Amy is a film that will make you cry, laugh, sigh and cringe. It is the latest feature from the award winning team of Nadia Tass and David Parker (Malcolm, The Big Steal) and has all the hallmarks of a typical Australian film: humour, nostalgia, a sense of community and well-realised characters.
Amy (Alana de Roma) is an eight-year-old girl who, after a traumatic experience in her youth, has been apparently left deaf and dumb, though psychologists and child experts alike are at a loss to explain it.
Her emotionally scarred mother Tanya (Rachel Griffiths) is left to raise Amy in a world populated by child welfare sharks (Malcolm Kennard in this role is spot on, recalling his character in Joe’s Jury), paparazzi photographers desperate for a shot, aging rockstars endlessly replaying their glory days (Kym Gyngell) and an unlikely collection of neighbours living in a semi-industrial area of Melbourne.
This excess of characters often distracts (and sometimes detracts, as is the case with Susie Porter’s Annie) from the main action, which revolves around Amy’s unresolved muteness.
Enter Robert (Ben Mendelsohn), a singer-songwriter who acts as a catalyst both for Amy, who sees in him an echo of her absent dad (played by rocker Nick Barker), and Tanya, who is naturally suspicious and over-protective of her child.
Robert’s discovery that Amy can in fact communicate through singing is a defining moment in the film, in a magical scene featuring Mendelsohn singing an improvised serenade to Amy through the front-door letter box, while two bemused mechanics look on.
From this point on, the audience follows the action through a string of incidents and adventures, some farcical (picture a pack of police officers singing to little girl lost Amy in a dark, suburban park), others truly moving (for example, Kerry Armstrong’s convincing performance as a battered mum and Jeremy Trigatti’s portrayal of her traumatised son).
The plot’s many loose strings are tied together in a confronting and moving finale which showcases the strengths of the various actors, but most especially Alana de Roma herself, whose easy movement between moments of happiness, muteness and distress puts Anna Paquin to shame (and she can sing, too).
David Parker’s photography is as poignant and energetic as ever, bringing out the sun-parched colours of the country and the city’s monochromatic hues. Nadia Tass’s direction is probing and insightful, focussing strongly on the characters and their emotions.
All in all, Amy is an uplifting and quirky cinema experience, continuing a fine tradition of Australian film-making.
Rating: ***
This review first appeared in the Melbourne street press publication, InPress, some time in 1998.