The Last Days of Chez Nous
Directed by Gillian Armstrong
Screenplay by Helen Garner
Starring Lisa Harrow, Bruno Ganz, Kerry Fox and Miranda Otto
Reviewed by Lee Wallace
Some films have such an effect that you leave the cinema slightly shaken, still digesting what you've seen. They aren't crudely manipulative, they manage to make connections through a series of minutiae — a throwaway line of dialogue, an actor's telling gesture. It is their subtlety that carries the emotive force. You may not even be sure why you respond the way you do, but you realise that something has got under your skin.
The new Australian film The Last Days of Chez Nous, directed by Gillian Armstrong from Helen Garner's screenplay, is an ensemble piece about the final stages of a marriage. It is sensitive, sensuous and intelligent and it carries such a strong emotional resonance that you may feel the need to be alone afterwards.
Beth, a writer, shares a crumbling terrace house in the inner Sydney suburb of Glebe with her teenage daughter Anne and French husband of seven years, J.P. The film opens with the arrival at Chez Nous of Beth's younger sister Vicki and the emblematic cutting of a heart-shaped welcoming cake.
Vicki, extroverted and lacking in direction, arrives only a half-free spirit. She's envious of her sister's ability to juggle responsibilities and has returned to Australia pregnant after unsuccessfully following her boyfriend to Europe.
Beth and J.P.'s relationship is in trouble. He has begun to feel overlooked in Beth's steadfast determination to manage a career and run the household at Chez Nous. When Beth undertakes an outback trek with her estranged father, she will return to find the dynamics of the household altered irreparably.
With its giveaway title and limited setting, the film could easily have become a cloying, twee melodrama, but Helen Garner has written such natural, unforced dialogue and Gillian Armstrong has directed with such a graceful, fluid rhythm, that it has a prickly realism.
The camera elegantly pans around the household activities, never forcing a detail. The scenes are not overplayed for dramatic effect. Even when the film heads outdoors to the NSW desert or Sydney Harbour, locations which have been over-utilised to the point of cliché, the perspective remains fresh. Armstrong has a unique take on locale. She captures the stillness of the
landscapes and reflects the characters' emotional terrain.
Last Days is polished and well crafted, but it retains a bracing spontenaiety. It is never obvious. The situations and characters have an aching authenticity about them.
This film wouldn't work at all if the actors weren't up to the material. There are moments when the dialogue has a piercing emotional clarity, akin to eavesdropping on someone's most private thoughts. At some point all the characters behave foolishly, but the film never loses its compassion. The women are naturally, radiantly sensual and complex.
Lisa Harrow's Beth has a weary, driven vulnerability. Kerry Fox, as Vicki, is light-years away from the Janet Frame she portrayed in An Angel At My Table. The role demands that Vicki have a lackadaisical, spirited charm.
As J.P., Bruno Ganz has the most difficult task, for it is the least developed role. For all his selfishness and arrogance, we can perceive what Beth first found attractive in him and realise what he has had to sacrifice.
In their smaller ways, Miranda Otto as Beth's adolescent daughter Annie and Kiri Paramore as the young lodger, Tim, fit seamlessly with the easygoing, natural rhythms of the rest of the cast. Bill Hunter performs a subtle, moving turn as Beth's estranged father, struggling to remain stoically non-emotional to his daughter. It's a carefully crafted, expert performance.
The Last Days at Chez Nous is a type of film rarely produced in this country — it has an elliptical, mature sensibility — but it is exactly the type we should be encouraging. It is being said that it has a European quality, presumably because it is character-driven and emotionally complex, but that is unfair and condescending to our culture. Its tone is distinctively Australian and is more representative of our culture than a dozen more self-evidently "Australian" films. It has been lovingly made with an intuitive grasp of relationships, not only those between the characters, but also of the characters with their environs.
Janet Patterson's vibrant art direction and Geoffrey Simpson's cinematography create a potently evocative inner-city Australian summer. The doors of Chez Nous are always wide open, and there is some instantly recognisable business happening both within and at the edges of the frame. If you saw the film overseas, and had been away for a while, you would be overtaken by homesickness.