Faced with his imminent death, a theatre director has retired to an isolated retreat to live out his last days with his son and five favourite actresses. He calls Conor, an inexperienced beautiful young man, to this spiritual haven for an experiment in performance that will blur the line between fiction and lies, biography and legacy, ceremony and sacrifice. The director watches from the shadows as the actresses perform scenes from his life, and Conor is absorbed into this uncertain twilight world of memories and confessions. Can the muse atone for the sins of the artist?
A haunting experience of intense beauty and restraint. A must for anyone who loves cinema.
You very likely already are saying 'Huh?' to all this and you are right. I couldn't make head nor tail (nor tale either) of this farrago, apparently an attempt at some form of sub-Alain Resnais sensibility, so I deputised the job to the DVD cover blurb. That was the first paragraph. The second para was an opinion from Megan Spencer on radio JJJ. The only way I could account for it was that Ms Spencer must be the director's mum.
There were occasional hints that it was all some sort of unscripted play, but the film failed to convey its plot across to me. Even less did it induce me to care.
In the end, the only way I found to survive through to the end was to pretend it was an allegory. The prologue up country bus journey was really the midnight coach ride to Borgo Pass, the setting (in the spa at Hepburn Springs) was Castle Dracula, the shadowy 'director' was a behind the scenes Count, the actresses his brides, and the BYM a bewildered and bewitched Jonathan Harker. Certainly the mind control and blood motifs were there.
I still didn't care for it. The soonest these vampires shot through to harvest jugulars in the big smoke was never going to be soon enough.
I was a bit surprised by the film's 'beautiful young man'. I was expecting a Dorian Gray type, but Conor O'Hanlon who played his namesake here wouldn't have looked out of place in the Wallabies front row.
