James Vaughan’s feature debut touches on Australian history and colonialism in an admirable cinematic experiment
Australian writer-director James Vaughan’s debut feature is a strange exercise in tone and atmosphere. For sure, there are characters who wander around and do stuff – but almost nothing of consequence happens. This film is almost aggressively deadpan and oblique, to a degree that’s almost admirable so long as you feel it’s worth spending 82 minutes of your time watching a cinematic experiment. As one of the characters, a videographer in his 20s named Ray (Fergus Wilson), says about his work: “It’s all real, unless none of it is. It’s all smoke and mirrors.” Indeed, Smoke and Mirrors would be just as good a title, and about as randomly appropriate as the generic title it has already.
In the early section, Ray wanders around Sydney with a young woman named Alice...
Australian writer-director James Vaughan’s debut feature is a strange exercise in tone and atmosphere. For sure, there are characters who wander around and do stuff – but almost nothing of consequence happens. This film is almost aggressively deadpan and oblique, to a degree that’s almost admirable so long as you feel it’s worth spending 82 minutes of your time watching a cinematic experiment. As one of the characters, a videographer in his 20s named Ray (Fergus Wilson), says about his work: “It’s all real, unless none of it is. It’s all smoke and mirrors.” Indeed, Smoke and Mirrors would be just as good a title, and about as randomly appropriate as the generic title it has already.
In the early section, Ray wanders around Sydney with a young woman named Alice...
- 11/8/2021
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
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