Reviewed by Catherine Bisley

A FILM in which flights of the imagination are balanced with the unavoidable realities of daily life is a rare thing. Look Both Ways, the debut feature of Australian director/writer Sarah Watt, achieves this and more. Maintaining a cerebral dynamism and a down to earth humour, the film launches head on into questions surrounding death which are often ignored.


While death, dying and mourning are the central motifs, Look Both Ways also explores love, art, family, and loneliness. Incorporating so many weighty themes, as well as numerous characters and subplots is a mean feat; Watt’s finesse as a scriptwriter and director is established in this narrative interconnectedness and detail. The narrative centers around the death of a man who is hit and killed by a freight train in an Adelaide suburb; Meryl (Justine Clarke), returning from her father’s funeral, witnesses the death; Nick (William McInnes, Watt’s husband), who has just been diagnosed with testicular cancer, photographs the aftermath. Andy (Anthony Hayes) is the journalist who covers the story; he has a lot of pent up anger and all sorts of ex-wife problems, as well as a newly pregnant on-again, off-again girlfriend, Anna (Lisa Flanagan). We also follow her story, that of the train driver (Andreas Sobik), the partner of the dead man (Daniela Farinacci), and the editor of the newspaper Andy and Nick work for, Phil (Andrew S. Gilbert). All the characters enrich the film, and each actor gives an outstanding performance.

The script is witty. Bemoaning the state of her life to her sister, the lonely Meryl lists all the usual woes (no boyfriend, broke etc). However, rather than wallowing in it she concludes, “I don’t have a Yacht and I’ve never been on a world cruise... and my sister ate all the salmon sandwiches at the funeral.” Much of the humour is achieved through means visually. At the swimming baths Meryl observes a young blonde vainly adjusting her skimpy bikini (yellow of course, to emphasis the tan). Her focus then shifts to some old ladies who are fixing their humungous bras around their large blubbery forms.

Andy also gets a fair share of hilarious scenes. In one he goes to the dairy to get his paper and milk. When the shop keeper won’t allow him to take his goods (he is 5 cents short due to a price rise) he launches into a tirade against people’s small mindedness. He storms out of the shop, popping a bag of chips as he goes. He then turns his anger on a choir he hears as he marches past a church: “Shut up”. In another, he finds himself landed with “arts diary” and at an awful performance of Macbeth – “out out brief candle” delivered by a man in resplendent tartan – it is too much for him and he makes a conspicuous exit. The interactions between Nick and Meryl, who romantically entangle, are great, capturing how awkward attraction can be and the stupid things you blurt out.

Using a palette primarily made up of yellows and blues, Watt (who studied fine arts before she went on to do film at VCA), instills her film with a mature artistry. The film includes drawn animations and montages of still photos and medical diagrams. Animations violently burst onto the screen as Meryl rides the train home from her father’s funeral, imagining many forms of her own death. Later, as she submerges herself at the swimming pool, she explores a coral reef: surfacing to breathe she returns underwater only to be eaten by a shark. Nick’s imagination is dictated by his cancer. Walking past the butcher’s he is drawn into a pig’s eye and the carcinogenic lumps of meat. His reactions to a man with a mole and a smoker are in a similar vein. These are coupled with the painterly frames of the live action. Beautiful still shots with subtle focus show characters in windows and doorways. I am reminded of Vermeer. The sound design is also characterised by such shifts. In one scene, the noise of a freight train overpowers, then, as the train gets further away, metallic clatter subsides into dry quietness.

The locale and its dryness, especially the area around train tracks, figures prominently in the film’s imagination. Camera angles bind the characters to the earth. The birds that inhabit the sky are returned to again and again to juxtapose this downward gaze. There is some brilliant camera work here; the cameraman is so accurate one imagines he had choreographed the birds’ flight paths. Each time the motif returns, the frame shifts slightly, the series of images suggests multiplicity and transformation. The final montage is cut to the sound of the birds’ fluttering wings, giving a beautiful sense of cohesion.

Including last year’s film festival, I have now seen Look Both Ways three times. Unusually, each time I have been brought to tears. The representation of Nick’s father’s slow death from cancer form attains emotional power; the train driver’s trauma is equally affecting. This film instills not only a profound sense of sadness but also joy; somehow the view is included in its lucid acts of perception. Afterwards, sitting on a bench with a friend, I looked both ways and saw the world with the film’s heightened sense of life.