by Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier
The artist may have amassed plenty of misgivings in his 50+ years, but his female-led feature debut Misgivings isn’t one of them.
With his first foray into feature-length filmmaking, Australian painter and director Duncan James presents his contemplative, female-driven drama Misgivings. Beautifully shot and delicately paced, the film is something of a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist is not a wide-eyed teen but a deflated housewife, eager to rediscover her sense of self.
Following a run of shorts across the past decade, Duncan James admits that this most Australian of films – shot along the sunny, windswept coastline of New South Wales – found its inspiration in French cinema, specifically François Ozon (Swimming Pool, 8 Women). “I really love what he does with his films,” James tells us over the phone, calling in from Blueys Beach, the filming location of Misgivings. “His films are a little bit quirky, and they also allow a good amount of time for character development. Certainly, after watching his films, you’re left wondering, what really did happen?”
This penchant for mystery is surely a visible force within James’ own film. Suze, a stagnating, childless housewife, is informed by her husband that he needs to work away for a week – only for her to discover, on her own personal road trip up the NSW coast, that he isn’t anywhere near the office. And he’s not by himself, either.
In making the leap from shorts to full-length feature, the director feels that now, “at the tender age of fifty-three” is the right time to take all he has learned across his artistic explorations in film and canvas. Yet, at its heart, Misgivings is a story which Duncan James feels many audience members will see a small part of themselves within.
“The protagonist, Suze, she lives quite a sheltered life. Very bored, childless housewife,” he says. “She really wanted a child, and her inability to have a child sets the story off, so it really had to be about a female. I really do believe it’s a story we can all relate to, her insecurities and her dreams. All of that really resonated with me – and maybe resonates with a wider audience.”
The film’s striking poster art, depicting Suze in silhouette at the edge of a huge body of still water, was a spur-of-the-moment decision from the director. “Where we filmed in Blueys Beach, the crew were staying pretty much across the road from Wallis Lake,” he recalls.
The location became the scene of a photoshoot that incorporated around 200 shots, one of which became the film’s dreamy, somewhat malevolent poster art. “That particular photo really stood out as being the best,” Duncan James says. “I didn’t want to have to go into Photoshop and all of that; I just wanted a raw image. What you see is what we photographed, of her coming out of the lake. It was a chance to take a photo in a really good spot, which was local to where we were all staying.”
Duncan James posits numerous possible readings of the image’s ambiguous and enticing quality, one being a suggestion that her insecurities are washed away in the process of self-evaluation that she takes across the film’s narrative.
The artistic choice of a single, intriguing image is also a pleasantly old-school approach to poster art, in an era where most films are advertised by a generic assembly of their cast’s airbrushed, pensive faces.
Duncan rejects such one-size-fits-all pretences. “My film is really not mainstream at all,” he says emphatically. “I really hate the mainstream… I’m an artist, technically: what I spend a lot of my time doing is making abstract art, and I like creating artwork, which is different, original.”
He upholds the same practices with his filmmaking, even stretching back to his earlier short films, which he regards as “pretty out-there”. These are ultimately the stories he not only enjoys sharing, but those which he would actually wish to see as a viewer. The quirky side of life is a constant source of inspiration, again underlining his admiration for the iconoclastic films of François Ozon.
The cast of Misgivings is filled with brilliant local talent, the result of a headhunt which pitted Duncan James against thousands of applicants. Naturally, given her central role within the story, much of the director’s energy went into finding the right actor to play Suze.
It was a perfect fit, he recalls, when he saw the showreel of Joanne Connor. He had a gut feeling that she was the right person for the role, and “since day one of starting on the film, she was brilliant. Really easy to work with, she could get into character very quickly, so she was a particular stand-out. I think she’s going places.”
That all remains to be seen, but audiences will be able to judge for themselves as Misgivings begins its distribution across the European film festival circuit, ahead of planned Australian distribution in 2026.
