My Year Without Sex

Rating

: * * * *

Verdict

:

Australian domestic moments beautifully observed.

Danger and death was always threatening in Australian film-maker Watt's 2005 debut feature

Look Both Ways

, which won the big prizes of its year at the local film awards. All its characters were living in the shadow of dying but the tone was more offbeat than maudlin and often downright funny.

The same can be said of this second feature, which is even more assured thanks in large part to Horler's warm and self-effacing lead performance. She plays rest-home nurse Natalie who, with her broadcast technician husband Ross (Day), shares a cheerfully cluttered house and life in Melbourne's west where they raise footie-mad 12-year-old Louis and Ruby, 7.

When, a few minutes in, Natalie collapses with a brain aneurysm, the family's life is upended. She awakes with a bruised face and a giant, stapled crescent scar on her skull.

Doctors describe the attack as "a yellow card" ("It's a warning, but you're still allowed to play," Ross explains) and the title's one of the measures she has to take to avoid a relapse.

The film surveys the next year in discrete chapters - each with a suggestive title: Foreplay; Getting Lucky; Going Down - that track Natalie's return from near-death. On the surface, it's a charming domestic drama - indeed at times it feels almost like a home movie. But there's an artistry to the way Watt keeps the characters' different storylines running, occasionally intersecting with, but more often just nudging up against each other.

Watt's screenplay is full of domestic moments so beautifully observed that you feel like gasping. What parent has not wailed at Christmas "how do you go back to giving them a skipping rope and an orange when their friends have got iPods and cellphones" or dealt with nits or wrestled with other parents' different child-rearing standards?

Better still, Watt's film is rich in a sense of how life is an endless stream of unexpected moments. Thus she finds drama in the banal: a dropped Lotto ticket raises one set of expectations which Watt undercuts not once, but twice; an encounter between a child and a strange adult doesn't work out the way we think either.

A couple of the characters are under-written, if not stereotypes, but it's hard to think of a recent film with a truer sense of the way human beings work.

Peter Calder

Cast

: Sacha Horler, Matt Day, Maude Davey, Jonathan Segat, Portia Bradley

Director

: Sarah Watt

Running time

: 93 mins

Rating

: M (contains offensive language and sexual references)