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The Turning poster

Review: The Turning, Twenty Feet from Stardom and The Butler

By Cinema, Reviews

Hugo Weaving in Tim Winton's The Turning (2013)

The Turning posterI went into The Turning in the dark and in some ways I wish I hadn’t and in oth­ers I’m glad I did. I’ll see if I can explain.

The film is a col­lec­tion of related shorts, each based on a single story from Tim Winton’s acclaimed col­lec­tion of the same name. That much I knew. As story after story rolled through, each pro­duced by a dif­fer­ent Australian cre­at­ive team, each tak­ing a unique and ori­gin­al approach to storytelling, I star­ted to see con­nec­tions between them. Many of these con­nec­tions were visu­al – the recur­rence of rusty aban­doned cars, people liv­ing in cara­vans. Some were geo­graph­ic – a Western Australian min­ing com­munity sur­roun­ded on one side by red dirt and on the oth­er by the ocean. Damaged, cor­roded and cor­rup­ted mas­culin­ity. Redheads. The name “Vic”.

Afterwards I read a copy of the glossy souven­ir book­let that view­ers get to take away with them when they buy a tick­et for this “spe­cial cine­mat­ic event” and those con­nec­tions became clear­er. In Winton’s book all of the stor­ies inter-connect – char­ac­ters re-occur (often at dif­fer­ent stages of their lives) and events we see in one story might be referred to obliquely in another.

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