Look Both Ways (Film Review)

Took my dearest mum to see Look Both Ways yesterday as part of her birthday present. Only just realised now that both of her presents involved William MacInnes (I'm sure she doesn't mind), the other being a SeaChange DVD. This is a wonderful little film about the criss-cross of lives of a number of people living in Adelaide, who all have death on their minds in one way or another. The cast is uniformly excellent and Sarah Watt, who directed the film and is also MacInnes' wife, has an assured hand and is able convey substantial emotion with minimal dialogue. In fact, many scenes have no dialogue at all, instead relying on body language, facial expression, cutting and music. This may be explained by the fact that Watt has an animation background, and this is her first major live action effort. What concerned me about this film, was that in knew going in that there would be scattered animated segments through out the film. My initial reaction to this was that it was like the corpsified brother in Two Hands, a device that I thought almost ruined an otherwise entertaining film. Luckily, the segments work extremely well. Justine Clarke's character is a painter and Watt often visualises her thoughts about death using brief animated segments - chomped in half by a shark or disappearing under the rubble of a train derailment; MacInnes has similar thoughts about his predicament and they are conveyed by montages of stills and more realistic animations bringing his worst fears to life.
An outstanding film on all levels, and for someone who has never been overly impressed by films from my own country, I think we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel after a period of shockers to say the least.