Stranger Gardens: Nicholas Godfrey on WABI SABI RENDEZVOUS
A sample from the upcoming mega-sized moviejuice zine, a lovely piece by author and Senior Screen lecturer Dr. Nicholas Godfrey on WABI SABI RENDEZVOUS.
Two long-lost friends reconnect in a chance encounter in a park. Monika (Hebe Sayce, Paco) is a musician who has just returned to Adelaide from overseas. Yael (Lauren Koopowitz, Carrie’s Doing Great) is an amateur photographer who spends her days in the Botanic Garden, where she observes a mysterious reader through her camera’s viewfinder. Over the following days, they meet for a series of lengthy conversations, in which they discuss friendships and relationships, art and photography.
Jordy Pollock’s Wabi Sabi Rendezvous is a playful, whimsical and literate debut, which bears the marks of its cinematic reference points. There are echoes of Rivette, Rohmer, Hong and Piñeiro in its sun-drenched park setting and its female duo, for whom art is the most important thing in the world. But Wabi Sabi Rendezvous is no mere facsimile, inflecting its influences in a distinctly local idiom. Running at a brisk 60 minutes, the film has a formalist’s play with structure and repetition. Cinematographer Sam Twidale’s camera tilts and pans to track our characters movements through the dialogue sequences, which are often punctuated by unexpected codas. A bold viewer may wish to chart the film’s spiralling geographical trajectories, from Rymill Park to the Botanic Garden’s iconic palm house, perhaps on a map with red twine.
Paired with Audrey Lam’s Us and the Night, a similarly long-gestating labour of love from an unhurried filmmaker, both works centre on conspiratorial pairings, quietly conjuring whispered worlds into existence. These films are studied portraits of shared obsessions and secret languages, fixating on physical and mixed media – in Wabi Sabi’s case, photography plays a central role in the film’s plot and structure, while its play with form persists until the very end of its brief runtime, concluding with the delightful surprise of a post-credits sequence film-within-a-film. Both films invent their own mythologies, and continually reinvent themselves.
Along with Tim Carlier’s Paco – a film with which Wabi Sabi Rendezvous shares considerable DNA, and, importantly, a sense of humour – an optimist might hope that we are entering a rich period for idiosyncratic filmmaking in Adelaide. The Moviejuice film collective has done heroic work in its short existence to look beyond Adelaide’s most solipsistic, self-congratulatory orthodoxies, and champion distinctive independent work with the potential to puncture national indifference. For those who are inclined to explore stranger gardens, Wabi Sabi Rendezvous shows the way. Let one hundred flowers bloom.
