Blessed

We just returned from yet another brilliant and moving Australian film; it is the third of a trilogy of tough films that we have recently attended. Do not expect anything remotely comparable to something from Hollywood. As I have commented before, these films could not be made in Hollywood; the Americans could not stand the realism, the rawness or the lack of a cutesy ending. We were particularly struck by the realness of all that we saw; I do not know people living on the edge to the extent depicted in the film but I have encountered people such those on the screen so I believe that I can vouch for the accuracy of the portrayals. The film is divided between mothers and their kids. The first half of the movie examines the kids and the kind of life they are forging on their own, generally, because the bonds of motherly love have been broken irreparably in some cases and temporarily in others. In all cases the journey for the viewer is a road full of potholes. The seven children represent different methods of survival and the mothers, it could be argued, also represent different methods of survival but at an adult level. Men play a purely secondary role, if their presence could be called a role at all. To me the males represented the alpha and omega of maleness: at one time protector, at another life-slayer. However, the film first and foremost is about females and the roles they form to survive as best they can in a disturbing, malevolent world.

I was tremendously moved by this movie from Australia, and the audience at the London Film Festival were very appreciative of director Ana Kokkinos who attended to introduce the film and for a Q&A. Blessed is based on an Australian play called "Who's afraid of the working class" which was produced in 1999. So the project to make it cinematic has taken the best part of 10 years for Ana Kokkinos. Ana's focus in the film was towards the relationships between mothers and their children (or blessings), and stripped out anything from the play that didn't fit in that agenda.

The film is simply that, an examination of the bond between mother and child, with a strong backdrop of contemporary Melbourne. I think it was a challenge to try and strip the theatricality out, but that seems to have been pulled off really well (both with the structure of the film which is very cinematic and the focus on the close-up of the human face, which is a cornerstone of cinema). There are around five different stories here, which have some degree of connectivity, which avoids the choppiness you can get in a typical portmanteau film. Mostly we are seeing children on the streets of Melbourne, instead of in school, in some degree of confrontation or peril. There is a structure so that you can see the same story twice, once from the children's side and once from the adult's side.

I think the cast is cracking. Frances O'Connor as Rhonda if electric in this movie, like a force of nature, a flaming creature. She does some terrible things, they are sins of omission more than anything else (though they are still heinous). There is a scene in this movie where heavily pregnant Rhonda dances in a nightclub after a huge incident, whilst her social worker looks on in awe and disbelief. That's the attitude of the audience mirrored. Rhonda's alive with sexuality and agony throughout the whole movie, so apart from the way most people live in their ultra-sanitised lives where they've tried to remove everything animal. The social worker is a proxy for the middle class audience member, who is university educated and has erased their pagan side.

The level of confrontation in the movie is astonishing to anyone (like myself) who lives in a confrontation-phobic milieu. A police detective in a darkened interview room, full of frustration and rage, tells two truant girls how miserable they are and stupid, and how they've got no talent going for them and that they know nothing, and will never amount to anything.

Cezary Skubiszewik music is absolutely haunting, it's played over the opening scenes where we see all the children asleep in their beds. You know right then that you're in for a very special movie. It's a raging torrent of love and hatred and pure emotion that leaves you bewildered and touched by the dilemmas and hideous positions that the characters find themselves in.

I don't have any trouble in saying that this is the finest film I saw in a programme of at least 25 films, including the eventual winner of the festival, Jacques Audiard's Un prophète.

As many other Australian movies, this work is hard to comprehend at a firs glance by the non-Australians, those used, especially, to enjoying the public places in accordance with their local rules heralded – NOT being punished for NOT listening a music without headphones/cell-phone deliberating last shag details in a computer zone if any, at a local public library, for instance.

Such a very specific flexible Australian approach in situ to human freedoms and liberties demanded from the rest of the world to follow uncompromisingly, has been seen sure-transparently in works by Ana Kokkinos, a movie-maker having already a world shocked with her brilliant "Head On" and definitely-Australian "The Book of Revelations", of which contexts are simple dominance of what-want-to-do attitude as a resistance against commoner's factual powerlessness and arbitrariness factually sustaining a grey boring grass-root subsistence of semi-egalitarians/semi-inmates of Australian ethnic minorities she belongs to, particularly.

This new movie is of inter-family relations and how strangers are interacting unknowingly in their common inability to change anything in lives run down in modern dead-boring Melbourne-a self-proclaimed vibrant cultural capital of Australia.

A gem not to miss.

This film is fantastic. Beautifully crafted, brilliantly acted, comes together incredibly.

I have to agree with the Sydney Morning Herald blogger, Giles Hardie, who today put "Blessed" in his "10 Turkeys of 2009" list - in direct contradiction to his SMH Film Reviewer (the beyond middle aged Sandra Hall) who gave it 4 stars. Hardie nails it between the eyes and is worth quoting in full : "In a year of prolific Australian film making, it takes a stand out effort to make the worst film. Congratulations to the team behind Blessed who mistook melodrama for content, predictability for pathos, tokenism for meaning. The names behind this film were stellar, and that only made their fall from grace harder to bear." My only question is ..."what is it with Melbourne film-makers?" Do they have their own funding channel ... is it a Paul Cox thing ? Why do they continue to keep funding failed directors? Ana Kokkinos should have been sent back to screen writing 101 after "the Book Of Revelation" ... yet Film Victoria handsomely funded this overblown (& expensive) turgid soap opera. I don't get it. I think it's box office says it all - it appealed to no-one ! Ye Gods. 2 hours of my life I'll never get back.