Best movie of this year hands down!

How sad is this?

Don't listen to the negative reviews

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The basic approach of "Beneath Clouds" is admirable. It's exactly the quiet, personal type of story I usually love. But here, it's too quiet. Breathing room finds itself drifting into meaningless space. There's a kind of politeness on display here, in the way the action is filmed, how the characters interact. They take too many turns in dialogue, allow for more room than would come naturally. It's awfully polite. The actors themselves are good enough - Dannielle Hall, especially. She provides a convincing lead performance, enough to ground the story in a more personal way. I was less impressed by Damian Pitt. Neither of them have gone on to pursue an acting career.Ivan Sen wrote and directed this film, and all of its main strengths and weaknesses come down to him. He focuses on character, but in a way that pushes against the grain. He seems intent on making his characters talk and act in ways that are less than believable. He focuses on cinematography, but in a way that feels too clean and bright and artificial. His landscapes seem more like postcards. He writes a script designed to be a large-scale adventure/road trip, but provides hardly enough content to pad out an hour and twenty minute film. Even at that, it feels woefully overextended."Beneath Clouds" has a fair amount of potential. Indeed, the first twenty minutes promise a film of considerably more adventure and believability than is ultimately delivered. It's a good effort, but without much spark.

Firstly, I am shocked at all the positive reviews for this film. On a superficial level it is a fine film; technically very strong and well-paced. However, the film is full of so much contradictory stereotyping and half-baked social commentary that it falls flat on its face. The acting is also terribly wooden, and I doubt I can find the kindness within myself to call it 'understated'. The music comes in when any small drama occurs, and the audience is pushed to care for two characters who really never become likable because they are played by two blank-faced actors.I am particularly intrigued as to why an Aboriginal director would want to perpetuate the stereotype of his people - Drugs? Guns? Tattoos? Domestic abuse? Teenage pregnancy? Drinking? EVEN an eyepatch? Aren't you going a bit far? And every time director Sen tries to de-construct or analyse this stereotype he ends up reverting back to it (one specific example is when Vaughn spits in the cop's face). The stereotyping of white police is especially brutal - there is not one decent cop around according to this film. In fact, white people in general are not too favourably looked upon. The only nice white person in this film is an old man who gives our two heroes a lift, and possibly the conveniently named "Sean", which gives the Irish-wannabe Lena a little pang.The other white characters try to kidnap Lena or treat Aborigines disrespectfully.The camera-work is often too obvious. A hand-held camera arrives to shake things up whenever an upset occurs. A fight, the threat of violence, sickness - the hand-held camera is there to tell us, "Wow, isn't the situation getting intense!", but after spending so much time establishing a static mood through gratuitous landscape and time-lapse shots of clouds, the hand-held is an obvious symbolic device and director would've done better keeping his style consistent. The use of tracking shots was often very disrupting to the flow of the film as well, except in the last sequence where it is quite effective.But unfortunately by that stage, I couldn't care less what happened to the characters, as they stared blankly at each other 'til the end.The one thing to admire about this film, however, are the good intentions behind it. This movie failed on an emotional engagement level, but for the sheer effort involved in its making, and its technical triumphs, it gets 5/10, which I think is fair.

If Starlight Hotel(NZ)(1987) had got so much as half the recognition it deserved, Beneath Clouds would not be able to even rear its head.Initially this ran as a most beautiful work of art, then around halfway through I began to realise I had seen it all before.See if this sounds familiar. Starlight Hotel is a road movie about a young girl who leaves home to seek out her estranged father. She teams up with a guy who is on the run from the law and they have recurring close encounters with the law, as well as folks who help them. After you see how the leading ladies in both films are framed and the way they are placed into circumstance, the parallels become complete.I was disappointed that this film did not make a better effort to be unique.Zig Zag

I thoroughly enjoyed Beneath Clouds, and thought it was a fantastic film all round...especially since it is part of the rise of Aussie films dealing with Aborigines (both historical and contemporary). The main thing that struck me with the film, however, was the similarities it had with Tom Tykwer's work (specifically The Princess And The Warrior, and to a lesser extent Heaven). I thought the mood, depth of emotion and the manner in which the story was told was almost identical to Tykwer's work. I mainly am writing this to see if anyone else shared my thoughts on this. Considering that Tykwer is one of my favourite directors I guess this was the only aspect of the film that disappointed me (there's nothing wrong with either mimicking or coincidentally sharing stylistic aspects, it's just that I couldn't stop thinking 'this is a Tykwer film' when watching it).