By Sandra Hall
WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
★★★½
CTC. 143 minutes. In cinemas May 8
In With or Without You, Marta Dusseldorp is busy wrecking her life, which is a good thing.
She’s played so many self-disciplined, can-do characters that I wondered for a while if she was happy doing anything else. Then came her TV series, Bay of Fires, which plunged her into a set-up dictated by black comic hysteria, and the picture changed.
Melina Vidler, Marta Dusseldorp and Albert Mwangi in With or Without You.Credit: Ian Routledge
But this time, she’s really unravelling. Sharon has brought up her daughter, Chloe (Melina Vidler), alone while propping herself up with alcohol and the company of men who are bound to let her down. Now Chloe is an adult and the mother and daughter have swapped roles. Chloe is looking after her.
The film is a first feature from South Australian writer-director Kelly Schilling, who has based it on her own experience of growing up with a single mother struggling to keep going. And it’s very clear that she knows these people. You could never write off the mercurial Sharon as a stock character.
Wildly unpredictable whether she’s drunk or semi-sober, Sharon careens through the action with an energy that exhausts everyone around her. When she crashes, as she often does, she laughs. And in her rare moments of clarity, she displays a generosity that commands Chloe’s loyalty no matter what.
When the film opens, they have reached a point where Sharon is insisting that Chloe leave to find her own place in the world. And Chloe, despite her misgivings, is taking her advice.
But her taste in men is no better than her mother’s and she’s taking off into the unknown with a character who turns out to be a violent criminal intent on implicating her in his crimes.
From this point, the film becomes a road movie set in South Australia’s bushland, its motels, pubs and villages. Everybody is on the run from something. Chloe is hiding from her ex-boyfriend, Sharon is escaping those who think they know what’s best for her, and Dalu (Albert Mwangi), a Nigerian refugee Chloe meets during her travels, is trying to forestall bureaucracy’s efforts to send him back home.
Marta Dusseldorp in With or Without You: unravelling.Credit: Ian Routledge
A few loose ends are left trailing in their wake and there are a couple of coincidences which demand your indulgence but the film is a bold plunge into life on the margins with Dusseldorp getting a welcome chance to exercise her sense of humour. One of her best scenes happens on a school bus which she hails in desperation after being stranded in the bush. A solemn-faced child makes room for her on the seat beside her and in the conversation that follows, displays a maturity that Sharon herself could never hope to match.
By the time she rejoins Chloe and Dalu, who’s proven himself to be somebody both women can trust, she’s drunk again and more obstinate than ever. At first, she refuses to go with them, but she finally consents if they “take the scenic route”. And it comes as no surprise when the ensuing trip through the backblocks precipitates another crisis.
It’s far from being a one-woman show. Running in tandem with Sharon’s misadventures is the slow-growing romance between Chloe and Dalu, which is handled with great care. Admittedly, Dalu comes across as being too good to be true. He would seem to have enough troubles of his own without taking on those of a woman he barely knows but Mwangi is such a likeable actor that it’s possible to push those doubts aside – at least for the time being. It’s a film done with a lot of heart.
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