Fell

Synopsis: While on a camping trip in the bush tragedy befalls Thomas (Matt Nable) when his only daughter (Isabella Garwoli) is killed by a logging truck in a hit-and-run accident. Stricken with grief, Thomas adopts a new identity as Chris and finds work as a logger at the same camp from which the driver, Luke (Daniel Henshall), came. When Luke is released from prison after five years, he returns to the same camp to resume work, not suspecting with whom he is working.

Fell is a debut feature film for its writer-director, Kasimir Burgess, and it shows. It’s not that there isn’t talent in evidence here but experience is wanting. The core idea, which sets in opposition two father-daughter pairings around the pivot point of a shared tragedy is a strong one but its development on screen is wanting, suffering from a banal script and an excess of directorial artiness.

A non-linear approach to the narrative, which alternates between over-generous ellipses and redundant flashbacks, means that as an audience we either struggle to engage with the drama, or are being told unnecessarily how we should, whilst some of the symbology (an ant struggling to find its way across a river, a naked man running through the forest and so on) tends to art-cinema cliché.

The film deals with the connection between the traumatized father of the dead child and her accidental killer who is heedless of the emotional volcano seething within his taciturn working partner.  Or at least so it seems in what appears to be a kind of moody revenge thriller.  The trouble is that although Burgess keeps us wondering where the story is leading, this is as much, if not more, the result of the wilfully obscure treatment as it is the result of narrative suspense.

One of the problems here is in the motivation and development of the two protagonists within the context of the overall narrative. The most powerful thematic opposition in the film is between the Nature and Man. Thomas takes his daughter camping to experience the pristine beauties of the Australian bush which Luke and his confreres are in the business of brutally tearing down.  The logging scenes are heart-breakingly sad and the loggers are presented as dyed-in-the-wool yobbos.  Except for Luke.  We first really encounter him in jail and he is taping a bedtime story for his daughter whom he has never seen. Pretty nice thing to do. When he returns to the logging camp he is so shunned by his fellow workers (though why we are never told) that he seems more of figure of sympathy than a target for righteous justice.  Is this supposed to be how Thomas/Chris sees him?  Irresponsible perhaps but basically a nice guy? Is Fell a story of redemption? For one, or both, men?  It might be, but Natasha Pincus’ script doesn’t develop this in any meaningful way. Thomas/Chris spends most of the film in brooding silence and doing chin-ups in his backwoods hut and we know nothing of his thoughts. Luke cheerily goes about tagging venerable old growth trees for execution, apparently heedless of his past. When there are any dialogic exchanges between the two men, or for that matter any of the characters, no shift of understanding is apparent. A campfire conversation late in the film skirts tantalizingly close to exposure and confrontation but then fades away and the film segues into a make-of-it-what-you-will ending (it is not clear why Luke's daughter is with them) .

Both Burgess and Pincus come from a background in music video (Pincus directed the mega-successful video  for Gotye’s "Somebody That I Used to Know”) and whilst the N. E. Victorian landscape looks magnificent thanks to cinematographer Marden Dean they don’t seem to have appreciated the dramatic imperatives of narrative film which put simply means that an audience wants to see how the relationships between the characters play out in some comprehensible world (one might suggest Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne, which similarly revolves around a death, a place and differing perspectives as a point of comparison). Being elliptical and enigmatic, no matter how artfully, is no substitute for real dramatic substance.

Fell will screen as part of Australian Perspectives at ACMI from Thursday 21 August to Saturday 27 September 2014. For program information and tickets, please visit the ACMI website.

The  film will be available on Video on Demand through ACMI’s website for the duration of the cinema season.

 

 

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