Peaches

In a climate of poorly performing Australian feature films this offering did not prove to be any different.At a writers conference the screenwriter, when asked what the premise of the movie was, couldn't clearly articulate it. She mumbled something about "moving on" and "accepting loss"...say no more. The ideas were great but the script lacked a powerful driving narrative line. There was no clear protag and no "big idea" which feature films seem to require to keep the audience awake for two hours.

And as for the casting....if you want to get away with a 40 something man shagging a 16 year old girl then the actor needs to be ATTRACTIVE!! Hugo Weaving??...pulleeeeze!

I really enjoyed the performances of the main cast. Emma Lung is courageous and interesting. The director has developed performances where the characters are not one dimensional. A complex story with the changing between eras. Also appreciated the underlying story of the unions losing power and the effect of a large employer closing on a small town. I do not agree with the comment that the older man has to be attractive. There have be many relationships with older men and younger women - without the male being good looking. Depth of character can be appealing to the not so shallow. The film has a good look and the cinematography is also good.

The Australian film industry is reputed to be in a mess, and this film gives a hint of why that might be. Set and filmed in the South Australian Riverland area, famous for its grapes and stonefruit, it attracted funding from the SA and Australian film commissions and the scenery is lovely. But you don't get much for $A5.5 million in movie production these days and despite some nice cinematography the production values are pretty modest – FAQ TV movie level. Most of the money probably went on food for the shoot. Hugo Weaving is in it (he must owe director Craig Monaghan a favour after the brilliant "Interview") and there is other fine acting from Jacqueline McKenzie and (especially) Emma Lung as Steph. Yet somehow it doesn't make it.

Is it the script? This is by Sue Smith who has written many absorbing hours of TV drama ("Carson's Law", "Brides of Christ", "Bordertown"), and while her dialogue is a bit posh for a bunch of peach cannery workers it is at least coherent.

Is it the plot? It is indeed a bit over-ripe. We have the melodramatic circumstances of Steph's birth, the love to hate relationship between her aunt and the cannery foreman, Steph's taking up with the said foreman and his brother, not to mention the brother's criminal record, and an arson attempt. But in the end nothing truly out of the ordinary occurs.

Is it the theme? Life in rural Australia has never been easy and is not getting any easier. Canneries are closing, small towns are dying, and the drought is tightening its grip. The film reflects all that but somehow inadequately reflects the resulting personal malaise. "The Farm" (a mere TV movie) and "Three Dollars" did a much better job of combining the character's personal dilemmas with a more general view of their circumstances.

As to the acting, there is little to complain about. Hugo is a very fine actor and both he and Jacqueline get away with being 20-year-olds in the flashback scenes. I'm not sure the part was a huge challenge to his resources but he handles the love scenes with Emma very well - his alleged ugliness (I like to think of him as lugubriously handsome) is only an issue for those who do not realise that attractive young girls can and do fall in love with ugly old men (remember Rasputin, and heck, Hugo was only 42 at the time of filming).

Jacqueline McKenzie provides an interesting contrast between the party-loving girl of the flashbacks with the present-day overprotective aunt who uses Steph's mobile phone as an electronic leash. Emma Lung shows some real talent as the pretty, confused and dyslectic Steph, Craig Monaghan has put the story together quite artfully and tastefully with some nifty cutting but in some ways the whole is not quite the sum of its parts. The characters are interesting and sympathetic, but a bit dumb, somehow. Maybe that's the Australian condition!

PS: warning to Peugeot lovers – at least one splendid 504 is destroyed during the movie. – a most unusual car for a seasonal fruit picker to be driving in the early 1980s, even if he was Vietnamese.

PPS: "FAQ" is a wool classing term – it means a fleece of "Fair Average Quality".

Let me be the first non Australian to comment on this :) I got the movie for Hugo Weaving and I watched it to the end. It's one of those "drama of life" films, as my mother used to call a movie that depicts a real life story with no extraordinary events and that is mostly descriptive.

I liked the light and the girls. The rest was without too much fault, but without too much merit either. I yearned for something like The Interview, or at least some matrix villain element here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary. The story does teach one about facing one's own destiny and break free from the environment others build for you, but this happens when the life giving peach factory in the area is about to close, so not much of an effort to change things is required.

The "smart" American Beauty sound-alike song in the background could have been part of a larger soundtrack, but just that one playing over and over again became annoying after 100 minutes of film.

In the end, I guess it did his job of presenting a part of Australian life, but to me it didn't seem specifically Australian (it could have been placed anywhere) and it didn't seem attractive as a story.

I guess one must be in a certain mood to like the movie.

I was at the same screenwriters conference and saw the movie. I thought the writer - Sue Smith - very clearly summarised what the film was about. However, the movie really didn't need explanation. I thought the themes were abundantly clear, and inspiring. A movie which deals with the the ability to dare, to face fear - especially fear passed down from parental figures - and overcome it and, in doing so, embrace life's possibilities, is a film to be treasured and savoured. I enjoyed it much more than the much-hyped 'Somersault.' I also think Mandy62 was a bit unkind to Hugo Weaving. As a bloke about his vintage, I should look so good! I agree that many Australian films have been lacklustre recently, but 'Peaches' delivers the goods. I'm glad I saw it.