The troubled young Sonja becomes a troubled
adult, played by Kerry Fox, in "The Sound
of One Hand Clapping."
Turmoil translates
into shards of potteryThis is the last review of the five feature films nominated for the Hawaii International Film Festival Maile Awards.
By Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinThe Sound of One Hand Clapping
Not rated Screens 8 p.m. Tuesday at Kauai Community College and 8 p.m. Thursday at Honokaa Peoples Theatre
KEEP these people away from the crockery! Dishes, teapots, windows -- see it in the movie, moments later it's broken, then someone will weep, or, if we're really lucky, there'll be a glimpse of blood oozing out of a clenched fist. It's so dramatic.
"The Sound of One Hand Clapping" was written and directed by Richard Flanagan, the same fellow who wrote the novel it is based on, and so he joins the noble company of novelist-directors like Stephen King, who masterminded the midnight movie "Maximum Overdrive."
The buck stops with Flanagan, who cannot complain about what the film industry has done to his creation. Too bad, because it's not enough. The essentially interior, rational world of literature doesn't translate well to the endomorphic, visceral realm of film.
The concerns of "Clapping" are primary literary -- relational, not confrontational; circular, not direct. Unable to convey an interior reality, the film suggests emotional reaction by metaphor. Watch out for the broken crockery -- means someone's upset. Got that?
Film also telescopes the story, and requires the filmmaker to put everything on the screen instead of parceling it out in the pages of a novel. When the mother of an adorable little girl abandons her, causing her to grow up mystified, it's apparently a mystery for readers as well. But viewers witness Mom weeping, packing a rope and noose in her bag and staggering out into the snow, stricken-faced, and we KNOW no good will come of this.
The girl Sonya, daughter of Slove-nian immigrants in Tasmania, is stuck with Dad, who drinks too much, smokes even more and has the kind of screw-you attitude that won't make him management material. Things aren't easy for the two, who are essentially stuck with each other by accident of family. Soon as she's able, Sonya ankles the family shack.
A couple of decades later, Sonya is pregnant and wondering what happened to Mom. She returns, looks up Dad -- yep, he's still drinking and smoking and snarling -- and settles in, neatly scoring the job that's always open in Australia, beer-serving.
Will she reconcile with Dad? Will she realize that life goes on and that every birth is another chance at redemption? That audiences demand a conclusion to a dramatic arc? Your expectations will not be confounded here.
This is one of those movies in which every character in it seems on the verge of the Big Weep, which supplies a certain amount of tension. As the grown-up Sonya, Kerry Fox is solid, giving a finely nuanced impression of an average woman caught in the grip of an unusual childhood. She reminds me of a younger Kathy Bates.
The key figure in the film, however, is Kristof Kaczmarek as the father, who seems genuinely haunted and has terrific presence. He should also have gotten hazard pay for all the cigarettes he had to smoke.
Tech credits are adequate, with particular note of the art direction suggesting 1950s Tasmania. American ears that have trouble understanding Australian accents will struggle mightily with Slovenian-Australian-Tasmanian dialects.
