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Clip description
Beth (Lisa Harrow) and her father (Bill Hunter) are driving into the desert of western New South Wales on a short holiday. Beth wants to get closer to him and resolve some personal issues before it’s too late, but they argue constantly, as they have done for most of her life. He doesn’t see the point of talking things out. As far as he’s concerned, women always want to talk too much.
Curator’s notes
The road trip into the desert is a surprising part of the movie. It takes the action away from the ‘femaleness’ of the inner-city house, into a vastness where the problems of Beth and her sister and JP are supposed to recede. At least, that is what Beth is hoping but she just ends up feeling more alone. The attempts to communicate with her father are disastrous. He doesn’t like displays of emotion or the way that the women in his life, both his wife and his daughter, attempt to drag emotions out of him.
The gap is partly generational and that is also true of Beth’s attempts to communicate with Vicki and possibly her own daughter Annie. Age has a lot to do with the way each of Helen Garner’s characters behaves in the movie. It partly dictates the emotions that each feels. Some of the mastery of her script is in the way that she sews that idea into the action, without age being specifically mentioned.
