Famed for her can-do characters, Marta Dusseldorp unravels
WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
★★★½
CTC. 143 minutes. In cinemas May 8
In With or Without You, Marta Dusseldorp is busy wrecking her life, which is a good thing.
She's played so many self-disciplined, can-do characters that I wondered for a while if she was happy doing anything else. Then came her TV series, Bay of Fires, which plunged her into a set-up dictated by black comic hysteria, and the picture changed.
But this time, she's really unravelling. Sharon has brought up her daughter, Chloe (Melina Vidler), alone while propping herself up with alcohol and the company of men who are bound to let her down. Now Chloe is an adult and the mother and daughter have swapped roles. Chloe is looking after her.
The film is a first feature from South Australian writer-director Kelly Schilling, who has based it on her own experience of growing up with a single mother struggling to keep going. And it's very clear that she knows these people. You could never write off the mercurial Sharon as a stock character.
Wildly unpredictable whether she's drunk or semi-sober, Sharon careens through the action with an energy that exhausts everyone around her. When she crashes, as she often does, she laughs. And in her rare moments of clarity, she displays a generosity that commands Chloe's loyalty no matter what.
When the film opens, they have reached a point where Sharon is insisting that Chloe leave to find her own place in the world. And Chloe, despite her misgivings, is taking her advice.
But her taste in men is no better than her mother's and she's taking off into the unknown with a character who turns out to be a violent criminal intent on implicating her in his crimes.
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