Beautiful Kate
What:
Beautiful Kate
When:
In cinemas from Aug 6
Watch Trailer:
Here
Win:
Thanks to Roadshow we have 10 dbls! To enter, email win@twothousand.com.au with the subject line ‘I'm still here!'
Beautiful Kate is the kind of movie that'll spark debates in the pub afterwards. Rachel Ward's assured directorial debut is a tale of a family hiding a troubling taboo, but it resists lurid revelations or moral finger-wagging. Instead, the central tragedy emerges gradually and evocatively through the tortured recollections of 40-year-old author Ned Kendall (a weary-looking Ben Mendelsohn).
Ned's spent his life cultivating a smart-arse persona to escape his guilt over the violent, premature deaths of his brother Cliff (Josh McFarlane) and his twin sister Kate (Sophie Lowe). But he's forced to confront the past when he returns to the family farm with pouty young fiancée Toni (Maeve Dermody) to visit his sister Sally (Rachel Griffiths) and dying dad Bruce (Bryan Brown).
Ward never settles for clichés of; 'fucked-up-ness' - Ned isn't a drunken failure; Sally isn't a downtrodden martyr; half-dead Bruce is by turns malevolent and vulnerable. Courtesy of cinematographer Andrew Commis, Ned's memories are similarly ambiguous, full of sensuous mystery. Like Ned, you might struggle to define the rightness or wrongness of what you're seeing - which is a triumph.
Format: Cinema
Mood: Make a therapy appointment now
Keywords: Rachel Ward, Sophie Lowe, Australian cinema
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