Share
clip 2Clip description
Rose (Joan Chen) and her husband 'Uncle Bill’ (Steven Vidler) kiss after she moves back in, seven years after she left him. Rose’s son Tom (Joel Lok) gets a nosebleed as he watches them. Rose resents the presence of Bill’s mother Norma (Kerry Walker), but tries to get along. Cuddling her children in bed, Rose tries to reassure Tom and May (Irene Chen) that life will be better and more stable now.
Curator’s notes
The film works hard to establish a sense of humour in these early stages and a sense of the intimacy between Rose and her children, but Tom’s nosebleed is a fairly obvious pointer to the stress he feels when he sees his mother around men. An earlier sequence establishes that Rose left Bill a week after marrying him and moved the family to Sydney where there was a procession of ‘uncles’. One of the recurring visual motifs is the use of mirrors and distorted views through glass – like the peacock curtain that Rose hangs in every new place they live. The idea is perhaps that glass both reflects and distorts – like memory. It may also be an indirect reference to the idea of a lens, as in a filmmaker’s lens. Tom grows up to be a writer, and he is very clearly the alter ego of Tony Ayres.
