My thoughts on this film (spoilers)
(Spoilers ahead).
Minor writer Ned is tooling down the country road on his way to his dying father’s house, to be with him when his hour comes. His girlfriend, half his age, is an immature, narcissistic, aggressive dumb blonde, with a big abrasive mouth, which starts to get on my nerves immediately. Then she takes an extended leak by the side of the car. Then they hit a kangaroo and Ned throws away the dead body, with the still living joey. Then they pass groups of drunken blue singleted hoons. Then they arrive at the tired run down little homestead. That’s in the first few minutes.
It goes downhill from there, way, way downhill. As soon as they open the door, and dumb blonde girlfriend makes herself as obnoxious and rude as possible, she is matched by Ned’s father Bruce, who turns out to be one of those fathers who is stuck on being as sarcastic and wounding as possible, to everyone, but especially his own family. If there is one scene showing him at his most sour and acidic, there are a dozen, and likewise there cannot be sufficient scenes of him wetting himself, lying screaming on the floor, weeping loudly in his bed and so on.
At about this time, my own nerves are jangling as much as Ned’s, and when he starts banging his head on a steering wheel, I felt I would like to do the same, or get down on the cinema floor and start dragging up carpet tacks with my teeth. But wait, there’s more.
Ned’s sexual urges concerning his girlfriend are not being met, and their coupling has a mechanical aura to it. She hates the place and between her moaning and bitching about it, and his father laying on the vitriol, I feel like I’m at a very wrong night when some truly disgusting family is going to lay out its filthy linen, and by filthy I mean bulging with mounds of steaming fecal matter a yard high. By this stage, the plot is virtually without a pulse, but director / writer Rachel Ward decides she can slow it down to a standstill. Without a music score to speak of, and no other theme or diversion to go to, the affairs of this awful family begin to take on the effect of having a dentist use an industrial rasp on your molars.
It may be impossible to believe, but this is just the entrée for what is much worse. Ned begins to have an endless series of flashbacks to his life at the homestead 20 years ago, and each flashback is done in the clichéd manner – he hears his father belly aching, and he sees his father from back when he was in his prime. And he was even worse. So the flashbacks are no relief from this bloody-minded torment, but they do now broach the main theme of this flick, “Beautiful Kate” the long-dead twin sister of the permanently downcast Ned. Turns out she seduced him all the way back then. Now I enjoy scenes of youthful frolic, both in play and in sexual ardour, but call me an old fuddy duddy, I’m not into incest, and scenes of the two siblings running around the Hills Hoist with a hose, and later skinny dipping and “making love” by the dam at night, I just find repellent. You might get off on it. I don’t.
Just when you think this grande guignol could not plumb another avenue of dis-entertainment, we are shown that the “beautiful” Kate has also seduced Ned’s brother. They have fights over her. This family of sexual cannibals then gets a severe trim when Ned’s brother takes “keep it in the family” Kate in the car, and she gets killed in a crash. He then hangs himself in the shed.
It’s absolute meanness and nerve-destroying emptiness ruling the present, and this multiplied for the flashback scenes. Ok, if this sounds like your cup of tea, then go for it. I spent the whole film trying to find something that was not totally repulsive. Then I thought of all the stars and good reports it had garnered. I remembered Margaret Pomeranz raving about it, and I thought. “Yes, this is the story of Australian cinema. It gets extra stars because it is an AUSTRALIAN film, and it gets more than that because the writer / director is female.” The film is copybook example of the “higher values” of the self-absorbed illuminati. It looks upon alienating, boring, repulsive scenes and characters as worthy of our rapt attention.
And it is textbook female auterism. Why is it that female directors / writers tend to favour plotless movies with unsympathetic characters and stomach-turning themes? Is it because they want to show they are not sentimental and soft-headed? That they can be as dour and acidic as the most intestine-obsessed French wanker? That they are philosophers, not entertainers? How best to do that? Well, Beautiful Kate gives you the answer in bucketloads of ordure. Take an already repulsive and sickening theme. Slow it right down. Remove any hint of vitality, joy or humour. Remove any subplot or diversion from the main train wreck of a family which must be viewed with lidless eyes. You cannot overstate any negative dimension of character. If Bruce is snide and caustic, let that be paraded in extremis, scene after scene after scene. I felt like yelling “Ok, I get it! I get it! Can we move on?” There are no cattle roundups here. No sequences of life in the broader community. There is no hint of any ambition or life outside of the psychotic dilemma of the main characters. There is no sense that we are being told a story which has the feeling of a narrative.
And then comes the big denouement, the only moment in this interminable film that might lift it, at least marginally, out of the crypt. And it is complete belly flop. The catharsis feels contrived and confused. It has something to do with Ned exonerating his father over Cliff’s death. If Cliff’s death had been cause by a father’s curse, then a scene of atonement might have meant something, something in this viscous swamp of a film to give it meaning. But we are shown at least twice that Cliff kills himself directly after accidentally killing Kate. So none of it makes sense.
But not to worry. Just give it extra stars ‘cause it’s an Aussie movie, and has a female writer / director. And watch how audiences begin to realize that a constellation of stars awarded to Aussie movies mean next to nothing.
Btw, I can’t fathom why this “timeless masterpiece” has a message board here at IMDB with about 6 threads, after a year. And why the main board doesn’t even bother to name the characters played by half of the main stars, including Bryan Brown’s Bruce. Goes to show how genuine all these accolades are.
I see things that never were and say WHAT THE..!.