Published 2018 on Down Under Flix
Director: Paul Cox
Director: Paul Cox
Stars: Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell, Julia Blake, Terry Norris,
Chris Haywood, Norman Kaye
Director
Paul Cox’s final work, 2015’s Force
of Destiny, opens with a title card dedicating the film to two departed
collaborators: actress Wendy Hughes – star of the superb Lonely Hearts as well as Kostas, My First Wife, Lust and Revenge, and Salvation – and Oliver
Streeton, art director on Human Touch and title designer on
that film, A Woman’s Tale, Innocence, and The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. This dedication, combined
with the film’s subject matter – dramatising Cox’s own brush with liver cancer
– and the fact its director died just a year after its release, casts a shadow
of mortality over the filmmaker’s swansong effort. Having said that, Cox
grappled with matters of mortality throughout his whole career.
This
theme surfaces in Innocence,
which centres on former lovers reuniting in their seventies. Andreas (Charles
‘Bud’ Tingwell), a widow, writes a letter to his former love Claire (Julia
Blake) proposing that they catch up. They meet, rekindle their love for one
another, and embark on an affair, leading to the erosion of Claire’s
fourty-year marriage to John (Terry Norris). This was the first Paul Cox film
to appear on my radar, but it was not a film I sought out: as an 18-year old
filmgoer of dubious taste at the time of its release, I avoided Innocence like the plague,
dismissing it as geriatric romance. In retrospect that was my loss, but
also a gain, as the passage of time has equipped me to appreciate the film
better than I would have at age 18.
A
few months ago I reviewed the film Words
and Pictures, and while it wasn’t much to my liking I appreciated the pairing of mature leads in Clive Owen
and Juliette Binoche. Onscreen romance is generally the domain of the young.
Much of it is also predicated on amorality that’s mutually agreed upon in a
silent pact between filmmaker and filmgoer: an unblinking, unspoken acceptance
of dodgy behaviour – lying, cheating, betrayal, spying, stalking – sugar-coated
and brushed off as Hollywood confection and convention, just part and parcel of
the genre. Remember Sleepless
in Seattle when Meg Ryan breaks up with her fiancé Bill
Pullman to meet up with Tom Hanks atop the Empire State Building? Or While You Were Sleeping, where
Sandra Bullock lies her way into the lives of a comatose man’s (Peter
Gallagher) family by pretending to be his fiancé, only to end up in love with
his brother (Pullman again)? Or My
Best Friend’s Wedding, where Julia Roberts does everything she can
to destroy her “best” friend’s (Dermot Mulroney) wedding to Cameron Diaz? Innocence is a rarefied
specimen; not only is there a greater vulnerability to the romance that comes
with the age of its protagonists, there’s also a greater sense of the
collateral damage in the form of the dissolution of Claire’s marriage. Things
get ugly. Things get messy.
The
film showcases strong work from three industry veterans, who sell the shared
history and sometimes tender, sometimes thorny interactions between their
characters, as well as some of Cox’s more didactic ruminations on love and
life. The late Tingwell delivers an understated performance, quietly harnessing
50 years of accumulated audience affection to Andreas’ romantic cause. Blake,
an actress who has lent class, warmth, and occasionally haute chilliness to
films like The Getting of Wisdom, Patrick, My Brilliant Career, and Travelling North, plays Claire
with dignity and fragility. And Norris – who’d only returned to film and
television a few years earlier after a long absence, but has been prolific
since – is alternately clueless, callous, and sympathetic as John. Also
deserving some praise are Kenny Aernouts and Kristine Van Pellicom as younger
versions of Andreas and Claire. We see them only in fleeting dialogue-less
flashbacks, but both make strong impressions, adding colour and personality to
what could have been merely ‘filler’ scenes.
Ben Kooyman