GRAEME:
A round of applause for Stan for its investment and creative involvement in the new feature film The Second, which will stream on Stan following a short theatrical release.
Shot on location in Jimbour, north west of Brisbane the movie starring Rachael Blake, Susie Porter, Vince Colosimo, Martin Sacks & Susan Prior was directed by Mairi Cameron written and produced by Stephen Lance with Leanne Tonkes as Producer.
The cleverly serpentine story follows Blake’s successful author riding high on the international acclaim of her first book, a sexually unambiguous autobiography. Slender and sophisticated she suddenly has it all including a publisher who’s fallen in love with both her and her wildly sexually inventive alter ego but she’s battling the dreaded second book syndrome unable to even make a start on the new one.
Attempting to meet her deadline the author and the publisher take a long summer sojourn at her family’s country estate, her deceased father also a distinguished writer, famous in the region, when her beautigul but rather licentious best friend from the past who loves a drink and a good time, arrives unexpectantly the secret history between them creates a not unexpected screates a not . When Nina, Kit’s oldest friend, arrives out of the blue, the secrets from the past become that shadowy past threatening all their lives.
It’s an engrossing and sometimes perplexing effort from director Cameron, photographed beautifully by Mark Wareham it moves from psychological thriller to gothic pastoral mystery to erotic melodrama and finally to a kind of post modern deconstruction of the creative process itself. The ending is impossible to guess and will have you puzzling over it for hours after seeing it.
MARGARET:
It is the sort of film that you come out of you want to pull all the parts out to see if they fit together. It’s tonally intruiging and really quite clever because is it about an author exploiting an event in her past and extrapolating from that… using it and that’s what authors do, they use stuff and distort stuff. And I just thought this was really quite clever. They’ve got splendid performers and they’re all really, really good, all of them.
GRAEME:
And they cope with all the sort of genre bending of this really well because it does really jump in and out of genre all over the place which is totally intuiging and the actors do it with great relish. They love the fact that we’re changing from a pastoral mystery now to an erotic thriller and they just go at it full throttle. It’s beautifully performed, I really enjoyed this and I did think about it a lot afterwards because it is impossible to work out.
MARGARET:
But I mean you’re totally engrossed through the whole of the film which says a lot and that’s all you can demand and if you’re talking about it afterwards, which we actually did.
GRAEME:
Yes we wandered down the street…
MARGARET:
We wanted to work out what it was…
GRAEME:
…and said what did we actually watch????
MARGARET:
So I think this a really nice accomplishment! Good on Stan, as you say. I’m going to give it 4 stars.
GRAEME:
I’m going to give it 4 stars as well. I was totally intrigued by this. I enjoyed it enormously.
MARGARET:
Nothing is just delivered on a platter in this film. You walk out and you go ‘now how do I fit all of the pieces together how do I interpret this film?’