Film: Beautiful Kate

Finding a cheerful Australian film these days is quite a challenge. Having discovered the particular affinity between Australia’s parched and expansive landscape and the genres of horror and misery memoir, the nation’s filmmakers have set about exploiting it with an enthusiasm that reliably finds a pile of corpses – physical or emotional – bloodily heaped by the time the closing credits roll. Beautiful Kate is no exception, but if you can brave its confronting gaze you’ll find one of this year’s most delicate and accomplished films staring back at you.

The film opens with lingering shots of a truculent, dishevelled-haired beauty. This ripely self-conscious creature is not however the “Beautiful Kate” of the title, just the latest flavour of the month for Ned (Ben Mendelsohn), a middle-aged writer who could have achieved greatness but for his fatal “weakness for cunt”. Together with Toni (Maeve Dermody), a trashy waitress-cum-actress, he makes the journey back to his childhood home in the remote South Australian outback to visit his dying father.

His return triggers memories of his final summer there – the summer after his mother’s death, but before those of older brother Cliff and twin sister Kate. Surrendering himself to these memories, Ned is forced to confront his troubled relationship with tyrannical patriarch Bruce (Bryan Brown), reliving the isolated childhood, oppressive home life and deeply confused sexual awakening that led to family tragedy.

Adapted from Newtown Thornburg’s American novel of the same name, Rachel Ward’s debut directorial feature is a neat geographical transposition, recognising the pervasive isolation that characterises the communities of the Midwestern plains and the Australian outback alike. The tragedy of the Kendall family, we understand, is as much one of place as of personality, the relentless isolation governing and moulding the young characters more surely than even Bruce’s ruthless authority.

This pervasive spirit of place is largely the product of Andrew Commis’ cinematography. His glowing outdoor shots are set against the dull functionality of the interiors, where angles are tight and boxed-in by the walls and doors of the childhood fortress – still covered with the maps and diagrams that testify to the family’s home-schooled imprisonment from the world.

It is Rachel Ward’s direction however that moulds Beautiful Kate’s unprepossessing premise into a work of such fragile beauty. Mirroring her subject in her treatment, Ward creates a work whose sophistication is as natural and unselfconscious as her heroine, gradually growing in self-referentiality to create an allusive and devastatingly potent climax. The beauty is in the details: the yabby traps that remain long after the dam has dried up, the teenage rituals and routines among siblings, the rusty barrel “bull” slung between trees that eventually tosses every rider into the dirt.

Leading a cast drawn from among Australia’s strongest character actors is Mendelsohn’s Ned. His nuanced self-loathing shifts between guilt and denial with absolute control, evading emotional truth with a smart-ass wit that is both a release and a source of fresh wounds. Pitted against the venerable Bryan Brown, whose physical vulnerability undercuts an otherwise unreconstructed villain, Mendelsohn delivers his strongest scenes, though the disturbing sexual encounters with Toni come a close second.

It is newcomer Sophie Lowe however, as the 16-year-old Kate, who mesmerises and carries the film. Shot from the first-person viewpoint of her brother, her flashback scenes are all lingering tracking shots and close-ups, dwelling on the open-faced, long-limbed simplicity of this untaught Lolita. In the wrong hands this role could have become knowing and sordid, corrupting the bizarre innocence at the core of the film. As it is, Lowe brings a freshness and joy to Kate, seducing her audience every bit as completely as her family.

Not so much Flowers in the Attic as Flowers in the Outback, Beautiful Kate takes a brave and beautiful look at the darkest of social taboos. Such an achievement, though worthy, would make for unbearable viewing were it not for the visual poetry and emotional delicacy with which Ward tackles her (home-)truths. Forget Samson and Delilah, this is surely the Australian love story of the year, turning the Romeo and Juliet screw harder and further than many would dare.

• Read more about this year's Australian films on theartsdesk
• Find Rachel Ward's work as an actress on Amazon
• Watch Beautiful Kate trailer on YouTube