Jennifer Fallon - the Official Site

The Internet Movie Database lists the plot of this Australian entrant in the Toronto Film Festival as “an erotic mystery about power and sex, the entanglement of victim and perpetrator, and a man's struggle to regain his lost self” which sums up the plot rather nicely. Based on the Rupert Thomson novel, this film is about dealing with the consequences of sexual assault as much as anything, the twist being, the victim is male.

Talented dancer Daniel (Tom Long), goes out to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend just before the premier of a new modern ballet and doesn’t come back. He remerges twelve days later, unable to speak of his absence or his ordeal, and barely able to cope with it.

So he doesn’t even try. He quits the dance troupe, leaves his girlfriend and takes a job as a barman under an assumed name in a nameless pub, while he attempts to seduce his way through every likely female in the city, looking for the women who captured and degraded him.

Still wearing the trauma of the assault like an open wound, things finally start to come together when two things happen. He meets Aboriginal student, Julie, on a train and because she shares not a single physical characteristic with his assailants, you can almost feel the instant relief Daniel feels, knowing this is someone he can be sure is not going to appear in his nightmares. The second catalyst is the news that his mentor and long time friend, Isabel (Greta Scacchi) is dying.

Gradually, Daniel starts to think about dance again, and even goes so far as to start working on a new ballet of his own with Isabel. But it all falls apart at a nightclub when he thinks he sees one of the women who abducted him and reacts in a way that exposes just how thin the veneer of his recovery really is.

This is a film about coping, as much as anything. About the trauma of sexual assault and the victims who are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. It is about coping with inner demons, and in the end, the futility of trying to pretend all is well, when in reality, you’re falling apart on the inside.

But somehow, I was not engaged. I got the message, I felt for victims of sex crimes the world over — except the one I was watching on the screen. I puzzled about this all through the film. I put it down to Tom Long, himself, whose morose and broody persona prior to the attack, was pretty much the same morose and broody persona we got after it. Although buffed and toned to within an inch of his life, with a body fat percentage of about 2.5, I have to say, if was going to go to the trouble of kidnapping a bloke off the streets so I and a couple of gal-pals could have our wicked way with him, it would be someone with a tad more charisma.

That being said, I found this film both better and worse than I feared. It wasn't nearly as confronting as was expecting. The acting was superb, the cinematography excellent, the soundscape of the film particularly masterful, and the direction subtle but effective, conveying more in one lingering dialogue-free glance, than many other films manage with ten minutes of “please explain it to me, Throckmorton” type exposition.

The ending is true to the book, right down to the dialogue, and the real kicker, because it’s then that you realise you’re not watching the film you think you were watching.

Definitely worth seeing, but not a film to take in on a first date, that's for certain.