TOBY WALLACE AND BRENNA HARDING IN THE TURNING

Many-faceted portrait of a writer and a place

This remarkable and ambitious omnibus film with its interlocking episodes has been said to resemble Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver short stories. Structurally, it may; in mood and focus, not so much. There's a difference between marginal residents of low-budget parts of Los Angeles and people living around a remote coastal village in Australia. Carver's stories are up-close stuff about the relationship issues of adults. The Turning, an ambitious adaptation of the eponymous story collection by the acclaimed Australian writer Tim Winton (designated a Living Treasure by the Australian National Trust), has much more of an outdoors, and sometimes coming of age, feel, a strong visual sense of landscape. There are stories in which children are central. There is a lot about water. Alcohol plays a part too, as it does it in Carver. Making the Australian film, or short film collection, was a formidable effort, understandably presented as a signal cultural event Down Under. Marketing it in this form for general viewers elsewhere is less easy. But indigestible and uneven as this collection may feel, it has the tonic vigor and harsh energy of Australian cinema, the wild open country that's terrifying, yet free. It's the land, and the cinema, of Walkabout, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max, or of Animal Kingdom.

The theatrical release film, shown in London at BFI in 2014, runs three hours and contains eighteen stories in which some characters recur, and so do locations. Notably, in contrast to Altman's Short Cuts, each short film is by a different director. (For full details see Wikipedia, "The Turning (2013 Film).") This has been issued on DVD, and further theatrical release is coming. However, there was a much shorter version edited down for presentation on ABC1 Australian television, consisting of only half the original short films and lasting only ninety minutes. My remarks are based on that. (The remaining nine stories were originally made available online as multi-platform ABC iView content, but this is no longer the case.) The three-hour original version is getting a UK theatrical release and a US one in early 2015.

Given the multiple directors, it's surprising that there is some sense of unity of mood and even style, but there are also shifts. There is no absolute harm in this. There's no reason to assume Winton never changes tone in the stories; readers describe his style as sometimes brutal and abrupt. But Guy Lodge asserts in his Variety review that The Turning "boasts a handful of standout contributions — none more striking than the writing-directing debut of actress Mia Wasikowska — amid a surfeit of gauchely literal ones." It's not quite that simple. Actually Wasikowska's "Long, Clear View" is itself very literal in translating a voiceover to images, though it's not uninteresting to see this, and the effect is less cloying than it might be given that it lasts only for a few minutes. (Each story is adapted by a different writer, too.)

The casts of the collection include some well-known Australian actors, including Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Miranda Otto and Rose Byrne. Byrne won the Australian Film Institute’s Best Actress award for her performance in the title short, "The Turning." But often lesser known newcomers are equally impressive. The plot weaves through turning points, if you will, in the lives of locals in the familiar town for Winton (he's used it before) of Angelus, the last whaling town in Australia, as they form relationships, end them and see their lives skid off track. Blanchett appears (really in a pretty minor role) in a segment adapted by her husband Andrew Upton. Besides standard dramatic episodes, The Turning also unfolds in the guise of an interpretive dance and an opening animated segment with a somewhat ponderously intoned voiceover from T.S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," which also serves as the epigraph to the story collection. The eight stories in the ninety-minute version are "Reunion," "Commission,""The Turning," "Aquiver," "Cockleshell," "Sand," "Long, Cleaar View, "Boner McPharlin's Moll."

In the original collection Winton was mining his own memories of a childhood and adolescence in a town on the West coast. Common characters include a boy named Vic (played by different ac tors), his mother Carol, and his father Bob, an alcoholic cop who suddenly disappears. There are two aboriginal brothers, Max and Frank. They occur in the entirely wordless and powerful story of "Sand," directed by Stephen Page, in which the older boy builds a tunnel while their adult male relatives are surf fishing, and the younger boy, trustingly, goes inside. The older boy jumps up and down on the dune to make the tunnel collapse and bury his sibling, afterwards running down to the beach. His brother escapes, but the implication is that he won't trust his brother ever again. "Aquifer" shows a man revisiting a scene of violence from his childhood prompted by a news report. The intercut flashbacks and intrusive musical background are distracting and clumsy. "Cockleshell," inconclusive but more successful, focuses on a teenage boy called Brakey (the dreamy Toby Wallace) who's madly in love with Agmes (Brenna Harding), the girl next door, and closely follows her for several days as she spear-fishes a meal for her impoverished older parent, even though fishing disgusts him. Agnes' lack of interest in Brakey is mysterious, nor does the shocking finale clarify things as filmed, but Asian-born director director Tony Ayres infuses a sensuous quality into his film in a way that makes Wallace's scenes memorable. Similarly the aboriginal actors in "Sand" are striking in themselves, and their closeness to the beach landscape and the ocean is palpable. Despite Rose Byrne's win in it, Guy Lodge condemns "The Turning" segment itself, with its piggyback religions conversion of an abused wife who's just befriended a better off wife, and he's right; the conversion, which departs from the story's narrative order, doesn't feel convincing. Sometimes the filmmakers can't seem to convey in their few minutes what Winton was getting at in his words.

"Boner MacPhalin's Moll," directed by Justin Kurzel, is one of the shorts with a jarringly different approach. It's retrospective account of a violent, dissolute individual is told, at least partly, in a vérité, documentary style, as if speakers are being interviewed on camera. The echt Australian accents here are a bit thick for American viewers. The short version ends with one of the more literal versions, "Big World," which consists simply of a voiceover summarizing the story of two high school boys who try to escape bad grades and a grim or mediocre future by running away north from town in a VW van and picking up a girl, but don't get anywhere. It's an audiovisual CiffNotes version of the story, sweet and pretty but hardly a stand-alone film.

The Turning (even half of it) is a remarkable, if challenging and uneven experience. The incidents on offer are sometimes quiet, but nonetheless earth-shaking for the participants, and sometimes are shocking and violent. These are always short films, and must adhere to the special shorthand and economy that entails. One must be patient: one must be prepared to refocus every ten or fifteen minutes, and to do that for three hours sitting in a cinema isn't easy. A challenging exercise, but with its rewards. Welcome to Australia, and to the world of Tim Winton, as filtered through eighteen different directors' short films. They may not do full justice to these stories, as described in a appreciative short essay for the Guardian by Jem Poster, but the attempt is a fine tribute nonetheless.

The Turning, 180 mins. (but 90 mins. screened, as noted above), debuted at Melbourne August 2013, then in 2014 at Berlin and other festivals including Hong Kong, Seattle, and London. There was a theatrical version of the short story series in 2008. The film was released in Australia 26 January 2014, and "disk and digital" formats came out there 24 Feb. 2014. Schedule for release of the film in the UK 6th Feb. 2015. A US release is coming (Main Street Films). Screened for this review courtesy of Main Street Films in the 90-minute TV version for the San Francisco Mostly British Festival.

To be shown in the Mostly British Festival in San Francisco at the Vogue Theatre at 7:30 pm Sunday, 13 February 2015.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.