Ticket to Paradise saved by Clooney and Roberts

When their daughter is about to marry a seaweed farmer she’s known for just 17 days, divorced parents David and Georgia are forced to come together for the first time in 20 years.

Ticket to Paradise (M)
In cinemas
★★★½

The “paradise” in the rom-com Ticket to Paradise is Bali, but the film was shot in Queensland (Airlie Beach, among other locations) so the first thing that has to be said is that veteran Australian production designer Owen Paterson and costume designer, Lizzie Gardiner, have achieved wonders in transforming this Australian resort into a completely convincing Bali. Paterson and Gardiner are the real stars of the film, but the names above the title are George Clooney and Julia Roberts, both very popular and very accomplished actors who really deserve better material than this.

Ticket to Paradise is a safe, predictable affair. There are no surprises yet it’s all perfectly pleasant. The somewhat unlikely set-up introduces an ex-couple, David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts), divorced 20 years ago after five years of a marriage that produced their beloved daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever). Early in the film, Lily graduates from university with a degree in law – her parents are furious because they’re seated next to one another at the ceremony. Lily and her best friend Wren (Billie Lourd) decide to celebrate by taking a trip to Bali and it’s here that Lily meets and falls in love with Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a local whose job entails harvesting seaweed. A holiday love affair (which would be believable) turns into wedding plans just 17 days after the couple’s first encounter (pretty unbelievable) so the anxious parents, who haven’t communicated in ages, fly to Indonesia in an attempt to convince Lily that she’s making the same kind of mistake they made when they were her age.

Director Ol Parker – not to be confused with director Oliver Parker who made some decent theatrical adaptations (The Importance of Being Earnest, 2002; An Ideal Husband, 1999) as well as lesser efforts like a belated version of Dad’s Army in 2016 – does an efficiently anonymous job with a screenplay that has lines like: “When we started out it was unreal – then it got real”, a statement delivered by Clooney almost convincingly. The first hour or so is mildly engaging, but a draggy third act is a problem that another script rewrite might have solved.

Fortunately, the leading actors are a delight. Roberts’s Georgia, who has a French pilot (Lucas Bravo) as a boyfriend, lets her hair down with style, while Clooney reminded me of latter-day Cary Grant with his grey hair and boundless charm. There’s a lovely scene in which they get drunk and dance with abandon in a Balinese nightclub. Clooney and Roberts make this colourful but empty movie watchable.

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The Territory (PG)
Limited release in cinemas
★★★★

The Territory is a beautiful but very sad documentary about the struggle between an indigenous Brazilian tribe in the Amazon and the “invaders” and “outsiders” who, with the open encouragement of President Jair Bolsonaro, are increasingly encroaching on the territory of the Uru-eu-wau-wau, whose land is an island of rainforest surrounded by farms.

The “invaders” cut down the magnificent old trees, burn the devastated land and then spray the area with insecticide. It’s a horror story, the more so because the “invaders”, personified by a so-called settler named Martins, who allows himself to be interviewed by director Alex Pritz, are so ignorant not only of the ownership of the land by the native peoples but also of the lasting effect on the planet caused by the destruction of the rainforest.

During the course of the film Neidinha, an Uru-eu-wau-wau woman, leads the campaign against the settlers at great risk to her life (the body of Ari, a member of the tribe, is found beaten to death during the course of the film) while Bitate, at age 18, is elected to lead the tribe. The members of the tribe employ modern methods – drones, video cameras – to document the crimes being committed on their territory; and they fear they will catch Covid from these relentless destroyers. It’s a sobering film offering little hope for the future of this part of the Amazon – unless, perhaps, Bolsonaro is defeated at the polls on October 2.

Bitaté Uru-eu-wau-wau and members of the Jupaú Surveillance team patrol the river by boat. (Credit: Alex Pritz/Amazon Land Documentary)

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You Won’t Be Alone (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★½

The setting of Goran Stolevski’s ambitious feature debut (after award-winning short films) is a Macedonian village in the 19th century. Stolevski is serious about the precise location of the film, so the dialogue is almost entirely in Macedonian (with a small amount of Romanian), posing challenges for the international cast (Noomi Rapace from Sweden, Alice Englert – Jane Campion’s daughter – from Australia, Ana­maria Marinca from Romania, among ­others). That’s one of the reasons that makes this UK-Australian-Serbian co-production, which was well received at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, so interesting.

Stolevski has created a horror film with a difference. The central character is a shapeshifting witch known as Old Maid Maria, aka Wolf-Eateress (Marinca), who is feared by the peasants because of her reputation for drinking the blood of newborn babies and wild animals. At the start of the film a woman makes a pact with the witch, getting the crone to agree not to take her newborn daughter until she reaches the age of 16. The mother then hides the child in a cave, condemning her to a lonely childhood isolated from the outside world.

When she reaches the appointed age, the girl, Nevena (Sara Klimoska), is easily located by Old Maid Maria, who removes her tongue and turns her into a witch. Nevena then wanders into the outside world with the power of changing herself at will, of inhabiting the bodies of humans, including abused mother Basilka (Rapace) and young Biliana (Englert) but also adopting the body of a dog, as she seeks to understand how the world, or at least this isolated corner of it, works.

Stolevski is clearly an original talent, but You Won’t Be Alone has more than its fair share of problems. The storytelling is unnecessarily opaque at times, the cinematography (by Matthew Chuang) is annoyingly wobbly and unattractive, the music score (Mark Bradshaw), mostly composed for the piano, is unexciting and the make-up is frequently unconvincing. Nor do the principal actors, none of them speaking their own language, have too many opportunities.

I’m sorry to be so down on this film because it’s undeniably original and in a way daring in that it doesn’t follow the usual path of movies about witches and shape shifting. It’s more of a Balkan folk tale, a tale told with the trappings of cinematic horror.