Something Out of Nothing At All

It’s clear from the opening moments of West of Sunshine, that you are in good filmmaking hands. From the locked off shot of a car’s headlights in an early morning blue to the transportive lilt of Lisa Gerrard’s and James Orr’s score, the mood is set instantly and the pedigree assured. Moreover, anything is worth new recordings from Lisa Gerrard.

But on to the film…

Father and Son

Here we follow an Australian family, the relationship between a tattooed father – Jim – (Damian Hill, “The Leftovers”) and his son Alex (Ty Perham), as they struggle to find common ground in a hand-to-mouth paycheck to paycheck lifestyle. The father wants desperately for his son to connect but is prone to frustrated outburts followed by feeble attempts at reconciliation.

Soon enough we discover that the real rail is his propensity for gambling and his growing desperation to maximize his earnings in increasingly high stakes. Every relationship, in every permutation, is put under the strain of his obsession, as young Alex is always somehow, credibly placed into the scene as a unwitting witness to this downward spiral as Jim surreptitiously attempts to raise money from the innocents that permeate his life to repay a particularly dangerous loanshark.

The Little Things

There are so many nice little touches here from director/writer Jason Raftopoulos, details, nuances, peppering the beats. The son watching a baker sift flour, the son refusing to open the car door as he plays his annoyingly blippy mobile game on his father’s phone, each of the homes of the various ex-girlfriends they visit, trying to drum up favor and resources.

We get a grand tour of characters, each a foil to our anti-hero and his attempt to game them with his reserved charm. In one particularly chilling moment, Alex discovers a tiny bag in the glove compartment that brings the boy precariously close to a line with which he should never have converged.

The cinematography and the editing employ a deft interplay between handheld, wides and closeups, de-focused and lens flared, affording the film a subdued but stylish and contemporary finesse that elevates it above standard indie low budget fare. Not to overstate the importance of the music here, but the mixture of dulcimers, bells, dumbeks and haunting drones continually elevate the undercurrent to a transcendental level, helping to draw focus to the minutae and what may otherwise be a very pedestrian week in the life of inner city Australia and not much else, plot-wise.

I was reminded of the brilliant slice-of-life, “social-realist” River Phoenix film “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon,” and it was good to feel that again, you know those kinds of films about the nothing day, that was the best day ever.