Australian
Screen

Clip description

Over photographs of happier times, both during her relationship with Steve, and from the time before, Liz quotes her mother and some feminist writers and deliberates on her struggle with dependency on a lover, and on the general nature of human dependency.

Curator’s notes

This sequence occurs around the middle of the film. Visually different from the rest of the film, with its collection of static shots of photographs and its absence of camera movement, it distils Liz’s essential dilemma. Throughout the film there’s a tension between the world outside (represented by photographs, shots out the window and references to people other than Liz and Steve in the narration) and the interior internalised world of Liz’s pain (represented by the obsessive diatribe of the narration, its excess reined in and tethered to the carefully composed static images). Signifiers of the world outside suggest that Liz had a life before Steve. Ipso facto she will have one again after Steve. As with any addiction, the difficulty is in the steps in between. The distance between pain and recovery is beautifully illustrated in one of the final shots of the clip. A candle in sharp focus (still burning for the ex-lover) sits in the windowsill. Outside in the distance, the night-lights of the city are visible in soft focus. In reality the city lights shine far more brightly than the candle, but for Liz they are diffuse, faraway and unattainable.

Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the sequence, many parts of the middle section of the film are difficult for some viewers to digest. Just prior to the clip, Liz has stated that she is ‘sick of the boyfriend-snatching so-called feminists of today’, and condemns other ‘fashionable feminist beliefs’. In the clip she debates the contemporary social expectations around dependency, having a spray at feminism and other liberation movements by which she feels abandoned. Today this has become a bit of a sport in the mainstream media, where second wave feminism is regularly strung up for a public beating, being blamed for the unmanageability of contemporary women’s lives. In this light, the real concerns of the middle section of the film – Liz’s self-doubt and whether or not she will ever reconcile her dependency needs – lose some of their relevance.