Signis

The Tree

(JPEG) (Australia, France, 2010, d. Julie Bertucelli)

From the director of the fine SIGNIS award winning film, Since Otar Left. And the tree that they found for the film looks quite magnificent.

This is a story of an ordinary family in Queensland, the father a truck driver (Aden Young) and the mother at home with four children (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The father dies at the opening of the film and the rest of the plot concerns how well, or not, they cope with the death, especially as the months pass. They all grieve in their own way. The most dramatic is 8 year old Simone (Morgana Davies) who finds the presence of her father in the Moreton Bay Fig tree outside the house and communes with him. She persuades her mother to do the same but becomes unhappy, thinking the others have forgotten their father, and she becomes resentful when her mother takes a job at a store in town and the owner comes out to do jobs at their house and lends them his trailer for a Christmas holiday at the beach (Marton Csokas).

While the Queensland scenery looks wonderful, the film is more ordinary, likeable (though Simone can be rather irritating as she makes emotional demands on her mother ‘this instant’) than highly dramatic.

Nature turns against them rather spectacularly at the end, but they go forward with some greater happiness to begin again.

Peter Malone