The Sunken Dream: Girl Asleep
Everything feels like the end of the world when you’re fifteen. But, even at the same time, it feels like the start.
Greta Driscoll (Bethany Whitmore) is on the verge of her fifteenth birthday, neurotic with new-kid-at-school shakes and wasn’t-I-a-child-yesterday confusion. She has a connoisseur of dad jokes (Matthew Whittet) and a lover of exotic cooking (Amber McMahon) at home rooting for their daughter; but her childhood world of colourful mystery still rises to the top of her heart like cream on milk. And yes, this is a world with delivered milk bottles like that; it’s the 1970s universe of laminate and turntables. A birthday party stirs up disco fever, and a reemergence of Greta’s vivid visions. In her dream she could see a way to survive, and it’s full of joy… And fear. And the magic of all unknown.
Adapted seamlessly from the stage play by Whittet, it retains theatre’s focus on the performers first; revolving around the axis of the characters as humans in everything they feel. The realism alongside the magic is perfectly placed, and the awkward laughs roll out like a red carpet the characters are tripping over.
Whitmore has the nervous-bird eyes and round perfect face to act like a magnifying class for everything else; we see through her to emotions subtle and grand. Harrison Feldman is a masterstroke as her gawkily endearing best friend Elliot, ringing of every boy with a crooked parting and a cracking voice hiding a heart he’s trying to make gold, the leaf flaking off just like yours. Mum and dad are like Shakespeare mechanicals, hopeless and at times chaos-causing but always centered with love, delivering laughs on silver trays. Imogen Archer is a chilled older sister with a Joan Baez presence, who turns tenderly nurturing at the right times. Eamon Farren gives outstanding yet handsome creepiness as her boyfriend, whom Greta tends to look at for a little too long. A trio of teenage bullies also gives new meaning to deadpan hilarity as they (literally) sing a song of humiliation. Poor Greta, she came out to have a good time and she’s just feeling so attacked right now.
Prima ballerina of the film (by a nose, the excellence is constant) and turning the theatrical realism to magic is Jonathon Oxlade’s production and costume design, partnered perfectly in every movement by Andrew Commis’ cinematography. Every frame explodes with charm, from family dinners around the dumb waiter to eating donuts in the schoolyard, all with nostalgia’s 70s special. The camera does nervous stillness and frenetic chaos exactly as they were needed. It’s a perfect way to imply that every moment in a frightened teenager’s life can feel false, somehow staged, but also endlessly special, as though a team of people worked on making it just for you. What else is a brilliant film crew for? It’s the god-awful small affair for our girl with the mousy hair. The whole film’s mood works out to Wes Anderson’s style x the strange magic of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, via The Mighty Boosh’s insanity; and yet completely its own. Seriously, titles and time cards are hidden in the set and emerge like a Boosh guy is about to tell them off.
As for the creatures of Greta’s walk through her sunken dream, the perfect colour and whimsy are like nothing I’ve ever seen, strange as they are inviting, as though adapted directly from out-of-proportion childhood crayon scribbles, rainbow shining and physics-defying. Circus nymphs, scavenger fairies, jumble sale wraiths. She’s lived them ten times or more, but they are opposite of a bore. They take on a ceremonial quality as she faces growing up, like a group of pagan priests inviting her to run with them, and she’s frightened of what she once created, realising so there is more strangeness inside her than the outside world could ever match. Besides looking at those creatures go in their freakiest forest show; a visual standout sees Greta’s birthday party arrivals turn to a blazing roller disco, Luke Smile’s music blasting under the disco ball and a whole team of partiers whirling in her dance hall, oh man, look at those kids go! Their choreographer has us hooked to the silver screen, as does editor Karryn De Cinque, never dropping the energy for a moment.
For all it has to offer, I want to note particularly that this is a film by and about women. It has the commitment, the effort, with the attention to detail you pick up as an artist when you have to fight for what you make mattering. I look to a future as a female filmmaker, and I couldn’t feel more privileged to live in a world where women are making films like this.
It’s difficult getting a film to a perfect level of those two perfect words: magical realism. To nail them you must turn the world inside out, construct a story of the fragility of a growing mind outside it. The film is a tribute to what new things can feel unreal, Greta’s frenetic impressions and hypercolour fears make the world around her. The dancers spin like tops because they feel so loud and better to her, the trio of triplet bullies are like old school perfectly spoken villains because she’s so afraid of them, everything at school is symmetrical because it feels so stilted, she folds paper cranes put of nerves or distraction as though she wants to fly away with them, and she sees her creatures out of the corner of her eye, every time her mind turns to being anywhere but where she is. And the future is unknown, so the past it must be. What she imagined turns darker and fouler as she sees what darkness life brings in this world, but it’s in the same screaming colour. Your childhood goes with you as you grow, it’s in your memories forever, locked in the music box of your heart. No longer the girl with the tiny hands, but you can show her how you hold so much more in your bigger ones now.
Joni Mitchell sings that children’s dreams lose some grandeur coming true - but there’ll be new dreams, maybe better, before the last revolving year is through. Well, does Greta want these dreams coming true? Maybe once, but now she seems scared of them, and that fact, that change, scares her more than them. No feelings are stronger, troubles deeper, forevers longer, and joys brighter than in adolescence, so this world makes them all into a kaleidoscope, a labyrinthine dream that could mean so many things, but is most perfect in its very chaos and mysterious colourful endlessness. Letting it be that is the masterstroke in itself, knowing life can feel like you’re surrounded by beautiful and frightening questions and not knowing where to find the answers or how to make them up. That doesn’t feel real, so why should this film?
Everyone’s unreality is different, and it seems impossible to tell a story will land in all our sights, but the uniting part is the unreality itself, the oddness we all recognize. Start there, with the acknowledgement of our collective strangeness, and no matter how the forest twists us on our own path, you’re walking through it with all of us. I’m so happy I could walk with Greta. We’re the life on mars. Asleep or awake.
(originally published in 2015)
