trailer break: ‘Beautiful Kate’

I'm surprised it's only coming out now. It was quite well reviewed, I seem to recall. It had a bit of a rough ride otherwise though. It came along at the start of some much needed soul searching by the Aus cinema industry. Australians don't go and see Australian films and even, it seems, studiously avoid them. Films like this seem partly to be why.

It seems like a perfectly nice well made film (I haven't seen it), but it is another one of those stories about a broken family from the country with a few skeletons and something, often a tragedy, brings them back together to face each other. There's quite a few of these already (this is at least Ben Mendelsohn's second). It's seems we make one every year or so. It looks even worse that the story for this one was imported.

Rachael Ward said some seemingly precious and defensive things about the mood surrounding the film: of it being a good and perhaps unfortunate summary of the industry. They were the sort of things that come across badly in print though and she's not like that in person. Still, the film was getting a lot of that sort of talk; Yes it's good, but do we have to make this sort of thing so much?

The funding bodies were being restructured at the time and a new generation of film makers is gnawing at the edges of the biz, wanting to make the sorts of films that Australia (apparently) just doesn't make (and you couldn't get support for, for the longest time. Which is terribly ironic considering our film heritage).

If this period is the watershed we all hope, Beautiful Kate will probably be best remembered for being right in the middle of it.