HARMONY
M, 90 minutes
Jessica Falkholt, who plays the eponymous heroine, in scenes from the film Harmony.
★½
If you have ever been stopped on the street by someone who handed you a New Age pamphlet and wanted to chat about the cosmos, you have a rough idea of the effect produced by Corey Pearson's Harmony, billed as the first instalment in the Five Frequencies Saga. This amateurish local try at a fantasy for teenagers is a transparently bad movie, but bad in a disorientating, vaguely psychedelic way, obeying laws peculiarly its own.
Jessica Falkholt, who plays the eponymous heroine, in scenes from the film Harmony.
One factor that makes Harmony hard to pin down is that it is the kind of Australian film designed for export: the characters speak in not always convincing American accents, while the script provides few reference points to connect their world to ours.
"Harmony" is the name of the heroine, played by former Home and Away star Jessica Falkholt, who died in a car accident not long after the film was shot. A Goth waif born with the ability to absorb the fear of others, she roams the mean streets of a nameless city, accompanied by ethereal music.
The mystery of her birth starts to come to light after she meets her soulmate Mason (Jerome Meyer), a formally dressed young weirdo who spends his time practising magic tricks and jotting philosophical questions in a notebook. Along the way we get a lot of high-flown discussion about the warring forces of love and fear, as well as bizarre scenes such as a moment of transcendence at a straight-edge rave.
The actors are all over the place, though Falkholt comes through relatively unscathed, functioning more as a symbol than a character. Struggling with an unplayable part, Meyer seems as gormless as he did as a real-life murder victim in Joe Cinque's Consolation, while Jacqueline McKenzie goes well over the top as a representative of high society.
Pearson's biggest coup is the casting of rising star Eamon Farren, an unforgettable villain in last year's new season of Twin Peaks. In a somewhat similar role as a sadistic gang leader, he makes the most of his few decent lines, and has an immediate impact through his physical presence.
It should be stressed that the ideas in Harmony are not necessarily ridiculous, or at least no more so than those we are used to in films by M. Night Shyamalan or the Wachowski sisters. The problem isn't the woo-woo material but the accompanying lack of artistic knowhow: it seems too soon to be preaching about spiritual wisdom when you haven't yet acquired the power to make a movie that comes off.
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