Walking on Water

Gavin is dying, presumably from AIDS. He wants to die at home and asks for help from his friends and family. The friends include Charlie and Anna, the latter of whom is also Gavin's business partner. Family includes Gavin's mother and brother, the latter of whom arrives with his wife and child.

Unfortunately, Gavin's departure is not as smooth as was planned, which serves as a catalyst for everyone else's problems to come out. Besides the obvious grief, we see addictive behavior from several people. We also see people try to use sex to deal with their pain. This is fairly balanced between heterosexuality and homosexuality, although until I thought about it afterwards, the film seemed heavily skewed towards the latter. My personal discomfort had affected my perception.

The acting is definitely a strong point in this film. Almost all of the performances are very good, and some are amazing, including one scene with Gavin's brother later in the film. There are is some excellent cinematography outdoors, especially of the ocean (presumably taken near Sydney, Australia, where the film takes place).

Seen on 11/2/2002 at the 2002 Hawaii International Film Festival.

Tony Ayers shows great promise as a director and I will be keen to see what he does next but this film was riddled with cliches. It was a film where I think the characters needed to be developed more fully at a script stage. It was an attempt to show a gay relationship in a different way but really it fails satisfy.

This film is OK.

It positions itself safely in the territory of Lantanaland...earnest, frank, emotionally charged and sometimes tawdry.

The shots are uninspired as are the ideas the story is dealing with. Grief is sad....but can we go deeper? Can we dig a bit more and discover something truly perverse or honest about ourselves. Maybe his friends don't really care all that much. Maybe his mother is just a tad less likable. I am not sure. In the end...it all seemed a bit cinematic ally safe.

Everything made too much sense. Everything had been worked over far too much. LIFE is a great film about AIDS. SAFE and POISON are great films too. This is good but feels a bit like movie of the week.

Walking On Water is about the way people deal with grief. It's also about death with dignity, in that attempting to provide just that for a friend is what causes most grief for the main characters.

When Gavin has lived as long as he can in relative dignity with HIV/AIDS, his live-in friends call for his family to come from South Australia to be at his bedside in Sydney.

A traumatic, rather than peaceful death adds to the stress of the surviving friends and family as they try to sort out their lives after enduring 18 months of increasingly intense pressure.

Charles and Anna are long time friends of Gavin. Charles has been working as full-time carer and fellow housemate Anna was also Gavin's business partner.

Judi Farr is rock solid and very impressive as the loving mum who lost her son to far off Sydney many years earlier. She has as much need to grieve as the others but is being distanced by Anna.

Charles struggles to maintain his sense of purpose and his relationship with boyfriend Frank, while Anna takes full advantage of opportunities to feel wanted.

It's an intense and beautiful film with a superb soundtrack and real life characters. There is ample dark humour to add relief and overall it is definitely more food for thought than depressing, as we follow the characters' search for resolution.

We will all have to learn to deal with grief. Hopefully we can take up the offer made at the start of the film: `Does anyone need counseling?'

Australian film "Walking on Water" is one of the most original films about homosexual characters.The best thing about it is that unlike other gay films it does not glorify homosexuality and gay people.It shows gay people as perfectly normal ordinary mortals whose joys and sorrows are same as that of straight people.This film's director Tony Aires started his career in 1999 with a documentary called "Sadness". His feature film debut "Walking on Water" is about tough choices one has to make in life.It is said that life assumes a different meaning altogether when people are confronted with death.This is something which happens in this film as a gay character dies after waging a valiant war against his illness.This film revolves around a group of friends who cope with an inevitable grief arising out of their friend's death.Their presence highlights the fact that a slow death is more brutal than Euthanasia.As a tale of human emotions and their implications on ordinary people,Walking on Water shows that friends are always around when one is abandoned by family.This is one of the best rewarding reasons for watching this film.