Trail of wounds

Beautiful Kate
15, Key Cities

Beautiful Kate is one of those emotional-journey films that begins with a family member returning home after a long, unexplained absence and, whatever else happens, you know they are not all going to settle down to a nice cup of tea and a cheerful catch-up. Instead, old wounds will be reopened, secrets from the past will be reawakened, skeletons will clamour to be released from cupboards and the flashbacks will do what flashbacks do: that is, flash back, rupturing the narrative before bringing it together and creating that satisfying whole. As a cinematic plot, this is as old as the hills, but if you like this sort of thing, and I rather do, then you will like this film. It’s absorbingly intriguing, emotionally involving and it will get under your skin. It may even still be under my skin. I’ll just check…yes, still there, just below my armpit, and I think it’s going to be there until next Tuesday, at least. (Some films can stay under your skin for several months, which is fine, but you will need to wear loose clothing.)

Set in Australia, it’s directed and was adapted (from the American novel by Newton Thornburg) by the English actress Rachel Ward, who starred opposite Richard Chamberlain in the TV mini-series The Thorn Birds, which may not be relevant, but still: who’d have thought it? Anyway, it opens with Ned (Ben Mendelsohn), a 40-year-old writer who is making the journey back to his outback childhood home along with his fiancée, Toni (Maeve Dermody), a deliciously trampy, petulant sex-bomb. As they travel at night, along a dirt road, their car hits a kangaroo, splattering the windscreen with blood, thereby signalling a tone that means a nice cup of tea and a cheerful catch-up are seriously not on the cards, if you ever thought they were.

Ned hasn’t been home for 20 years and now his father, Bruce (Bryan Brown), is dying grumpily, while being nursed by Ned’s dutiful younger sister, Sally (Rachel Griffiths, who provides a wonderful portrait of a lonely woman peculiarly at peace with herself). Bruce is finished physically. He has to be fed. He has to be toileted. But his anger is still on the go, as is his ability to needle, belittle and provoke Ned. Bruce is a failed everything: failed farmer; failed politician; failed husband; but is he also the failed father Ned thinks he is? Or, at least, is he as much of a failed father as Ned thinks he is?

Toni flicks though an old photograph album, discovering that the family once went to Majorca and had a marvellous time. Come on, chances of that? Instead, she discovers that Ned once had a twin sister, Kate, and an older brother, Cliff, who both died the summer Ned walked out and never came back. And so we are off, following the trail of wounds right back to their source via Ned’s dreamy, disturbing, handheld flashbacks. Kate was beautiful all right, if not more than that. She was so luminous it was frightening, and her sexual curiosity, once triggered, would have shocking and devastating consequences; consequences Ned himself doesn’t fully understand until Sally reveals one last secret. (Gosh, on reading that, I can see I’ve made it sound tantalising, which is terrific, as I didn’t even know I could do tantalising. I’m made up.)

As I said, there’s nothing new in any of this, just as it wasn’t new to, say, Tennessee Williams, but it is sensitively handled, and hauntingly handled, and Ms Ward sidesteps sensationalism to unpick meticulously the relationship between Ned, a disappointed middle-aged man tormented by past desires, and his father, a fading patriarch whose brief moments of tenderness and vulnerability are, in their way, as shocking as anything else. This has a strong sense of place — the parched, desolate homestead is like a dusty graveyard — and the performances are so authentic it’s as if these people are real facts of life.

Although the redemptive ending does feel like a cop-out — Ms Ward, the little Aboriginal kids are too much, but I forgive you because I loved The Thorn Birds so — the rest is good enough for it to not matter that much, if at all. And now my work is done, and I am off for the summer to an exotic land, far, far away — well, France — and if I do not come back it’s because I have met a sexy Frenchman who does not mind the films under my skin. I don’t think the French often do.