Travelling Light Review

It?s the summer of 1971 in the suburb of Greenacres in Adelaide. Leanne, Pia Miranda, is chafing at the stultifying world surrounding her at home with her parents, Marshall Napier and Heather Mitchell, and at her future as a teacher. She?s currently totally uninspired doing practice teaching. Meanwhile her newly married sister Bronwyn, Sacha Horler, is slowly going mad with domesticity in the backwoods with her anally retentive husband Brian, Tamblyn Lord. Next door neighbour Gary, Tim Draxl, is struggling with his sexuality while working as floor manager on a television show hosted by Ray Sugars, Simon Burke. New arrival from America, the hippie poet Lou, Brett Stiller, brings a whiff of revolution with him. There?s a scent of marijuana in the air and Leanne?s inhaling. Travelling Light is a time-warp film with particular resonance for those of us who experienced the world writer/director Millard is recreating. But the film seems forced somehow, constrained by the formality of the screenplay, by the points the filmmaker wants to make about that world that existed thirty years ago ? the mother immured in domestic detail, the decent father trying to keep everything together while his two daughters spin out of control in varying directions. The performances and the mis-en-scene suffer from those constraints, certainly to begin with, but by the end I felt there was an integrity to the film that was maintained throughout. It?s not a film for everyone.Unfortunately, this film about the boring lives of a group of characters living in Adelaide in the early 1970s is pretty boring. One problem is that the supposed catalyst, the American beat poet who stirs everyone up, is, as played by Brett Stiller, a strangely uncharismatic individual. Indeed, the male actors (except for the excellent Marshall Napier) struggle to make their characters at all interesting, and though Pia Miranda and Sacha Horler do their best, their roles are pretty unrewarding.