
Don't they look like they're having fun? It's not going to last.
dir: Kieran Darcy-Smith
Wow, did I get this one wrong.
This flick was completely not what I thought it would be, either in style or content. For some reason I had this idea it was a light-hearted romantic drama about two Australian couples travelling overseas and finding out stuff about each other and coming to terms with stuff etc.
Spectacularly wrong, incandescently wrong. I could not have been more wrong if I’d thought I was about to watch a film clip for Pink Floyd’s song Wish You Were Here, sung by Christina Aguilera as Lady Gaga spanks her with a rhesus monkey.
It turns out it’s a sly reference to the postcard one used to be able to send, saying the title, as in, Really, I’m Glad That You’re Not Here, But I Just Wanted to Rub Your Nose In the Fact That I’m Here and You’re Not. That’s what it’s always meant in reality, but this flick, which has a black streak through it a mile wide.
There’s a darkness to this flick, a dread which precludes hints at levity or humour, and we’re not sure why at all until the very end. We’re not sure because the flick uses an aggressive editing style to keep us unbalanced and offside, and a non-chronological approach in order to keep us confused and in the dark throughout. There are also hints, feints, red herrings and dead ends throughout the script to keep us guessing, or at least it kept me guessing constantly. Of course it all makes sense in the end, but it’s the getting there that’s the harrowing part.
As the flick starts, as far as we know it starts, we know something has happened. One of the four of a group of Australians has gone missing. We don’t know what’s happened to him, and the three people who return to Australia from Cambodia don’t seem to know what’s happened either.
The waiting’s not the hardest part; it’s the gnawing anxiety that eats away at your insides waiting for something horrible to be found out by the ones you love most. Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice (Felicity Price) returned all right, it seems, but they’re clearly worried about what happened to their friend Jeremy (Antony Starr), and they’re really hoping he’s found soon. Clearly.
Of course nothing is that simple. Dave is cagey, and a bit dodgy. We get hints and flashes of stuff with a very extended explanation cycle attached to them. Stuff that could be innocuous (like needing to renew his license upon his return) could be nothing, or could mean something. Alice, who’s pregnant, is really worried about her sister’s (Teresa Palmer) missing boyfriend, but senses that something else is happening at the edges of her understanding.
And the younger sister, upon her delayed return, represents even more trouble than she seems to be worth, in her blonde and bland insipid long-limbedness. Dave seems jumpier than any person should be, even if he’s worried about what happened to Jeremy, but he seems like he’s dreading something worse happening, so much closer to home.
And why would that be, eh? We see him starting to tell little white lies, getting mystery calls, interviews with Department of Foreign Affairs chaps and dodgy-seeming Federal police where he minimises some parts of his story and embellishes others.
Something very odd is going on.
Being the kind of neurotic, peripatetic chap that I am, each of these tidbits of information were greeted with new theories, “Oh, that must mean he’s a Scientologist, no, wait, that must mean Jeremy was kidnapped by aliens, oh no, wait, what Alice said means that this is a remake of Rosemary’s Baby” all of which would be discarded with whatever next bit of data was doled out to us.
That might make this sound like it’s a thriller, some kind of edgy action suspense-filled extravaganza. I would argue it’s a thriller, but not an energetic one. The “thrill” comes from the fact that we, and most of the other characters bar one, don’t really know what’s going on either, and the magnitude of the “secret” that lies buried under the entire drama is what causes a lot of people to act out in sometimes terrible ways.
This flick isn’t an acting showcase, but the acting from the two main leads is always strong, even if many of their actions make them very unsympathetic. Especially with Alice, who does some very awful stuff later on, whether she has good reason to or not, we are torn between understanding where she’s coming from, and marvelling at the fact that she can’t see what’s just about to happen because of a very stupid thing she does. Oh, that scene, replete with a horrible level of irony, is a hobnail booted kick to the gut of a nasty scene.
Dave isn’t that sympathetic either (at least until we finally get to understand what actually happened, and why), but he is believable at least, and completely looks like a person wrestling with a burden he can no longer carry. His scenes with Alice are all strong, but he has a few particularly painful ones where he just wants her to understand what he’s going through, without being able to tell her, that are quite wrenching to watch. And of course their young kids acting like little shits in the background and sometimes foreground aren’t helping matters either.
Completely outside of the plot, there’s a scene where the kids, sensing the fact that their parents aren’t at their best, try to take advantage of it by refusing to eat their dinner, demanding repetitively ice cream instead. Let’s just say that, from my perspective, as a reaction by two stressed out parents is far kinder and gentler than those two brats deserved. I would have screamed blue bloody murder at the pair of them, but these two parents, despite all visible evidence to the contrary, are probably better parents than I.
Plus they were just rewarding bad behaviour, which never helps down the track. There’s a lot of bad behaviour in this flick, and just when I thought the flick was already as dark as it was ever going to get, the actual revelation of what led up to “what happened” is darker than I ever guessed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, considering the fact that it’s set in Cambodia, but be warned, there is some harsh material contained herein.
There are plenty of flicks where characters get in over their heads overseas, which, in a subgenre of horror flicks, is every flick that gets made whenever Americans travel anywhere (whether it’s the Hostel type of flicks, or even the ones where Americans travel from the city to the country, like every Friday the Chain Saw Evil Dead in the Cabin in the Hills Have Eyes Wrong Turn that you can think of).
This isn’t anything like those, in case I’ve made it sound like that, because ultimately it’s about a secret within a marriage that seems fairly likely to tear the family apart, but which is only the garnish on top of a secret even more devastating and likely to destroy the family, rather than just mess it up a bit. The test of their relationship, and for us watching it, is wondering whether the truth will set them free or damn them all to hell.
It’s a very carefully made film, very precise, and in some of that it comes across somewhat clinically cold. We come to sense after a while that we’re being messed around by the editing, with obvious, crucial information being kept from us only because telling us later rather than sooner makes us somewhat frantic. Odd scenes, like a wife having a shower, or a visit to the outside of Jeremy’s apartment are filmed in such a way as to make us feel a palpable dread even though nothing’s happening right then and nothing’s about to happen, but we still feel tense, sometimes an agonising tension, in our slippery guts.
That’s quality filmmaking, that is. That’s what we want, surely, in this kind of film(?) It’s very effective, and I can’t applaud it loudly enough for achieving what it wants to achieve, and doing so in an uncompromising fashion, even if we do feel a bit dicked around by the storytelling.
That doesn’t make it pleasant, but, then again, it never promised us a rose garden and didn’t need to. I admit to letting out a sigh of relief at the end, a long sigh of genuine, heartfelt relief by how things wrapped, because another outcome, a nastier “revelation” or whatever would have been too much to take after such a harrowing journey. Thanks for showing mercy to us, people responsible for Wish You Were Here, thanks, really.
8 times Holidays in Cambodia, where people don’t dress in black anymore, shouldn’t have to be this fraught with peril out of 10
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“You from Australia? I have family in Australia.” – you think that sounds friendly, but it doesn’t the second time the guy says it – Wish You Were Here.
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