by Nadine Whitney
Review: $17.50
(FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount they believe a ticket to the movie to be worth)
Molly Haddon’s The Longest Weekend can best be described as a Trojan Horse film. The work pulls you in with the promise of one kind of experience but leaves you with something quite different. What it does deliver is an excellent family drama and coming-of-age story for a set of alienated siblings who learn through each other and their pasts when the right time is to just say “enough” to the various factors playing havoc on their lives.
The film opens with Lou Palmer (Mia Artemis – absolutely astonishing in the role) drinking herself into oblivion at a local Sydney club. She’s supported by her best friend and some time hook-up, Sasha (Alex King) who gently suggests that Lou might want to calm down a little. Calming down is not on Lou’s radar. She’s just lost her job as a stylist due to being unreliable and often drunk at work, and she’s been kicked out of her house by someone she was presumably sleeping with.
Her mother, Sadie (Tammy Macintosh) is trying to get hold of Lou and her siblings to invite them to a family dinner after she returns from a long weekend away. Rio (Adam Golledge) doesn’t bother to pick up her call. Avery (Elly Hiraani Clapin) answers but is curt and dismissive. Sadie is at her wit’s end with her adult children who range from uninterested to outright hostile towards her.
As fate would have it, Lou losing her job means that she has to move back into her mother’s house. Rio, who never left and seems to have zero motivation to do anything with his life resents her presence in what he calls “his house.” Soon after, Avery arrives at the door and the siblings are reunited, but not in a happy family way.
What we expect to be a piece about bickering siblings who haven’t got their lives sorted out morphs into a much deeper and more poignant drama. Rio has been secretly in contact with their father, Mark (John Batchelor) and is hoping to meet him that weekend.
Lou is the sibling who is wearing her scars on the outside the most. She rejects a plea of true love from Sasha and is borderline abusive with Avery and Rio. Lou is the obvious “mess” and to a large extent the focal point of Jorrden Daley and Molly Haddon’s screenplay. She’s a gay woman who refuses to settle in one spot and uses sex, drugs, and alcohol to numb her trauma. Avery is having her own issues – her husband Daniel is a serial cheat and she’s come to her mother’s house to try to sort out what she’s going to do.
As the film progresses, Haddon allows us to understand each character. Rio is still quite young and hasn’t settled on anything. Sadie clearly indulges his lack of ambition which rankles both Lou and Avery. Lou, of course, doesn’t have a leg to stand on when judging others.
One long weekend changes the Palmer family dynamic forever, and in the process, it also changes its individual members. The siblings share their secrets and their fears and find that they still need to protect each other.
Haddon has directed a wonderful and meaningful family drama that embraces the nature of truth telling and addresses the long-term effects of violence. One may have expected a story about Lou going further down the spiral, but instead the audience is given a narrative that is filled with awareness and kindness. The Longest Weekend is a heartfelt plea for patience and forgiveness – not for the ones that have hurt someone – but for the child inside that was once hurt.
Full article: https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-longest-weekend/