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Clip description
Tessa (Pamela Rabe) is remembering the night, at age 16, that her life changed forever. She closes a window and, at the next moment, her sixteen-year-old self (Simone Pengelly) falls into the room, in the midst of a miscarriage. Later, unable to sleep, Tessa remembers her last conversation with her mother (Toni Scanlon), who gave her money and told her not to come back, for fear of what her father would do.
Curator’s notes
The past is never the past in this film, because there are too many unresolved tensions. The script makes this idea literal by having the teenage Tessa fall into the arms of her older self, played by Pamela Rabe. The film strives for a very strong physical presence in the house, both in the present and in Tessa’s emotionally turbulent state. It becomes almost a haunted house story, but with a highly poetic visual style, characterised by the shots of open windows, breezes through curtains, dark bedrooms and lonely hallways. The film was shot by Dion Beebe, one of the best new cinematographers of the early 1990s in Australia.
