Movie review: Cry me another river

01 July 2016 - 09:50 By Tymon Smith

In a trivial coincidence both local art film hero Oliver Hermanus and blockbuster disaster master Roland Emmerich - the man who put Hermanus through film school in the UK - have films out within a week of each other. However, there's a world of difference between Hermanus's The Endless River and Emmerich's Independence Day Resurgence.After the heavy social realism of his first two films Shirley Adams and Skoonheid, Hermanus's third feature is an uneven mix of melodramatic themes and western-style vistas that attempts to examine the effects of grief on its central odd pair Tiny (Crystal-Donna Roberts) and Frenchman Gilles (Nicolas Duvauchelle) in the small town of Riviersonderend.Beginning with a credit sequence that references the classic Hollywood of John Ford, complemented by the ominous orchestration of composer Braam du Toit, the film soon moves from the romance of the landscape to the oppressive realities of the lives of its small-town residents.Tiny's husband Percy (Clayton Evertson) has just been released from prison after four years. Her mother (Denise Newman) is stern about her son-in-law's future and admonishes him that his old ways will not be tolerated but soon Percy is back to spending his days drinking with his delinquent friends in the tavern, while his wife works as waitress at a petrol station restaurant.There she meets Gilles, a regular at the restaurant who lives with his wife and two children on a farm outside town. Without spoiling the plot it's suffice to say that both Tiny and Gilles are drawn together after suffering tragedies and together they embark on a desperate road trip in search of something that's never made clear and ends in typically Hermanus-style ambiguity.While the film has moments of quiet claustrophobic emotional power and plenty of beautiful cinematography by Chris Lotz, there's an aimlessness that overwhelms whatever philosophical and psychological points Hermanus might be trying to convey.There are themes around the cycle of violence and the hardships of life in rural small towns, but these never really come out of the shadows in any significant way.Duvauchelle and Roberts are good at conveying their internal struggles, too many shots of them standing in front of bodies of water and contemplating nothing immediately obvious can't create the audience empathy needed to be engaged in their journey.While it certainly displays skill on the part of its creative team and moments of undeniable visual poetry, the film unfortunately ends up as a triumph of style rather than substance that drags and never quite manages to pull you into its world...

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