Ethan Switch - Monday, 7 February, 2005 - Print Version
Bondi Beach. Sand envelopes the entire place. Pot plants, inside the lifts, the counter top. Hell, even the showers scatter the grains of sand across the floor. Damn sand is everywhere. Lizette Montepelier knows of this observation's existence from a train and bus ride away. Daylight is unkind toward the Bondi Pavilion on Campbell Drive. Seat colours take up a lot of the ugly. Arriving with enough lead time, the cinemagoers find their mingling taking place on the balcony behind and in front of the pavilion. A paradox of locational streams.
Behind pale blue eyes a French accent shoots from the lips of a girl with frizzy hair and a sweater with one shoulder. Affecting this steely glare of loopiness, her voice is distant and her directions a little misleading. Vague gestures direct the feet straight into the turtle room; wherein dancers are dancing socks amast across the floorboards. Doubling back, the popcorn stand is where the purple banding action lies. This is where the food also resides.
Spread out on platters, the food turns out not to be that of the fee free kind. Prices on a plastic board making that glaringly clear. The topic is generic: wraps, big chunky bars of chocolate and sushi rolls. The drink cups choke down more ice cubes than they can handle. Water bottles are little farts, their hold doing nothing for a thirst beyond the tongue.
Coits on a wall do a little to bide the time between the start of the night's walk in and the film's flicker through the night. With two ring sets to throw, the lighter one is given and like all contests, only when the prizes are gone and the competition extinguished does the winning make true. The game is hard and erratic; the laid back host/carnie offers no help, having himself never played the game. Everybody's a loser and walks away with a frisbee with the UV ills and a keyring.
Minutes spiral by, a clocktower in the distance mocks the start time the operators were hinting at. Massive bean bags find their way all over the aisle of the ampitheatre. The girl from earlier insists that the projectionist has the film in hand and is waiting on the sun to lose itself behind another day.
So minutes later The Dreamers finally hit the screen of the Bondi Open Air Cinema.
Speakers down at the front row echo and mumble the starting dialogue. The tone and shortcomings fall away and it's like watching a big screen television with comparable sound. Only an hour in and the temperature nose dives into the plain. Winds are breezy, one woman takes three shots at a matchbox to light up her cancer stick. Legs find no feeling at night's end. Their use is negligible. Their pain is unfelt. Occasionally rippling gusts attempt a pale faced sonic boom.
Thematically is where The Dreamers finds its strength. With no actual (read: conventional) plot it's an observation into the lives of a brother/sister twin couple and their American friend. From pain and loneliness to suffering and love, the film buffs cover and dissect a variety of film influences and inferences. Outsiders, insiders, weirdoes—the damn gamut. Matthew (Michael Pitt) delivers the entry with hard and weary introspective thoughts that suffer only when taken through the nose. The incestuous relationship between Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) makes for an interesting dynamic to the relationship of the three as a whole. Their existence and lives with a revolution and riot just outside their windows holds a bright candle of contrast. With both time and temperature speedballing midnight the characters loosen their grip at the end of the reverse credits, Édith Piaf's rendition of "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" holding audio.
Walking away from the Bondi pavilion figuring out just anything, anything of the movie's hypnotic trance over the audience with Lizette is nowhere near clear. Are people shallow and selfish by act of indifference or fear leading them to cocoon themselves? Or did it have a deeper metaphorical context against that? With that?
Whatever the case may be, the chicken kebabs from Ali Baba have no chicken.
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