Family holiday on the New Zealand coast in the early Seventies. Mom drinks, and has the hots for a fancy-free bachelor with a boat. Dad drinks, too, but stays cool, almost comatose. (Nice still-lifes of the arrangement alongside the lawn chair: bottle of booze, bowl of lemon wedges, plate of squeezed lemons, ashtray.) Blossoming young Janey (the unactressy Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki, not a name tailored to a theater marquee) is supposed to be looking after little Jimmy, but is looking at many other things around her as well. Christine Jeffs, the first-time filmmaker, has something of her compatriot Jane Campion's frank and nonpartisan fascination with female sexuality, and the whole thing is frightfully grown-up if not frightfully professional: stunted no doubt by the low, low budget. The meager, muted background sounds and the breathing-in-your-ear voices give the film a bit of the audio quality of a postsynchronized cheapie circa 1965. This imbalance in favor of the voices does not necessarily make the accents intelligible. With Sarah Peirse, Marton Csokas, Alistair Browning. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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