Lou

A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 17, 2010.

The Australian film industry has been producing low-budget, lyrical miniatures like Lou since the 1970s, but I for one would be sorry to see the genre vanish. Following the little-seen City Loop (1999), this second feature from the writer-director Belinda Chayko takes place almost entirely on a property in the cane country of northern New South Wales, where single mother Rhea (Emily Barclay) survives by accepting handouts from her latest boyfriend (Jay Ryan) and barring the door against debt collectors.

To help make ends meet, she agrees to find room for Doyle (John Hurt), an old sailor with Alzheimer's disease who's the paternal grandfather of her three young daughters – an exotic in this setting, with his faraway eyes, British accent and sensitive, ravaged face. Typically at odds with her mother, the oldest girl Lou (Lily Bell-Tindley) initially resents the obstreperous newcomer and the painful memories he stirs up.

Much of Lou's brief running time is spent setting a mood: the children doing cartwheels in the overgrown backyard, the daylight moon hanging above blue hills. But the film has a real dramatic situation at its centre: Doyle confuses Lou with the woman who broke his heart many years ago, and Lou soon finds her own reasons to restage the past.

Lou is meant to be eleven, but looks a year or two older (a social worker labels her “precocious”). Barclay gave a smashing performance just a few years ago as the rebellious teenage heroine of Suburban Mayhem (2006) so it's a shock to see her already playing the mother of a virtual adolescent; Rhea could easily be taken for Lou's sister, introducing an uncertainty about roles and boundaries that proves to be a central theme.

Hurt has been playing eccentric old codgers for decades, and his very particular quality, otherworldly but tough, is just right here. Barclay is attractively understated, making sure we keep sight of Rhea's sensitive side. At the centre of the action, Bell-Tindley can seem awkwardly placed, less artful than the adults but more self-conscious than the little girls who play her younger sisters. Still, her stiffness could plausibly belong to her character, and her body language tends to be more effective than her line readings.

This is a slightly dangerous coming-of-age fantasy, alert to childhood sensuality yet as knowingly innocent as an alt-country song (I wasn't sure of the period till I spotted the Lisa Mitchell poster in Lou's bedroom). We're invited to be charmed by the feigned romance between Lou and Doyle, even as we're reminded it's unlikely to arrive at a happy ending.

Lou frequently threatens to turn cloying, and Chayko doesn't always know when to let up with the slow motion and the lens flare and the late afternoon light. But there are also moments when whimsy falls away and we're left with what amounts to an unconventional love story – a notable Australian film, which deserves the right kind of gentle applause.