Love Forever

The first thing we hear is electric bass, which serves as counterpoint to a discussion of Plato's view of love. Beach party, jeweled bindi, glitter eyeshadow. Adam.

"What do you think love is?" Emily, "Em", is our protagonist, narrator. Long and blonde, a fight about drugs and tea on a thunderstorm shack, piano hammered under the thunder. Headlong and stumbling, moving cameras. "There's no logic," we hear, but there is. Slow movements as of breathing, bedroom ceiling, passenger seat of the ute. Flare of engraved Zippo or simulacrum thereof. Mix-tapes our only indication of era, traceless and unspooling in some extra-urban Austral never-when. Differing grades of wriggly tin for domestic and commercial consideration. Shallow sinuous scallops in the suburbs, rectilinear right-angling at the railway-inflected coach terminal.

Near-naked and the Nokia tune. Nipples and parcels tied up with string. Nineteen, and probably the year. Contrasts in those crisp colours. Fairy bread and mirror mantras. Mesh tops and party preparation. Lyrics in marker on the glass. Another party, another amplified guitar through the stacked distortion of speakers and recording.

When the sound changes we're with it.

Hannah McKenzie is brilliant. Clare Young's film is centred on her performance and she carries everything in the set of her shoulders, the narrative distance of voiceover. If Jane Campion weren't credited as executive producer I'd have had to find a way to crowbar in a mention, though in truth the pool of Antipodean female directors of note is (justifiably) getting larger.

Pool perhaps advisedly, a suburban default for segments of Northern Shore Sydney. One of endless details, gestures, filled with import. Even that Adam is played by Beau Cram, "surfing royalty" they call him, near enough 19 that to old eyes he seems like a babe and to younger eyes as if over some doorway of perception. A threshold of wisdom in fact not crossed, we will discover. One does not ride the wave to arrive but the getting there is the point.

Breaking with format as we move to conclusion is striking. Young's previous films have been documentary, and that eye for the real informs a film that manages truths in fiction. Of an era, of a place. I might have been a teen in the Nineties but my geographic disdains were different. No less recognisable though, nor the clash of clades of fashion and future.

Earle Dresner's camerawork is as confident and uncertain as adolescence. Christmas lights and glossy photographs, a development of colour. There's a certain palette of nostalgia, a wash of desaturation that matches the alchemical haze of a hard lemonade, whatever the equivalent might have been. There's a grey and yellow of industrial ethanol coupled with sugar syrup that is burnt into my sensorium, as firm a band on the rainbow of youth as fizzy yellow lager or an ill-advised Guinness.

Tart and sweet, sharp and reminiscent of softness, downed and regretted. Love Forever is the kind of film that deserves that eponymous regard.