16-year-old
Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is an introspective, rebellious teen
whose path to independent adulthood is hastened when her mother Jane
(Del Herbert-Jane) begins undergoing gender transitioning. With their
time together now restricted to Tuesday afternoons, Billie
capitalises on the increasing discord between relatives (including
her torn father Tom (Beau Travis Williams) and happy-go-lucky uncle
Harry (Mario Spate)) and now forges a quirky bond with two
voyeuristic older school kids, Josh (Sam Althuizen) and Jasmin
(Imogen Archer). Now Billie must help her new “father” and
herself in reconnecting and settling into the stages in their lives.
This
is a genuinely inventive, brave and striking cinematic experiment,
and its power will really sneak up on you. Director Sophie Hyde,
drawing from her own experiences with a transgender parent, and her
cast and crew filmed it over a year, once weekly every week, and on
Tuesdays. Wise decision; the movie feels that much more authentic for
it. The central performances of Cobham-Hervey and Herbert-Jane (an
actual trans performer) are both ferociously raw and well-balanced,
and the supporting players all fill the background very
entertainingly. Plus, Matthew Cormack's screenplay (from a story he
and Hyde developed) is very perceptive, and Bryan Mason's
cinematography is lovely and rich, particularly in Billie's video
diary scenes. It's also cleverly interspersed with title cards
listing the Tuesdays in numerical order, embellished with snippets of
news events which happened during filming, like the Arab Spring, that
help us track the timeline and never feel jarring.
52
Tuesdays
won the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Film Festival Directing Award:
World Cinema, Dramatic and the Berlin Film Festival's Crystal Bear
Generation Award, and both were richly deserved. It's a beautiful
meditation on the path to accepting your relatives and finding
yourself. One of the best Australian films of this century.
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