Sydney Film Festival IV :: The Tree: Kick It Root Down

Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in this French and Australian co-production set in Queensland. Her character, Dawn, explains the unlikely presence of a Frenchie with a Britishy accent in the small town, but they needn’t have bothered – we all know Gainsbourg is reason enough. It’s difficult not to resist this film, probably the one I’m least enthusiastic about of the 10 or so SFF films I’ve seen. A dead father’s spirit or soul or whatever living in a big-arse Moreton Bay Fig? It’s adapted from Julie Pascoe’s Our Father Who Art in the Tree, a book’s whose title makes me feel vomity. I hated The Riddle of the Trumpalar as a kid, and approach most human-tree associations with extreme caution.

Each of the four kids is affected in their own way by the death of their father. I couldn’t help but feel that the precocious Simone (a nuanced performance by Morgana Davies), whose save-the-tree-for/its-my-dad was an image of a real thornily-named girl who lost who her dedicated, Queenslander father, and her mute, strangely-behaving, blonde bobbed younger brother only drove home this association. This is probably just me.

The tree threatens the house, its roots messing up the plumbing, and a large branch crashes through Dawn’s bedroom. A wrathful wraith of the husband unappreciative of her nascent amour with the rugged, nice-as, successful local plumber? Better than this possibility is Dawn curling up with the branch, a human-tree coupling I can absurdly appreciate.

“That’s not a tree, it’s an octopus,” says the bitchy old duck next door. The shade of guilt follows the family to the plumber’s caravan by the beach. A thousand-tentacled jellyfish redoubles the neighbour’s image, and it spurts out a dozen or so fish. It scares Simone. Dawn similarly gets scared by a bat coming in to hang off her light fixture.

The film began with images of great potential. The soon-to-be-dead dad works as a truckie transporting entire homes through the outback. Very wide load indeed. There are great shots of these floating abodes, moving like land-boats through a parched oceanic outback. Foucault took boats as images of heterotopias, and said “In civilisation without boats, dreams dry up.” But it’s already dry out here, and all a coming cyclone can do is cause the film to run its course.

However, while these places without a place disappear from the film, they go underground, and root the temporality of a game Simone and her friend play: “I’m 15, I’m still top of the class, which is boring, and I have three boyfriends; I’m 18, and I’ve moved to Paris, I work in a bar, and I say, ‘Bonjour, Je m’appelle Simone.’” The girls invent scenarios, imagined futures, the slices of time Foucault called heterochronies. Here, Foucault’s exemplary figures are cemeteries, which “begin with … the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.” This exactly describes the trajectory Dawn follows after the death of her husband, a kind of subterranean undoing always riddling the foundations of the family, and especially so long as they stay in The Tree.

Screen memories: cutest bat ever wrapping himself in his wing-cape; Gainsbourg sleeping with a tree; Bob, I mean Charlie, farting in the bath; jellyfish spawning fish.