Unfinished Sky

I spent a few years living in Australia and while improving my English, I developed a love of this country's cinematic tradition. This film has stuck in my mind ever since. While seeing it with foreign eyes probably helped, anyone that enjoys a good romance film will find something to like about it.

This film follows a widowed farmer that seems fairly happy living the life of on the land alone with only his faithful dog to keep him company. Enter one mysterious, scared and battered woman into his life and you have the makings of a good mystery romance.

The acting is excellent and while the plot is predictable, the mystery subplot was a bit under-cooked, its heartwarming where it needs to be and serious at the right time too.

i thoroughly enjoyed this film. history would suggest Aussie made films aren't generally of the highest caliber - mad max(mad max 1 that is) aside. But as an Aussie myself i will allow myself to be critical of Aussie movies. so to watch this film was a delight. this film had a great back drop - rural Australia - and didn't under or overplay that aspect of the film. Was a lot of money spent making this movie - no - but that would be true to the film - a gritty and very good Australian film. The film also contains a little something for most, with an element of romance and suspense thrown into this drama. The plot tag also suggests she flees a brothel which sounds very cliché but isn't accurate in relation to where she is fleeing from at the beginning of the film. Give it a try - great film.

This is a story about pure evil and men at their worst, but also a man who muddles through to what is right.

The refugee woman Tahmeena speaks almost no English at the beginning of the movie. Some of her backstory is explained through pictures and some the viewer can only guess at until the end. But since she shows up at the farm obviously the victim of some violence, the viewer can surmise that either she is herself a vicious criminal, which seems unlikely, or she has suffered a great deal.

There isn't much dialogue for half the movie because of the language barrier. Some of the story is told by quiet action. I won't say the story drags, but it develops slowly.

There are many sequences where the viewer sees flashes of action and there are quite a few dark scenes.

Finally the climax begins with John doing the famous good deed that can't go unpunished. The events that take place in the present and flash back to the past really dive into the sewer of human depravity.

The ending is hopeful but open ended.

This film demonstrates how fragile film aesthetics are. Quite possibly as a novel, which takes time to read and allows us to accommodate shifts in our emotions, it could be fine. But here we have, essentially two conflicting stories that are jammed onto one another with destructive results.

One story is a tough, indeed brutal, issues movie dealing with justice, male dominance and humanist sentiments, the other is a touching romance about two vulnerable people trying to heal each other from their emotional scars. Neither of these is very original and the one, in my view, emotionally precludes the other. When we are steamed up about injustice, we cannot access the very fine-tuned emotions associated with love.

One of the greatest things about the film medium is its ability to twist time and integrate the past into the present. But here, that is the film's undoing. If the story had been told chronologically, we would at least have been able to get the nastiness out of the way and empathise with the romance, but the threat and extremely crude depictions of the 'horrors of the brothel' keep bursting back in, destroying any subtle emotions that have been generated.

Good slow build up and a good story. Really enjoyed the film but then it was too much of an abrupt ending where you had to guess really what would happen afterwards. But nevertheless well worth a watch.