Look Both Ways

(Herald rating * * * * )

Films with multiple narratives are nothing new - D.W. Griffith alienated audiences with his four-story Intolerance in 1926 - but the movie whose plots intersect for dramatic or ironic effect has been a favoured art-film format since Altman's Short Cuts.

This small but winning film, a feature debut for its Australian director, has something of the feel of Lantana, although it's more modest in scale. Death - or at least the unshakeable awareness of it - stalks the film's seven unconnected people whose lives, on a scorching weekend in the suburbs of Adelaide, become entwined.

Meryl (Clarke), an artist, is returning from her father's funeral when she sees a man fatally struck by a train; Nick (McInnes), a newspaper photographer, gets a gloomy diagnosis on a Friday but he must wait all weekend to have it confirmed; Nick's reporter colleague Andy (Hayes) is thrown into turmoil by the news that his girlfriend Anna (Flanagan) is pregnant; and all the while the family of the accident victim and of the traumatised train driver negotiate their way through the perilous business of living in the shadow of dying.

If this sounds gloomy, it does the film a disservice. The tone Watt strikes is contemplative rather than melancholy - even occasionally funny - and she gives us a group of people of conspicuous individuality whose lives, like those of the characters in Lantana, quickly come to mean something to us. She also deploys techniques honed in a handful of acclaimed short films - notably hand-painted animation and still-photograph inserts - to take us deep into the characters' inner lives.

There's some heavy-hitting talent in behind the film-maker here: Ray Argall, who made the terrific feature Return Home in 1990, came out of retirement to shoot it, and the producer is Bridget Ikin, an expatriate Kiwi who makes a Hitchcockian appearance in a newspaper photograph.

Their presence on the project is a vote of confidence in an intelligent and sensitive film-maker which, to judge by the result, was not misplaced.

CAST: William McInnes, Justine Clarke, Anthony Hayes, Lisa Flanagan, Andrew S. Gilbert, Daniela Farinacci, Sacha Horler, Maggie Dence, Edwin Hodgeman, Andreas Sobik
DIRECTOR: Sarah Watt
RUNNING TIME: 100 mins
RATING: M
SCREENING: Rialto and Lido from Thursday