It’s a common lament among booksellers that you just can’t get people interested in short story collections, which is a shame considering writers as diverse as HP Lovecraft, E Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Eileen Chang and Jorge Luis Borges have produced their finest works in this form. So it’s to their credit that Soda Pictures have picked up The Turning, a multi-director anthology adapting the short stories of Tim Winton, for UK distribution.
The British release of The Turning is truncated from the three-hour Australian version by over an hour. Apparently some of the threads connecting the stories – specifically the character of Vic Lang, who is played at various points in his life by three different actors in the British version – suffer as a result. But the thematic and stylistic connections between the stories are strong enough to satisfy, and the average quality of the shorts (which is what matters most, after all) is commendably high.
The UK version opens, after a brief animated prologue by Mareika Walsh, with a shot of Cate Blanchett preparing food. Undoubtedly it makes commercial sense to open with your biggest star, but Blanchett soon blends seamlessly into the ensemble. Other acting highlights include an intense, emotional two-hander between Hugo Weaving and Josh McConville in David Wenham’s ‘Commission’, and Rose Byrne giving a performance in Claire McCarthy’s title short that will stun people who know her primarily for her comedy work in films like Bridesmaids and Bad Neighbours.
‘Sand’ and ‘Big World’ are two of the more experimental shorts that come in towards the end and raise The Turning into the realms of the truly impressive
THE TURNING
Many of Winton’s shorts share similar structures – Tony Ayres’s ‘Cockleshell’ is done no favours by being placed directly before Stephen Page’s thematically and narratively similar but much more effective ‘Sand’. But the approach to dramatising the stories is pleasingly eclectic. On one hand, the gorgeously-shot ‘Big World’ by Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) is so faithful to Winton’s words that it includes an excerpt of the author’s voice reading them out. On the other, the aforementioned ‘Sand’ does away with dialogue entirely, creating an eerie, chronologically scrambled childhood dream-world through its haunting images.
‘Sand’ and ‘Big World’ are two of the more experimental shorts that come in towards the end and raise The Turning into the realms of the truly impressive. Snowtown director Justin Kurzel’s ‘Boner McPharlin’s Moll’ is the strangest, and one of the best, a series of blackly comic monologues about a thuggish local character shot in a series of beautiful slow pans. It feels like you’re watching an avant-garde documentary about a town you’d never want to visit, and though it’s not as horrifying as Snowtown it shares the feeling of something truly unnerving lurking beneath the cult of the Australian larrikin.
The high point might well be Mia Wasikowska’s directorial debut ‘Long, Clear View’, which recounts Vic Lang’s childhood with a droll voiceover and a series of wittily illustrative images. The sense of humour has a winningly Edward Goreyish nastiness to it, and her visual flash is always in service of creating empathy with her fidgety, alienated, difficult protagonist. The final image – in a scene which reveals the unnerving meaning of the short’s title – is a peach.
The Turning is available to watch on VOD
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