"The Sound of One Hand Clapping", a backward-looking melodrama about the daughter of an Eastern European immigrant to Australia, is soaked with tears, dramatic revelations, past trauma and sugary-sweet orchestral music. If an audience of die-hard, teary-eyed melodrama fans can make it through the confused first half-hour, they may like the humorless remainder, but a broader audience will lose interest quickly.
The film screened recently at the Berlin Film Festival.
First-time director-screenwriter Richard Flanagan's own story is an interesting one: He wrote the script but could not set up a production. He turned the story into a novel that got so much attention before its publication, Flanagan was able to set up the picture and even direct it. The book and film will be released almost simultaneously in Australia.
Though his directorial debut is a technically handsome piece of craftsmanship with stunning images and colors (especially because of cameraman Martin McGrath and production designer Bryce Perrin), Flanagan gets in his own way with a script that makes too many novel-like jumps and does not pay enough attention to its characters.
We're not sure who the main character is at first: Flanagan builds up the narrative as a series of jumps between three or four different time periods and between characters and locations we can identify only later.
Finally, we figure out that the story is about Sonja (Kerry Fox), a pregnant woman who wants an abortion because her relationship with her father is less-than-happy and because her mother abandoned her when she was 3.
That's about all that happens in the present: The rest of the film is backstory, backstory and more backstory. Sonja at 3 is abandoned by her mother (Melita Jurisic); a slightly older Sonja is nearly abandoned by her father after they move to Australia, but he relents and makes a happy life for them for a while. But Sonja ruins his chance for happiness when she comes between him and his potential bride, and he beats a teenage Sonja when he is drunk.
Meanwhile, Sonja suspects that there is a deep, dark secret in the way her mother abandoned her, and she is right. When finally revealed, the secret is not spectacular as we hope, but it is satisfying. In fact, Flanagan likes this secret so much, he uses it as the film's climax, even though it happened in the distant past.
The purpose of all this confusing time-jumping is to put the mother-abandons-child scene, which comes first chronologically, at the end. Otherwise, there would be no climax.
Fox ("Angel at My Table") may be the star, but her acting talents are confined to the few present-time scenes. Her only jobs are to wonder whether she really wants an abortion and to ask about her mother's dark secret.
More than anyone, it is Kristof Kaczmarek as Sonja's father who turns in a moving, accomplished performance as the immigrant who tries to make a new life in a new world but fails because he cannot drive the old world and the love he lost there out of his heart. His is a tragic, poetic character. One can't help thinking that his story, handled in a neater, more engaging way, could have been a powerful one.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Director-screenwriter: Richard Flanagan
Producer: Rolf De Heer
Co-producers: David Lightfoot, Deborah Cox, Stephen Thomas
Camera: Martin McGrath
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editors: John Scott, Tania Nehme
Music: Cezary Skubiszewksi
Costume designer: Aphrodite Kondos
Casting: Elly Bradbury
Color/stereo
Cast:
Sonja: Kerry Fox
Bojan: Kristof Kaczmarek
Sonja (age 8): Rosie Flanagan
Jenja: Evelyn Krape
Maria: Melita Jurisic
Picotti: Jacek Koman
Running time -- 93 minutes
No MPAA rating...
The film screened recently at the Berlin Film Festival.
First-time director-screenwriter Richard Flanagan's own story is an interesting one: He wrote the script but could not set up a production. He turned the story into a novel that got so much attention before its publication, Flanagan was able to set up the picture and even direct it. The book and film will be released almost simultaneously in Australia.
Though his directorial debut is a technically handsome piece of craftsmanship with stunning images and colors (especially because of cameraman Martin McGrath and production designer Bryce Perrin), Flanagan gets in his own way with a script that makes too many novel-like jumps and does not pay enough attention to its characters.
We're not sure who the main character is at first: Flanagan builds up the narrative as a series of jumps between three or four different time periods and between characters and locations we can identify only later.
Finally, we figure out that the story is about Sonja (Kerry Fox), a pregnant woman who wants an abortion because her relationship with her father is less-than-happy and because her mother abandoned her when she was 3.
That's about all that happens in the present: The rest of the film is backstory, backstory and more backstory. Sonja at 3 is abandoned by her mother (Melita Jurisic); a slightly older Sonja is nearly abandoned by her father after they move to Australia, but he relents and makes a happy life for them for a while. But Sonja ruins his chance for happiness when she comes between him and his potential bride, and he beats a teenage Sonja when he is drunk.
Meanwhile, Sonja suspects that there is a deep, dark secret in the way her mother abandoned her, and she is right. When finally revealed, the secret is not spectacular as we hope, but it is satisfying. In fact, Flanagan likes this secret so much, he uses it as the film's climax, even though it happened in the distant past.
The purpose of all this confusing time-jumping is to put the mother-abandons-child scene, which comes first chronologically, at the end. Otherwise, there would be no climax.
Fox ("Angel at My Table") may be the star, but her acting talents are confined to the few present-time scenes. Her only jobs are to wonder whether she really wants an abortion and to ask about her mother's dark secret.
More than anyone, it is Kristof Kaczmarek as Sonja's father who turns in a moving, accomplished performance as the immigrant who tries to make a new life in a new world but fails because he cannot drive the old world and the love he lost there out of his heart. His is a tragic, poetic character. One can't help thinking that his story, handled in a neater, more engaging way, could have been a powerful one.
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING
Director-screenwriter: Richard Flanagan
Producer: Rolf De Heer
Co-producers: David Lightfoot, Deborah Cox, Stephen Thomas
Camera: Martin McGrath
Production designer: Bryce Perrin
Editors: John Scott, Tania Nehme
Music: Cezary Skubiszewksi
Costume designer: Aphrodite Kondos
Casting: Elly Bradbury
Color/stereo
Cast:
Sonja: Kerry Fox
Bojan: Kristof Kaczmarek
Sonja (age 8): Rosie Flanagan
Jenja: Evelyn Krape
Maria: Melita Jurisic
Picotti: Jacek Koman
Running time -- 93 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/23/1998
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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