The Tree

(Cannes – Out of Competition) – Julie Bertuccelli’s adaptation of the novel Our Father Who Art in The Tree closed the Cannes Film Festival on a gently luminous note. Emma Rowley winds down in the Queensland countryside.

The death of a loved one – a lover or family member – was a pervasive theme of films that screened at this year’s festival. Like Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His Past Lives, The Tree engages with the subjects of death and grieving in a magic-tinged manner that seeks to remind us that we’re part of a larger natural system. It doesn’t share the Palme D’Or winner’s overt belief in reincarnation but it’s related, as its central story is of a young girl who comes to believe that her deceased father’s spirit has taken up residence in the huge, twisty tree in their garden.

It's become a pretty standard gambit to suggest that the city or landscape in which a film is set is a character in its own right. Hell, even the execrable Sex & The City franchise has wheeled out that cliché to explain its enduring appeal (quite how that squares with relocating the action of the second film to Abu Dhabi, we can't imagine). It sounds good – a little post-modern, a cunning twist on an old format, something pretty clever for the cast to mention in interviews. But in the case of The Tree, it's actually true. The Queensland landscape in which the film is set provides the sparsely populated and naturally phenomenal backdrop that the story demands (the shots of the countryside frame it as an alien landscape, vast and prehistoric). But more than that, it seeps into and invades the characters' lives, genuinely interacting with them.

Dawn (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and George O’Neil (Marton Csokas) are a happily married couple with four kids. They’ve lived for fifteen years in a slightly ramshackle house in a remote part of Queensland and are rubbing along pretty nicely until George, returning from a haulage trip, has a sudden heart attack. Dawn, a childlike woman who has been sheltered from the world by her marriage, retreats into grief. The children deal with their unhappiness alone, until eight-year-old Simone starts to believe that she can hear her father speaking to her in the rustling of the leaves of the Moreton Bay Fig that stands by their home. One by one, the family members grow to share Simone’s fascination with the tree but by the time Dawn begins to assert some independence, landing a job and beginning a relationship with her employer, the tree has begun to make its own demands on the family.

Initially, this is handled subtly. Morgana Davies, who plays Simone, is a gifted child actor and it's easy to engage with her belief system and sympathise when she begins advocating for the rights of the tree. But Bertuccelli goes a step further when Dawn begins to share her obsession, which is when things go a little awry. In one scene, a storm hurls a huge branch into Dawn's bedroom, tearing down the thin wall and landing in her bed. In Simone's mind, her father is declaring his displeasure at Dawn's burgeoning relationship – which, in the context of what's happened, seems logical enough. But when Dawn climbs back into bed with the chunk of tree and curls herself around the branches, it's a step too far – a misjudgment that sends the film teetering into comic territory.

The source material is a novel by Judy Pascoe (wife of Robert ‘Kryten’ Llewellyn, fact fans) which is told, in first-person narration, from Simone's perspective. But Bertuccelli’s decision to forgo this interpretive filter means that she asks far too much of her audience’s suspension of disbelief. By casting the brilliant Charlotte Gainsbourg (last year’s Best Actress winner at Cannes), she comes close to getting away with it. But not close enough.

The Tree is full of startlingly beautiful – and just plain startling – images: a house travelling along a dusty road on the back of a massive flatbed truck; a toilet full of acid-bright frogs; a little girl swimming in a bright, clear water; a cyclone’s aftermath, the grasslands strewn with broken possessions; the tree itself festooned with Chinese lanterns by night. These will linger long after the flawed and sometimes silly narrative is forgotten.

Rating on a scale of 5 floral home invasions: 3

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Julie Bertuccelli
Screenplay by: Julie Bertuccelli, based on the novel Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Morgana Davies, Marton Csokas, Aden Young
Rating: TBC
Running time (mins): 100