Beautiful
Dir. Dean O'Flaherty
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 97mins
Sometimes I watch a movie and can immediately tell what the pitch would have been.
Disturbia was "
Rear Window, but with teenagers!" or
Australia was "
Gone with the Wind, but with Aussie accents!" Such it was with Dean O'Flaherty's debut film as writer and director,
Beautiful. I can picture the meeting now. "So guy, it's
Blue Velvet, but with teenagers... and Aussie accents!" Which just makes the movie even more of a disappointment.
There is a good movie tucked away inside
Beautiful and it occasionally rears it's head from time to time to perk the viewer's interest whenever it begins to slide due to unnecessary subplots and ridiculous flights of fancy. It is just that it never sticks around long enough to build towards a successful film. In fact, watching the film is a very bizarre experience, indeed. A bizarro-world mish-mash of ideas and images. Not once does O'Flaherty feel the need to explain why every household in the idyllic neighbourhood that the film is set in seem to have 1950s television sets and antique furniture or why characters watch INXS videos of VHS. Nor does he feel the need to rein himself in when in one odd scene his characters appear to enter a silent black and white movie with mock
Grindhouse aesthetics.
In the upper-class suburb of Sunshine Hills two beautiful teenage girls have been gruesomely murdered and another is missing. Such is the launching pad for the movie and it's a good one, especially with the incredibly lush cinematography by Kent Smith, in his first feature outing, filling the screen with bright colours with immaculate close-ups and angles. The loner kid of the street is Danny (Sebastian Gregory) who always carries a camera gets tangled up with his not-so-girl-next-door sexual fantasy, Suzy (Tahyna Tozzi), and begins to investigate the goings on at creepy number 46. And all this while dealing with an is-he-isn't-he abusive father (Aaron Jeffreys) and stepmother (Peta Wilson).
If it sounds straight forward enough then you're wrong. Subplots come and go - one involving Wilson's character is particularly awkward - and the lines between myth and reality blur to almost inconceivable levels. The big climax of a twist ending especially feels forced and like a dead weight compared to the quite delicious coda that follows it. That Deborra-Lee Furness has the most interesting character and is really the entire force behind the movie is seemingly not of any worth to O'Flaherty.
Like a lot of Australian genre films the acting is hit and miss. Furness is impressive in her small role while newcomer Gregory has definitely improved since his role in
Acolytes last year. Tozzi gives the film's strangest performance, seemingly a mix of five different characters none of which are in the same universe as
Beautiful. There's also no denying that there's something frighteningly about her. The hair, the tan, the everything. "Sex bomb" for the
Ralph set, I suppose.
The film's biggest strength is it's aforementioned aesthetics. It's so nice to see an Australian film filled with such vibrant images. They are images that deserve better than the screenplay they are servicing. A screenplay that deliberately presents a sort of hyper-stylised version of Australian suburbia, yet one that never connects the dots it laid out in fascinating and beautiful fashion. It's the most disappointing of misfires; One that really coulda been something. As it is, however,
Beautiful is a big pretty mess.
D+
There comes a moment late into Ana Kokkinos’ latest adventure through suburban woe that features Frances O’Connor, and it will surely hit any viewer like a punch from Mike Tyson right in the gut. So visceral is the moment that it rattled me for quite some time after the credits had rolled and its effects may actually give the illusion that Kokkinos is responsible for having made a good movie.
