by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.99
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Maeve Dermody, Alexander England, Sonny McGee, Noam Sen-Gupta, Septimus Caton
Intro:
… has its moments of softly haunting dread, and it features genuinely impressive thematic touches, but the divide between the tension built into its confronting subject matter and the atmosphere actually present on-screen drags down the efforts of all involved.
Life Could be a Dream, the feature debut for director Jasmin Tarasin and writer Courtney Collins, has one of the more striking opening scenes for a recent Australian production. As the credits float across the screen, we see 40-year-old mother Sarah (Maeve Dermody) in a wedding dress and drowning in water. It not only sets up the core notion of marriage as something capable of dragging a person down into the depths, as the film focuses on her attempts to separate herself and her son Otis (Sonny McGee) from her manipulative and abusive husband Jake (Alexander England), but it also preludes one of the most fascinating re-evaluations of a text that has already influenced vast sectors of romantic storytelling, not just film: Pride & Prejudice.
Specifically, it’s a flip of the iconic ‘rejection in the rain’ scene, subtextually pinning Sarah as Elizabeth Bennett (showing her reading the book throughout the film) and Jake as Mr. Darcy. Only her rejection of him isn’t a matter of sharpened words and bad if manageable weather; it’s a situation where loss of oxygen could very well be a less-than-figurative outcome. It’s not a downpour, but an active flood that can pull the innocent under.
Over the course of the story, as Sarah fights against panic attacks while recalling past… let’s call them ‘interactions’ with Jake, the film argues against the classic trope of the ‘bad boy’ that can be ‘fixed’ with the help of a capable heroine. It both gives side-eye to the burden that that trope assumes of women in the relationship and showing that some men are just beyond such remedying, what with Jake domineering over Sarah domestically, sexually, even financially. The bracing way in which the film admits that some guys just plain suck is remarkably refreshing, and the accompanying water imagery throughout provides a captivating thematic arc.
However, it often feels like the film itself isn’t entirely certain about what to do with that arc. The threat presented by Jake is palpable, as are Sarah and Otis’ attempts to carry on beyond his toxic influence, with Otis, in particular, openly parroting his father’s words in a way that highlights just how far that influence can reach if left unchecked. But for a film not just about escaping an abusive partner, but about the mechanics that go into both the escape and the partner’s attempts to subvert it, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the film should be packing a lot more tension than it does.
Dermody does extremely well in performing the psychological strain of her character, but beyond the moody imagery and the dreamlike textures offered through DP Meg White’s framing and the vocal layering in Dan Luscombe’s soundtrack, there’s a strange lack of urgency that cuts into the drama. Its brief run time, while appreciably lean, is also behind how weirdly rushed the story gets during the third act.
The main setting ends up hindering things further, with Sarah and Otis essentially vacationing in a plush mansion that she is in the process of selling, which not only weakens the narrative tension but gives the story an unpleasant privileged undertone to the notion of breaking free of unhealthy relationships, like it’s something only possible for those within ‘certain means’. It’s the specifics that hurt this film, which is a shame for something whose core plot is typically relegated to sub-plot status in far too many romance films.
Life Could be a Dream has its moments of softly haunting dread, and it features genuinely impressive thematic touches, but the divide between the tension built into its confronting subject matter and the atmosphere actually present on-screen becomes its own aquatic submersion, dragging down the efforts of all involved. Credit to the filmmakers for highlighting a seldom-seen aspect of real-world relationship separation, but by that same token, it also feels ever-so-slightly mishandled in a way that veers dangerously close to trivialising an extremely intense and scary situation.
