The Tree (2010) - film review

Having settled in Australia, Dawn and Peter live a happy life with their four children, aged between 4 and 17, in the shade of a huge Moreton Bay fig tree.  Their idyllic existence is brutally shattered one day when Peter has a fatal heart attack and drives his car into the fig tree.   Whilst Dawn tries to come to terms with her loss, her daughter Simone is convinced that her father is still alive, his spirit having passed into the tree.  The little girl listens attentively to every sound the tree makes, the rustling of its leaves, the creaking of its branches, believing that her father is trying to communicate with her.  When the tree’s roots begin to invade the house, Dawn calls in a plumber and decides that it must be cut down.  Simone refuses to let this happen, knowing that if the tree dies she will lose her father forever...

The uniquely harrowing trauma of family bereavement was something that French film director Julie Bertucelli dealt with sensitively in her acclaimed debut feature Depuis qu’Otar est parti (2003) and, seven years on, it provides the subject of her second film, The Tree (a.k.a. L’Arbre).  The film is based on the novel Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Australian writer Judy Pascoe, and is a co-production between France and Australia.   Filmed in the small Australian town of Boonah in south-eastern Queensland, The Tree capitalises on its stunning location, almost to the extent that it very nearly loses sight of what it is about.  Nigel Bluck’s photography may be breathtakingly beautiful, evoking the raw power of the Australian landscape with images that can hardly fail to carry us away on a wave of transcendent delight, but you sometimes have to stop and ask yourself whether you are watching a film drama or a nature documentary.  

The Tree is an engaging piece of cinema but for those who care to look beyond its seductive surface gloss its shortcomings are all too evident.   Many of the film’s failings stem from the novel on which it is based, which is riven with the clichés of grief, New Age mysticism and dysfunctional families that presently abound in Australian literature and cinema.  Characters are poorly developed and have a tendency to behave and speak in a way that, in real life, would result in ostracisation, alienation or a one-way ticket to the funny farm.   As the little girl Simone who is at the heart of the story, Morgana Davies has a captivating screen presence and has no trouble stealing our hearts with her very credible performance, but her character is simply too self-aware and prone to adult introspection to be remotely convincing as an ordinary eight-year-old girl.  Similarly, whilst it is impossible to fault Charlotte Gainsbourg’s performance (and we all love her far too much even to try), her character somehow manages to have less substance than something you may find in one of the lesser Aussie soap operas.  And these are the main characters; the other dramatis personae are so wishy-washy that you hardly notice them even when they are standing in front of the camera.

It is a minor miracle that, in spite of its overbaked sentimentality, self-conscious artistry and shallow characterisation (to name just three of its failings), The Tree is a film which still manages to engage its audience and deliver an involving cinema experience.  We overlook its deficiencies because, imperfect as it is, the film is sincerely meant and crafted with genuine love.  We may cringe at the crudeness of the visual metaphors (can there be a cruder symbol for grief than a gigantic tree with malignant roots?), but its evocation of the pain of bereavement resonates with truth.  Julie Bertucelli comes tantalisingly close to melding realism and fantasy, the physical and the spiritual, into a coherent and meaningful whole.   If only she had gone the extra mile and made this an exclusively child’s eye view of bereavement, without the pointless digressions into soapland and nature film, The Tree might have been a work of exceptional power, rather than one that is merely engaging and pretty to look at.  The film will doubtless do wonders for the Australian tourist board.

© James Travers 2011

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