys on their snow vacation, Angus, who cannot get parental permission, is left alone with Hunham and Mary Lamb, who runs the school kitchen.
 
The rest of the holiday sees these three main characters interact with each other, finding out bits of information and learning how to get along. We learn that Angus’s mother has recently remarried, and he tells Mr Hunham that his father has died. We discover that Mary worked at the school to enable her son to attend—something she would not have been able to do as a single Black mother. We also learn that her son recently died in Vietnam. Her grief is an undercurrent to the tension between the male characters and it often puts their surly attitudes into perspective. Mr Hunham is an alumnus of Barton, but his past is revealed slowly, as layers of developed personality are stripped away by his companions. After a less-than-amazing Christmas, the trio decide to go on a road trip to Boston, where Mary can see her pregnant sister. Angus, on the other hand, uses the opportunity to attempt to run away, revealing his own personal tragedy and his concerns for his future. Mr Hunham and Angus open up about how traumatic events of the past have shaped who they are in the present, slowly revealing information to each other as they explore Boston. The end of the film reveals the consequences of the journey. The choice that Hunham makes as a result demonstrates how simple choices help him evolve into a person free from tragedy.
 
This film derives its narrative force by not shying away from the ugly and mean spiritedness that eats away at damaged people. The characters are real and awkward, the conversations between them don’t give you the platitudes you’d expect. As we progress with the journey, we discover, as they do, the kernel of love that exists within each of the characters, as they process their respective grief by opening up to one another. There are moments in the film where the heartbreak is tangible, where the uncomfortableness is visceral. The dialogue is the star of this film, along with the visual detail and lingering shots on moments where dialogue just doesn’t say enough.  Even at the end, what isn’t said is as powerful as what is said, and the evocative set—its snow and space and defused lighting—creates a sense of emotional and chronological distance that is almost a visual metaphor for reflecting the past.

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