Little Sparrows (2010) Review

Usually I am not a big fan of films about terminal illness. More often than not the illness is used as a way to bring about an emotional reaction from the audience that should come about naturally. It's a cheap shot and it insults the intelligence of the viewer. Among the films that do this are Beaches, A Walk to Remember and The Cure. There are films where the emotion comes out of the story and performances. Among those are Lorenzo's Oil, The Pride of the Yankees and Philadelphia. I think we can add Little Sparrows to the latter list.

In the midst of an Australian summer we meet three sisters. Nina (Nina Deasley) is a widow with two young children, Anna (Melanie Munt) is an unhappily married actress whose husband is a filmmaker and Christine (Arielle Gray) is a med student who has yet to come completely to terms with her sexuality. When their mother, Susan's (Nicola Bartlett) breast cancer returns, the family is faced with choices and uncertainty.
The film is set up by writer-director Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen as a documentary. The camera wobbles as though there is a camera man pretending to not be in the room and the film features cutaways where we see the women talking directly to the camera. A sort of confession. What helps this illusion of reality is the performances. All of the performers in the film are incredibly natural. Their roles seem to come out of somewhere so rarely seen in film today with the exception of some.

We spend approximately twenty minutes on each daughter's story. First we get some background on their lives (complete with the "interviews") and then get some sort of conflict (for example Anna's husband leaves her after it is revealed that she was having an affair) and then there is a scene in a hospital room where the girls have a heart to heart with their mother. The hospital room is where the real emotion comes out. The girls slowly break down into tears while their mother confesses something or describes how much she loves them. At the end of each daughter's story there is a scene at a cemetery where the audience is reminded of the final scene in Carrie sans the hand reaching out of the grave. What I mean is an ethereal, delicate feeling. Almost as though we are in the girls head while she dreams.

The film does not end with Susan's death. Sorry for those hoping it would. It avoids that cliché and instead ends with her getting a tattoo of three sparrows. One each to represent her daughters. Even the entire feel of the film is not one of despair. The first thing that Susan says after telling her husband James about the return of her cancer is, "I don't want any hysterics".

I think the world has a great new director and I'm very interested to see where her career goes from here.

★★★★