SOFT FRUIT
Australia, 2000, 104 minutes, Colour.
Sacha Horler, Genevieve Lemon, Russel Dykstra, Linal Haft, Jeannie Drynan.
Directed by Christina Andreef.
After directing several short films and winning awards, writer-director Christina Andreef made this first feature film. She drew on her background in growing up in New Zealand as well as her ancestors coming from Bulgaria.
The film focuses on three sisters, each with a different life, families and relationships, tensions with their father and their brother who was just been released on parole from prison. They have come home to Port Kembla, near Wollongong, as their mother has terminal cancer.
The father is gruff, busy, disliking his son, not coping well with his wife’s illness.
She is played very effectively by Jeannie Drynan – who was later to give such a moving performance as a disappointed mother in Muriel’s Wedding.
The film is also something of a black comedy, especially with the behaviour of the dying mother, her hopes, dreams, attitude towards medication, towards her children.
1. The title? Reference?
2. An Australian story, New South Wales, the city of Port Kembla? The atmosphere, the city scenes, the streets and homes, industry? The musical score?
3. The home, the family, the strong father, Patsy and her illness, diving? The return of the three sisters? The return of Bo, from prison? On parole? The father and his control, violence? His resentments? The response of all his children to him? His relegating Bo to the shed?
4. Bo, jail and parole, his relationship with his mother, reading the story of Jackie Kennedy?
5. The sisters, Josie, Nadia, Vera? Each of them in themselves, Josie and her family, their lives and interactions, at home again, their beds in the room, the diets? Nursing their mother?
6. Patsy, her illness, wanting relief? Dispensing with the chemotherapy? Bo and the stories of Jackie Kennedy? Her dreams and hallucinations? Buying the coffin? The spider in the dreams? Going out, Bo and the morphine relief?
7. The pressure on all of the family, the dying situation, the family and its foibles, the blend of the silly and the mundane, aspects of the cruel? Pain and humour?
