The Alice

This article was first published in the Age on July 31, 2004

Colin Firth nude. Those who have seen Pride and Prejudice which is currently being repeated (ABC, 9.30pm, Sunday) for all those Mr Darcy fans, will know what I mean by that. However I also include the phrase for Googlers - especially those that have been using the phrase 'Claudia Karvan nude' to access my website. That phrase takes readers to a column I wrote about a Paul Cox film that SBS screened a couple of years ago. My point? I haven't one really except that people are weird and thoughts of weirdness put me in the perfect mood to watch channel 9's telemovie tomorrow night (8.30pm), The Alice: a total eclipse of the heart.

This is a strange film -I mean that as a compliment - set in central Australia but refusing central characters. It's an ensemble piece in which four different people are heading to Alice Springs from North, South, East and West. Some plan to see the total eclipse and others are (well so it is implied) simply drawn there by the magic of such planetary forces. All are wanderers of a kind, and the film itself meanders from one story to the next until the stories come together as the moon crosses the face of the sun.

A former heavy metal rock star, Jack, played by All Saint's Eirk Thomson, is heading to Alice because he's on the run from yet another badly judged sexual encounter, though he has been to Alice before, during the partial eclipse that took place there twenty years ago; a young guy, Matt (Patrick Brammall) who people think is gay, but who's really just into plants, leaps off the Ghan to take some samples and ends up lost in the desert; a young woman (Caitlin McDougall) talks to her dead friend (Simon Bourke) while acting as the 'support team' for her drop kick husband who is attempting to break the record for racing up Uluru during an eclipse; a group of friends (Brett Stiller, Luke Carroll and Kyas Sherriff) plan to offer a group of nutty German tourist's a five star holiday experience go horribly wrong and a girl (Jessica Napier) wants to film the eclipse for her mentally ill mother (Anne Louise Lambert) who once ran an Alice Springs pub.

By chance these characters all arrive at the same place to watch the eclipse, an event of great beauty, but also a twilight time, where daily rules no longer apply. It doesn't all come together, and like its characters this film meanders, but it has a low key charm which carries it despite these faults. And while it doesn't avoid all the clichés of whacky Australian comedy-dramas such as Priscilla Queen of the Desert or Muriel's Weddings it's a gentle film which doesn't try too hard for laughs (though they are there to be found) but just draws you in with some solid acting, unusual storyline and beautiful landscapes.

One of the things I particularly liked about it is that the texture of the story draws on dozens of stories and characters we've read in newspapers over the years: there are lots of Steve Irwin jokes, a truck ploughs into a hotel, there are eclipse junkies heading to South Australia for a fix, and the Ghan itself looks particularly gorgeous as it heads to Darwin. It's a film that emphasizes the small (and sometimes not-so-small) interactions that form relationships, and, eventually, a life. Lives that aren't glamorous, but are touched by magic nonetheless.

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