LOOK BOTH WAYS
Director: Sarah Watt Stars: William McInnes, Justine Clark, Anthony Hayes
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
The title of Sarah Watt’s small but award-winning film sounds like a Jungian exhortation to wholeness. No matter what our personal preferences and characteristics, we still have to look both ways.
Commentators on the Australian film industry might say that when it comes to promotion of directors and awards, it is rather a look one way: at male directors. Looking at this a little more closely reveals something unexpected from 2003. Gillian Armstrong won Best Director in 1979 for My Brilliant Career. Then, in 1986, Nadia Tass won for Malcolm. Move to 1991 and Jocelyn Moorhouse won for Proof. After that, no more women directors until 2003. The interesting point is that in 2003, 2004, 2005 the Best Director awards went to women directors: Sue Brooks for Japanese Story, 2003, Cate Shortland for Somersault, 2004, and now Sarah Watt for Look Both Ways.
Is there a particular characteristic that is common to these films? Is there a particular characteristic that could be called more feminine than masculine? That, of course, is a difficult and controversial question. However, one characteristic that emerges from these three films by women is ‘vulnerability’. Vulnerability is something experienced by men and women but is associated with the ‘feminine’ in both, with its emphasis on subjectivity, situations and circumstances and the need for making allowances in coming to decisions.
A suggestion as to why this should make an impact in Look Both Ways is that the film is concerned with death. At the centre of the film is physical illness and death. Nick (William McInnes, who is Sarah Watt’s husband off-screen) is diagnosed with cancer, a sudden and unexpected diagnosis. How does a man deal with this news? Is there someone he can communicate it to? Nick, a press photographer, seems to be able to confide solely in his editor. Rather, the film shows his introspection, the aloneness he has to face in this life-then-death situation.
One of the qualities of the film is Sarah Watt’s ability to suggest and explore experiences of introspection. In her previous short films, she has demonstrated her ability at animation, not so much animated characters as paintings in motion, in rhythms, in patterns, as in her award-winning, Small Treasures (1995)). This is particularly true of the other central character in Look Both Ways, Meryl (Justine Clark). Meryl is also grieving, not for herself, but for the death of her father from whose funeral she is returning home. Animated inserts suggest Meryl’s anguish and pain.
It is death which brings Nick and Meryl together, a death on the railway lines, perhaps accidental, perhaps deliberate. Meryl has seen it. Nick has come, immediately after his diagnosis, to photograph the aftermath.
Nick returns to the scene later to meet Meryl. The suggestion is that they might be soul-mates, aspects of death bringing them together, some kind of complementarity in compassion in love. The difficulty is that Nick is unable to communicate to Meryl either his condition or the desperate bewilderment he is feeling.
Once again, Sarah Watt dramatises introspection by inserting flashbacks of Nick’s father and his terminal illness, the son remembering his father’s stubbornness and asserting of independence the more helpless he became and his mother’s tenderness and exasperation in her continued care. The film brings this interiorising of his fears and comparisons with his father into the actual world when Nick takes Meryl to meet his mother.
The Australian inarticulate male almost ruins the relationship which has brought such love and affirmation to the warm Australian female – and to physical ruin as Meryl runs from the emotion and tongue-tied Nick and is almost knocked over by a car. The resolution comes with Nick’s freedom to express the truth about himself inviting Meryl to share his illness, welcoming her in to the deepest parts of his life.
While the core of Look Both Ways is powerful in engaging its audience in the vulnerability of the central characters, Sarah Watt invites the audience to identify with a briefly but clearly-drawn group of supporting characters, all of whom are concerned with death and life issues.
The editor, in whom Nick has confided and who has been caught off guard by the news and struggles with what he should say and do, has been busy with work and is challenged to come closer to his wife and children. The rather gung-ho journalist friend, (Anthony Hayes winning the Best Supporting Actor award), has been writing cavalierly on suicide and death wishes, finding the rail lines death grist for his journalistic theories and articles. Meanwhile, estranged from his wife and child, he has been involved in an affair and is confronted with his girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy. Abortion or not? Death of the child or not? His choice or not? Her choice and responsibility. (And she tells him that his theories about suicide are rubbish.)
And, grieving in the background, is the wife of the dead man, who has been photographed for the paper. More enigmatically, is the grieving man at home with his silent family, who gets into his car with his son – and who, it emerges, is the train driver whose life has changed because of the accident. The scene where the driver visits the widow and she reassures him that the accident was not his responsibility is a moving sequence of understanding and the lifting of a burden.
That is the world of Look Both Ways. It is not afraid of introducing the often shunned or avoided theme of mortality and death, of terminal illness and of accident. Australian audiences were able to receive this film and its themes and be moved. They have responded to being led into Sarah Watt’s world of vulnerability, of a world where logic and principles go only so far, where deep human feeling and feelings are the means of coping.