Envy
Director Julie Money's Australian feature veers slightly around the usual themes, but creates an interesting and new mix of character study, role reversal, and sexual politics. The story is basic, but its presentation is tantalisingly different. Envy opens with a fragment from a scene that doesn't appear fully until the film's climax. It draws the audience into confusion, and sets up the possibilites for unconventional storytelling. Envy grabs the attention immediately as the camera settles on young, blonde and nervous-looking Rachel at a suburban shopping mall. As if caught by a surveillance camera, she looks briefly down the lens (and directly at us in the audience) before leaving the frame. Later we will discover the significance of this moment but for now it's all the information we're given as the destinies of Rachel (Anna Lise Phillips) and Kate (Linda Cropper) collide. At a public swimming pool, Kate, a married professional recognises wh . . .
This family is believable, helped by all the performances. Envy creates an effective sense of menace out of a very realistic scenario. Linda Cropper is very strong as Kate, giving a stand out performance as a woman whose actions force us to question our concepts of justice, revenge and acceptable limits. It examines the need for Kate’s possessive materialism, when she owns, and wears, at least two other black dresses, and even wears a negligee that looks exactly like that little dress. The actions turn Kate's family upside-down and unwittingly sets off a dangerous chain of events. This compact effort succeeds because it has something provocative to say and a fearless determination to make us feel uneasy in our comfortable cinema seats. While Rachel is swimming, Kate reclaims her dress and bolts. Envy explores an ordinary suburban family, mother Kate , father Phil and son Matt, who through a minor act of defiance become the victims of three anarchic young people. She has a formidable screen adversary in Anna Lise Phillips as the equally calculating Rachel. She uses basic visual tricks of compressing time and space to heighten scares, alter points-of-view, and just keep things moving in general. On the surface Envy is about a successful, secure middle class woman and a young thief fighting over possession of a black dress. Envy makes comparison between social status between Kate's family that lives in a broad, beautifully appointed home, complete with a stylish pool and Rachel's "family" who lives in a shack in another part of town. The territory becomes darker when Matt blames his mother for what has happened, identifying with Rachel and her 'family' while rejecting his own. Underneath it's about class and sexual politics - rich topics given a vivid examination after Kate's house is invaded by Rachel and two criminal accomplices who initiate a humiliating assault on Kate's teenage son Matt (Wade Osborne).
Common topics in this essay:
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Acceptance Essays
