Summary
A coming-of-age film about loss mixes magical realism with fetishisation as it takes some odd thematic turns before pitching the entire kitchen sink of dramatic tropes at the audience.
As Melissa George in butterfly drag literally glides into frame on rollers skates, it is clear that debut feature director Priscilla Cameron wants us to be as entranced by her character as the male leads are. Setting the magical realism elements firmly in place, it’s a sentiment that THE BUTTERFLY TREE can’t quite maintain in this problematic narrative.
Butterfly obsessed teen Fin (Better Watch Out‘s Ed Oxenbould) becomes fixated on flower shop owner and ex-burlesque dancer Evelyn (George). So does his father Al (Ewan Leslie), a teacher who has turned to a series of meaningless relationships since the death of his wife. As they become aware of each other’s attraction to the same woman, they must also confront the fallout from that death.
The tone of THE BUTTERFLY TREE flits its wings about all over the place. One secondary story focuses on Al’s love life, and the affair he is having with his adult student Shelley (Sophie Lowe) is played partly for laughs. Yet it’s a film that also brushes up against suicide, obsession, and catastrophic illness. Indeed, it traces the pattern of the entire emotional spectrum by the time the film is done, and not all of these sit happily together.
Far more disturbing are the actions of Fin, who in any other film would come across as a trainee Norman Bates. Hiding totems belonging to his mother out in MacGyvered shrine in the bush, he begins to fetishise Evelyn in much the same way, spying on her changing and keeping similar found objects from her shop. His entire outlook is filtered through the lens of a camera given to him by Evelyn. Rather than objectively decry his actions, the film continues to allow Fin to misread her intentions for the sake of a drama-of-errors.
The excellent cast manages to overcome some of the weaker material, but their creative wings are pinned to the storyboard by some unimaginative outcomes. George in particular has the most solid line-through of a character arc, with a third act revelation that allows us to reconsider what has come before, but it all feels far too tacked-on to have any proper emotional weight to it. This is one butterfly that needed to spend a little more time in the writing cocoon before it was ready to spread its wings.
2017 | Australia | DIR: Priscilla Cameron | WRITER: Priscilla Cameron | CAST: Melissa George, Ed Oxenbould, Ewan Leslie, Sophie Lowe | RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: Vendetta Films | RELEASE DATE: August 2017 (MIFF)
