Till Human Voices Wake Us

My Helena Bonham Carter film festival drags on, with Till Human Voices Wake Us, a 2002 Australian film written and directed by Mark Cantori. At first I found this film very slow going and dull, but at about the halfway mark it kicked in and became very intriguing, with its mixture of memory, hallucination, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

The title comes from the last line of Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "Till human voices wakes us/and we drown." The theme of being asleep and drowning runs all the way through the film, as does the act of forgetting.

Guy Pearce is Samuel Franks, a Melbourne psychologist, who is first seen teaching students about the difference between passive memory loss, such as forgetting where you put your keys, and acting memory loss, such as repressing a bad event. As we find out, Pearce has reason to forget, as returning to his home town in the outback for his father's funeral rekindles memories of a sweet romance he had when he was a teenager.

In flashbacks we see young Sam (Lindley Joyner) and Silvy (Brooke Harmon), a pretty girl who wears braces on her legs. They both like to do things like read poetry and look at the moonlight reflected on the water. A tragedy unfolds though (and though I knew nothing about the film beforehand this was obviously telegraphed) and Silvy drowns, her body never found.

These flashbacks are intercut with Pearce meeting Carter on a train, and then saving her from drowning when she falls from a railroad bridge into the river. He brings her back to health, and he slowly realizes that she seems to share memories with his dead Silvy. The film then takes on the qualities of a ghost story, as it isn't apparent what we are seeing is reality or just the fantasies or dreams of Pearce. As such, it is very gripping, and ends with sweet melancholy, much as Eliot's poem does.

This is not a film to see if you are sleepy, as most of it is quiet and reserved. Comparing films to poems is not something I do lightly, as it is an overworked phrase, but Cantori does construct this film much like a poem, telling the story with fragmentary images. The performances are low key but solid. Till Human Voices Wake Us is very worthwhile.