Blueback (Connoly, 2022)
A stern and demanding mom is teaching her young daughter how to free dive in the ocean. The child is tired…or scared…or both, so to incentivize her, mom holds a beloved piece of jewelry over the water. “No mom, please don’t!” the daughter cries, but mom drops it in, forcing the daughter to hold her breath and dive deep into the water. When she returns (with the jewelry) she is terrified. “There’s something down there!” she cries. Still mom doesn’t comfort her child, choosing instead to interrogate her on what she saw.
Arguing whether or not something is child abuse or just stern parenting is hardly film criticism, so I’ll concede that the above scene doesn’t make Blueback a bad movie so much as it made it a movie I had little interest in watching. Granted the girl in question, Abby, grows up with the resolve and love of the ocean to take on the poachers. Granted also, the adult Abby (Mia Wasikowska), evidences ambivalence about her mom when receiving a phone call (after diving) that suggests estrangement between mother and adult daughter.
But overall, it looks to me as though the film characterizes such parenting as stern but normal — the source of many of Abby’s positive qualities. Perhaps it is the sort of relationship easier to portray in a novel. (The film is based on a short tome by Tim Winton that features a boy and is said to be somewhat autobiographical.) It could be the gender change in the protagonist or the condensing nature of film relative to prose shifts the amount of weight given to any one particular scene.
The film is shot nicely, including the underwater scenes, which are hard to make look any different from other scenes. And the cast includes Radha Mitchell and Eric Bana, so it is not as though there isn’t talent on display here. It’s just that for me, it is being sold as a family film, and while I appreciate that this label should mean something more than just wholesome, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these characters loved the ocean more than they loved each other. And that didn’t make for a particularly enjoyable narrative experience.
Blueback played at the Toronto International Film Festival and Sundance, and it opens in select theaters on March 3, 2023.
