I do not need to tell regular visitors to this blog of my partiality towards things Australian, my propensity to suppose the best of them. However, not even this, dear reader, and not even my warm admiration for the achievements of Allan Border and Steve Waugh, can restrain me from giving voice to the dismay I feel at the more than an hour and a half I chose to devote, yesterday evening, to one of the cultural products of that distant continent - I mean the moving picture Look Both Ways. Such a partiality and a propensity I may possess, but they are not such as to blind me to all other considerations, especially those intrinsic to the question under scrutiny, and if some prominent circumstance should intervene to influence my judgement on a matter Australian, influenced I will allow it to be, and go on to voice it without fear of contrary opinion.
I would normally now warn you of the spoilers to follow, but in this case there is no need; this is an aesthetic experience impossible to spoil. Here's the deal. Your main protagonist discovers, at the off, that he has cancer. As you would expect, it makes him miserable but only as miserable as the woman he will soon hook up with already is for other and amorphous reasons: she has the unsociable habit of thinking in cartoon form - for she draws for a profession - and the unhappy viewer is obliged constantly to witness these cartoon thoughts of hers, which are usually of imminent disaster, especially to herself. Disaster, in fact, is the movie's context, since it has begun with two of them, both involving trains. A colleague of the main protagonist learns, more or less simultaneously with the latter's learning he has cancer, that his girlfriend is pregnant. I call her his 'girlfriend', but until the last minute of the movie that is merely a hypothetical way of talking since the two of them display as much affection for one another as you might expect from a dung beetle for the work of Miss Emily Brontë.
Anyway, these four go about being everything from disgruntled through sulky to totally dejected, as do most other characters in the story: the ex-wife of the second guy; and a woman bereaved by one of the opening disasters; the train driver centrally involved in, but not at fault for, her bereavement; the dead father of the first guy - his death not preventing him from appearing in regular flashback and permanent distress; and his widow, aka the mother of the first guy. They all go about miserable and also show themselves, for the most part, unacquainted with the skills of dramatic performance. They are accompanied much of the time by inappropriately intrusive pop music. Until...
Until, just before the end of the movie, with several of them now weeping and sobbing, there is an almighty downpour in which some of them get caught, and this has the wonderful effect of getting them to perk up and look on the bright side.
After the movie I fished out the review of it in Sight and Sound for September 2006. A quite different film: complex, subtle, humorous. Humorous is right - indeed, looked at in a certain, detached way, a comic masterpiece. But if you take the venture on its own terms, I'd say this review gets it right. I wish I'd read it sooner.
Look both ways, then avoid it like an oncoming train.