A WOMAN'S TALE
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
A WOMAN'S TALE is an Australian film directed by Paul Cox and written by Paul Cox and Barry Dickins. It stars Sheila Florance, Gosia Dobrowolskia, Chris Haywood, and Norman Kaye. Unrated.
A WOMAN'S TALE, a film that moved from the Seattle International Film Festival to a local theatrical run, blurs the line between fiction and documentary to the point where we the audience cannot say that anything we see on the screen happened to Sheila Florance, the 80-year-old Australian actress, or to the character she plays in this her final performance. Both were dying of cancer as the film was made. Both apparently are feisty, sweet, in love with life with all its sadness, thoughtful, and mean to the petty and to those who have lost sight of life. However neither she or her character is the frightful old lady of TATIE DANIELLE or the cute eccentric of HAROLD AND MAUDE. She is one of a kind, the fictive she as well as the real she.
We have a traditional, rather straight-forward plot about an aging, dying woman, whose landlord wants to move someone more lucrative into her memory-filled apartment, whose fretful son wants to move her into a nursing home "for her own good," whose visiting nurse has become her surrogate daughter, whose friends include a 90-year-old woman who is as fluffy as her white hair and a senile ex-military man. His death sparks a crisis in her own life. This appears to be fiction.
But the core of interest for us in the character and person of Sheila Florance. She appears to be playing herself, her memories appear to be her character's -- as when she remembers the Blitz and dogfights and body parts raining out of the sky and the death of her infant daughter. Her anger at war, her inconsolable, lifelong grief, her joy in life, her wit, her theatrical, rather Tallulah-Bankheadish mannerisms. On this level, A WOMAN'S TALE is a one-woman theater piece. One thing is certain in all the peekaboo is that Florance was a performer of extraordinary courage and honesty. Her scene of taking a bath -- how many of us have even seen a naked woman of her age? -- in which she not only reveals her outer self, the sunken flesh, the fallen breasts, that amazing wide mouth stripped of its lipstick, the eyes so bright and lively elsewhere closed and unseeing in the dim bathroom, but even more devastatingly she reveals the inner terror and sadness of being old and alone with her memories, her losses, her tears. She grants us a unique gift in her dying to preserve and reveal who and what she was. You rejoice that you get to know this much of her now even you regret you never knew her when she was alive.
Florance is so compelling a personality that it is easy to lose sight of the writer-director Paul Cox, a Dutch-born Australian whose career ranges from a documentary about Van Gogh (VINCENT) to a gentle love story (LONELYHEARTS) to a comedy about voyeurism (MAN OF FLOWERS) to a divorce drama (MY FIRST WIFE). He first saw Florance on stage in the 60s, when they became friends. He has the good sense to pretty much hand his film over to Florance. But Cox also respects the lesser characters in his story, even the fluffy old lady who prattles endlessly about cliched messages in nature. Despite the source, there is an underlying wisdom even in the cliches and Cox returns to the source again and again in recurring (and final) images of moving water. Even the bitchy queens who live below Martha (Florance's character) and who covet her apartment are redeemed at the right moment; exactly why they had to be a gay couple to be bitches and unpleasant neighbors seems to me the only gratuitously mean note in the film.
Sheila Florance died last fall, a few days after receiving an Australian Film Institute award for this work. Because of the film, she lives on. I high recommend that you do what needs to be done to make her acquaintance. She will repay you many times over.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
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