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  Film: Nell Schofield previews Death Defying Acts and The Black Balloon March 16, 2008 Reporter :Nell Schofield  Watch the videoFilm: Nell Schofield previews Death Defying Acts and The Black Balloon Australian director Gillian Armstrong has a new film out this week starring local lad Guy Pearce as the famous American escapologist Harry Houdini. But Death Defying Acts is no bio-pic - it’s a fictional tale that conjures up a relationship between Houdini and a Scottish psychic showgirl who takes up the magician’s challenge to communicate with his recently deceased mother. The fictional character is played by the Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones and Nell Schofield caught up with her and Pearce and their young Irish co-star Saorise (pron: Sersha) Ronan to find out more. 14 year old Saorise Ronan, came straight onto the set of Death Defying Acts from her Oscar nominated supporting role in Atonement, and is now in New Zealand where she’s in production on Peter Jackon’s new film Lovely Bones. Her character Benji, in Death Defying Acts plays the psychic side-kick. It’s one of the highlights of this wonderfully theatrical film with Timothy Spall’s manager Mr Sugarman hot on her heels. Gillian Armstrong has pulled off quite a hat trick with this 'historical fiction', using lots of smoke and mirrors and great underwater sequences to help seduce us into the visually rich world of 1920’s burlesque and grand showmanship. Offstage, her actors ride their emotions skilfully with Pearce delivering a particularly appealing Houdini, still mourning the loss of his mother while falling under the spell of the gorgeous Princess Kali - AKA Mary MacGarvie. In the end it’s a very effective love story. As is the new Australian film The Black Balloon, for a whole lot of very different reasons. Toni Collette plays the earthy matriarch of the rapidly increasing Mollison family whose daily routine revolves around the unpredictable Charley, a young man who’s not only autistic but has Attention Deficit Disorder and is an elective mute and to boot. Erik Thomas is the army dad with a fondness for teddy bears and Rhys Wakefield is Thomas, a teenager bursting into manhood while all this chaos reigns around him. Thomas’s delicate plight is thrown into sharp relief when he falls for his spunky class mate Jackie. Luckily he has chosen the right girl to get a crush on. Jackie can handle a bit of unconventionality and the trio soon form a tight bond. But as the relationship between the teens blossoms, Charley’s behaviour becomes even more extreme and everyone’s tolerance levels are tested to the max. Super model Gemma Ward brings a real radiance to her suburban character, lighting up the screen with her beautiful sunny face. And Luke Ford delivers an impressively sustained performance as the autistic Charley. There are some resonances here with Cherie Nowlan’s film Clubland with its focus on a teen romance trying to evolve out of a dysfunctional family situation. But The Black Balloon is a more personal film. It’s the debut feature from writer/director Elissa Down who has not one but two autistic brothers. And by delving into her history and sharing some of thosse same challenges that she had to deal with while growing up, she’s created a really sweet yet often confronting film about coming of age in the eye of an emotional storm. |
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