By Travis Johnson
Cris Jones’ debut feature earned some excellent notices around the festival traps over the pat 12 months or so, and now the time has come for The Death and Life of Otto Bloom to try its hand at impressing the wider Australian audience, with the temporally complex indie finally slated for a theatrical release.
Xavier Samuel is the titular enigma, a man who experiences time in reverse, remembering the future but unable to recall the past. As the precis puts it, “…the film charts Bloom’s rise from scientific oddity to international superstar as he searches for love and meaning in this strange, backwards world. Over the years, he has a string of romances while challenging our preconceived notions about life, death and the nature of time. When the world proves to be not yet ready for Bloom’s radical ideas, his fall from grace is as swift as it is tragic. But for Bloom, the end is only the beginning…”
Jones’s clever, rather melancholy piece keeps us at one remove from him, telling his story in a documentary style through the recollections of those he encounters on his strange journey, including a lover, Ada, played by mother/daughter team Rachel Ward and Matilda Brown.
The Death and Life of Otto Bloom hits cinemas on March 16, 2017. Whether you’re looking forward to it or remembering it fondly is all a bit subjective, really.