Petrol

Writer-director Alena Lodkina’s Petrol compares well both thematically and formally with Todd Field’s recently screened Tár something which is even more to her credit as it is only her second feature (I have not seen her 2017 debut, Strange Colours).

No doubt drawing upon her own experience, Petrol (make of the title what you will) tells the story of Eva (Nathalie Morris), a young Melbourne film-making student of Russian descent (her parents and grandparents still speak Russian at home). She is a shy loner who finds herself powerfully attracted to the older and much more self-possessed, Mia (Hannah Lynch), a performance artist and aspiring actress. They get long well and Mia invites Eva to stay in her house as a roommate, while Eva makes Mia the subject of her graduation film.

Lodkina starts her film with the bar set high. We see Eva as part of a small student crew making a film.  Mia (Hanna Lynch) is playing a vampyr who has just sated her blood-lust on a pale young  man recumbent on wave-whipped rocks. One of the characters quotes a line from Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th century writer whose dark sensibility influenced English Neo-Gothic Romanticism, an unsettled, melancholy sensibility which is discernible in Lodkina's film. Eva is intrigued by Mia and follows her to a party that evening where the two women get on so well that Mia invites Eva to stay at her house.

UnlikeTár in which was the focus was on the older woman, Lodkina tells us of the younger but her approach is similarly obliquely understated, weaving subtle and at times cryptic hints of psychological dislocation (her favourite device is “suspending” or “doubling” Eva behind herself, an image which recalls the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s 'The Monk by The Sea'). In contrast, at times she introduces notes of magical realism (a picnic at the beach, a visit to a cabaret).

Skilfully photographed by Michael Latham  and benefiting from strikingly minimalist music by Raven Mahon and Mikey Young supported by an effective sound design Petrol hovers just on the margins of the unhinged (the key to this perhaps lies in the fact that “Eva” was the name of Mia’s dead sister) but never abandons the mundane

As impressive as Lodkina’s film is, there is a tendency for her script to feel dramatically too distant. Perhaps this was Lodkina's intention but one would have liked to see the two leads own their characters. Not necessarily to the level of Blanchett's Lydia but with at least more developed projection. This is not so much of an issue with Morris as her character is by nature unobtrusive but in Lynch’s case Mia floats through the film as if in a dream. In this respect one of the best scenes comes late in the film with the emotionally distraught Eva clinging onto Mia as the latter pulls away from her. (Apropos this Lodkina never suggests any thing sexual in their relationship).

Although it gets a little slow in the latter stages Petrol is a richly textured film that suggests a promising future for its writer-director.

 

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