Praise

Great, thrilling, scarily intimate. In its first half hour, this astonishing Australian feature gets so close to its characters you feel the director is touching your skin. Gordon (Peter Fenton) is a type well known to people in that age between Bill Clinton and the Backstreet Boys: smart, alert, passive, asexual, easily emotionally manipulated. Cynthia (Sacha Horler) is a big girl with a big appetite for beer and the male organ; she needs sex desperately, helplessly, in the way a love-starved puppy races in circles in need of a touch. The movie records the birth pangs, first steps, clunky adolescence, and quick death of a relationship. Like Wong Kar-wai's HAPPY TOGETHER, most of it takes place in a crappy flophouse apartment. That's it--that's the movie. And every detail in it, from the stigmata-like blood flow of Cynthia's eczemous skin, to the fellatio in a milky bathtub, to the reaction of a horny couple to a violent row, is flawless.

The director, John S. Cullen, is all about getting it right, and so he does--to the point where you can find yourself mouthing aloud the dialogue seconds before it happens. This isn't because the movie is cliched; quite the opposite. It's because the movie gets things about falling in and out of love that no one--nobody, not even those who have made the Big Famous Movies About Sex--has hit. PRAISE seems to have had no luck in the theatres; perhaps it will live on in its IFC afterlife. All praise to Strand Releasing, the best distributors of foreign and independent movies in America. If you want to see a non-studio movie on a subject other than a cute boy and his grandpa, or a wily chef who woos all the ladies, you have Strand to thank for your satisfaction.

The term "loser" to an Australian ear has a nasty harsh American stridency to it which seems to absolve the person uttering it from any sympathy for the "loser" in question. Now Gordon and Cynthia are definitely "losers" but at the end of this film we see beauty in an otherwise fairly pathetic pair. Gordon, in his mid-twenties, a country boy who's drifted to the city, works in a bottle store and lives in a once grand but now squalid rooming house occupied by various broken-down old men. He meets Cynthia, a barmaid, at work and for no particular reason they both quit. She moves in with him when her military parents are transferred. Gordon's chief recreation is drinking, and hers is sex, and after a while Gordon is dreading going to bed. Yet something happens between them and affection grows, even though we can see it's hopeless. There is beauty even in a doomed relationship between two misfits.

Quite why their lives have become so aimless is not really explored; both seem to have untraumatic backgrounds and neither is really cut off from their families. Gordon's lost love Rachel appears towards the end but he's lost interest in her, too. Gordon is at home amongst the deros, prematurely old, out of steam, life over before it really got started.

It sounds depressing and it is, but the relationship is tender and warm - a less melodramatic version of "Leaving Las Vegas." The story is set in Brisbane, though apparently not filmed there, and the humid stifling summer atmosphere is well evoked. It doesn't really explain the lack of motivation though.

"Praise" is a slice-of-misery Aussie flick which looks into the waxing and waning of a relationship between a sexually obsessed woman and her taciturn and less experienced boyfriend while both languish in a life of self indulgence, sex, indolence, sex, drugs, sex and more sex. "Praise" is one of those films which slip between the cracks of public consciousness for want of broad market appeal and entertainment value while garnering critical and industry acclaim for its ability to faithfully portray difficult human issues. A good flick for adult cinema devotees who are as interested in execution as in content.

Hesitantly I went to this movie after reading an interesting review on a local freebie. As I expected we were about 10 people watching this film at peak time (Friday night) in a major art-films theater. It didn't matter because this is perhaps one of the best films I have seen this year. This a fully realized piece with extraordinary performances, excellent photography, superb set design/atmosphere, music, certainly the work of a great director. The story of two people who get together in a dead end relationship becomes fascinating the longer one watches them walk the road towards its logical conclusion. I personally didn't care about their "motivations" or their "backgrounds" as I have ceased to expect any logic from life. I took each second the way it came, each surprising turn, each new wrinkle in an apparently plotless movie. The ending is absolutely perfect as anyone will interpret it the way he/she wants. For me it brought up the power of memories/dreams/fantasies that don't let go, where pale and boring reality can't compete, even if one is aware that a fantasy is a fantasy. This film is much better than anything that has come out of Sundance and could have had a good shot at Cannes.

A must see if you like Bergman films: I was a thoroughly depressed individual when I walked out, and very happy to be one.

I'm just not too sure about this film. I loved the book, but somehow the film is just missing something. I think that you are not treated to as much of Gordon's inner thoughts and motivations, and so he comes off as less of a sympathetic character than in the novel. I concede, though, that it would have been quite difficult to achieve some sort of balance in the portrayal of the main protagonists, especially considering that Cynthia is such a dominant, aggressive (albeit sexually) personality.

Despite my misgivings though, the performances are fantastic, especially Sacha Horler as Cynthia.

Probably a common gripe from anyone living in Brisbane is that although the film is set here, it is so obviously not filmed here. I've heard all the stories about budget constraints and what not, but it still irks me (and many others) that a cult brisbane novel was filmed in sydney, no matter how universal its themes.