Film Carew: The Rover, Galore, Good Vibrations, Two Faces Of January, Omar

THE ROVER

"10 years after the collapse,” a title-card announces simply, dropping the audience into the harsh realm of David Michôd's The Rover. It's a post-apocalyptic picture without an apocalypse; set in a near-future, post-oil-crash outback in which resources are scarce, currency is near-worthless, and justice comes down the barrel of a shotgun. It's a land of patrolling army trucks, abandoned open-cut mines, strung-out wire fences emitting an eerie hum; a lawless landscape where desperate characters cling to survival, human figures indivisible from the packs of wild dogs whose howls resound over the desert.

Guy Pearce stars as the titular character, a nameless hard-man who turns monomaniacal vigilante when his car is stolen, like a Spaghetti Western anti-hero pushed too far. He kidnaps a wounded, barely-there Robert Pattinson, and the two become an unlikely couple. Pearce is calm, steely, voice a forceful whisper, every action carrying a purpose; the Australian macho incarnate. Pattinson is restless, doubtful, eyes droopy; a slurring, Sling Bladey Southern Gothic dolt; the matinée beefcake striving for a transformative performance. Pearce and Pattinson get enough close-ups for The Rover to scan as actor's showcase, but the film is more about Michôd, staking a claim as Australia's budding international auteur.

With his 2010 debut, Animal Kingdom, Michôd showed the potential for greatness, even if its mise-en-scène - criminal domesticity; mythical ultra-slow-motion; proud pop-song placements - was straight from the school of Scorsese. Here, the canvas is grander, the visions bolder, and frames more composed. A memorable early car-crash sequence - cutting from the interior of a rolling car to Pearce sitting, still, as the flipping vehicle is glimpsed through the window behind him - feels like a director chasing the scene of their dreams; and Michôd embraces the hard-cut's potential for revelation.

The wilds of The Rover are visually rich and cinematically potent, there's a dramatic use of great music (Colin Stetson, Tortoise, William Basinski), and Michôd occasionally chases the premise to fascinating philosophical ends, as in when the army turns out to be private contractors whose 'arrests' are made to justify their own existence, to keep getting dem cheques. But, like Animal Kingdom, there's real dramatic limits to The Rover's parade of anti-heroes, its codes of crime, its standard-issue violence. Through two films, Michôd has shown bona fide filmmaking chops, now it'd be swell to see him tackle a story where 'everybody gets shot' isn't the dramatic progression.

GALORE

“This place is a shithole! I fucken hate it!” Toby Wallace spits, and he has a point: it's the outer fringes of Canberra he's talking about. Wallace is one of the angry teens caught amidst Galore's love-quadrangle, a suburban soap-opera of self-destructive behaviour and sexual exploration that plays out over a hot, idle summer, where kids with few thoughts for the future get drunk, pick fights, and fall into bed (or the backs of cars, or concrete drainage ditches) together. All the binge-drinking, hymen-bursting, yelling-out-the-window-of-a-car, threatening-to-commit-suicide, throwing-things-through-windows, living-life-on-a-knife-edge shenanigans are your standard-issue coming-of-age stuff - with Ashleigh Cummings in the lead, the Puberty Blues comparisons linger - but in the background bushfires blaze on the horizon, imminent destruction looming. The kids're fiddling whilst the Blue Mountains burn, debutante director Rhys Graham not only making the questionable choice of setting a teen melodrama against recent tragedy - 2003 Canberra = both bushfires and pre-smart-phone texting - but employing that destructive force-of-nature as a mere totem of innocence-lost, the razing of suburban tracts by fire used only to symbolise the end of adolescence.

Good Vibrations

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Good Vibrations is the name of the Belfast record store and label chronicled in Lisa Barros D'Sa and Glenn Leyburn's shrine to the '70s punk scene in Northern Ireland, but it's also the film's goal. The film verily radiates feelgoodery, maintaining a cheery demeanour in the face of The Troubles so as to evoke its central subject, Irish 'punk godfather' Terri Hooley. This juxtaposition gives the film a social weight that takes it beyond the boilerplate; music transcending religious sides in the civil war going on outside, the scene a self-contained bubble of both community-building and defiance. As the man at the centre of it all, Richard Dormer plays Hooley as equal parts raconteur and blissful fool, and D'Sa and Leyburn refuse to lionise him; the movie no hagiography, even if it's wantonly celebratory. Another film chronicling a scene figurehead, 24 Hour Party People, lingers as constant comparison - especially with Michael Winterbottom and Andrew Eaton as producers - but the tone of Good Vibrations is far less cynical, far more sincere.

Two Faces Of January

TWO FACES OF JANUARY

Hossein Amini's directorial debut comes with old-style cinematic glamour: Oscar Isaac, Viggo Mortensen, and Kirsten Dunst trussed up in sweet '60s finery, like catalogue-models set against the sunkissed grandeur of Greece. They're tourists traipsing from luxury hotel to ancient ruins, but they're also grifters; Isaac a small-time guide short-changing wandering debutantes, Mortensen a financial-advisor who fled America, wife Dunst on arm, after some shady stock-tips went South. At first they're gay gadabouts footloose and fancy-free on the continent, but, soon, of course, shit goes down, and the trio goes on the lam, sliding deeper in a nightmare they can't escape; Greek soil turning unforgiving quicksand. Amini's adapting Patricia Highsmith, so there's an elegance to the turn, and old-fashioned thriller-isms in the air: from a few blessed moments - like inching through immigration - of genuine tension to an ending that embraces Greek tragedy. But the film is limited by the sense of inevitability that comes when things start going wrong, which means that there's very few moments, herein, that're unexpected.

OMAR

Hany Abu-Assad's much-awaited follow-up to 2005's Paradise Now comes to local screens with plentiful plaudits: from scoring the Jury Prize at Cannes last year to winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Lanuage Film. It's a highly-symbolic drama that starts out with much sweetness and grand symbolism: a pair of impossibly-attractive young lovers - Adam Bakri as the titular baker, Leem Lubany as the light of his eyes - divided by one of the West Bank's walls. They're both Palestinian, but are consigned to different sides; Bakri's daily scalings showing the wall as an absurd hurdle, but one not insurmountable. The constant presence of patrols lingers, though, with as much symbolism: a love that's lawless is bound to end badly. Where Paradise Now kept its potentially-scandalous qualities in check, Omar feels no such restraint: its initial low-key nature soon spiraling into a wild melodrama part spy-movie, part Shakespearean-tragedy. There's a love-triangle, double and triple-crossings, and a sense of self-conscious swagger; Abu-Assad out to make a bigger statement. At its best, the film feels achingly human and brilliantly conflicted, a profound portrait of a life torn between self-preservation and rebellion; its thriller elements creating a claustrophobia that captures the watched-over sense of life on-the-ground in the panopticon of the Occupied Territories. But at its worst, Omar seems more like arthouse fluff masquerading as political art.