Travelling Light

least, she stood out the front bravely enough BEFORE we'd all seen the film, and presumably stuck around for the screening itself, although I don't blame her if she didn't – and her mere presence at the screening made me curiously reluctant to say anything bad about her film. But then I come here and read someone actually PRAISING this valueless work and my reluctance vanished.

Barring comments on Sacha Horler's performance, which I suppose is up to her usual high standards (not that that it's easy to tell in a film like this), the nicest thing that can be truthfully said about the film is that it accurately conveys what it was like to live in suburban Adelaide in the 1970s ... to people who lived in suburban Adelaide in the 1970s. And if you think THAT'S an artistic achievement of any worth, you obviously haven't thought very much.

We do manage to gather that suburban Adelaide wasn't a very pleasant place back then. Everything looked sterile, and every single person who ever said anything, said it in the context of a sterile conversation. What it's like to LIVE in this impossibly bleak and mind-numbing environment, it's hard to say; there's nothing human about the film, so watching it gives us no means of telling. What it's like to sit through 88 minutes of flat conversations flatly acted in flatly lit flat settings, though, is obvious enough. It's boring. Or if not boring, AT BEST irksome. It's not as though the individually tedious scenes ever connect with one another, to produce something more than the effect of very many of them in succession.