Just when you thought magical realism had well and truly had its day (and then some), along comes a movie to remind you: done right, the day for any style of filmmaking is any day. Blaze, the debut feature by Australian director Del Kathryn Barton, may not be the kind of tour-de-force freshman effort to restore one’s faith in whimsical, fantasy-tinged drama, the likes of which have included innumerous “quirky” affronteries to art in recent years. But it’s a solid, sincere movie, handsomely designed, well-acted and, crucially, attuned to the details of each and every emotional maneuver it makes.
Blaze (Julia Savage) is a 12-year-old girl, an only child living with a single father, Luke (Simon Baker). She’s shy and somewhat uncommunicative; her bedroom is her sanctuary, where she conjures up an elaborate fantasy in the form of a friendly dragon, permanently perched in the corner of her room. She’s now a rapidly maturing young adolescent, but this benign, colorful creature still provides her comfort, support and protection. When she witnesses a tragic crime, the prolonged trauma exacerbated on Blaze both by a demanding legal system and by her own guilt drive her deeper into her imagination, seeking solace that only her own vibrant mind seems able to provide.
Barton and co-writer Huna Amweero tread a tough line here, navigating difficult thematic territory but also refraining from drawing decisive judgments on what is and what isn’t right for Blaze. Her father is sympathetic but understandably concerned; his efforts to pry Blaze away from the only coping mechanism she currently seems capable of engaging with feel as callous as they do caring. Her internal world, a haven of bright colors, irreverent popular music and frequent flights of outright fancy, appears both a much-needed retreat from a world she’s not yet equipped to deal with and an increasingly coddling retreat from reality. Meanwhile, she’s trying to come to terms with the horrendous event she witnessed just as she’s entering the most emotionally tumultuous years of her young life—her methods of doing so, alternately confronting her trauma with brazen confidence and withdrawing from it in pain and fear, are alarming, impressive, disappointing, dangerous, curious, audacious.
Blaze thus feels alive with promise and potential, each new scene wholly unpredictable as to where it might lead. The boundaries between Blaze’s actual reality and imagined reality begin to blur as her ability to cope with the panoply of immense pressures placed upon her becomes ever more strained and, as anyone currently in the throes of puberty (or anyone who’s been through them), will know, the resultant mood swings can be violent indeed. Barton and Amweero draw Blaze as a bright, multi-faceted young person already possessed of compassion and intelligence, sometimes outstripping the adults in her life in these regards, and Savage plays her with terrific intensity. Her outbursts feel spontaneous and genuine, while her moments of silent contemplation appear appropriately reactive—you can almost see each thought, each emotion form in her mind through an ostensibly unchanging gaze. It’s a complex part, but Savage is entirely up to the task.
For all that Barton mostly nails with the generous touches of magical realism, however, they seem to inspire a certain looseness in her storytelling. By no means is this approach an excuse to cover up subpar plotting—it’s a legitimate expression of the inner world of a troubled young girl undergoing a serious and seriously stressful event in her life, such that no-one of any age should have to, never mind one so young. But the metaphors are simplistic and, eventually, they don’t lead anywhere especially surprising. And that itself is, perhaps, surprising, since Blaze feels like such a singular story until the final few sequences, one inclined to veer off in whatever direction it must to tell itself authentically. Even if you’re satisfied with where Barton takes Blaze’s tale—and it’s not exactly an unsatisfactory conclusion, just a more expected one than it deserves—there’s little doubt that she loses some control over its structure by the end, abandoning multiple key characters whose varying connections to Blaze have fundamentally informed the progress of that tale.
Perhaps, though, one only feels the absence of the movie’s supporting characters so vividly because they were so vividly drawn in the first place. Blaze has an unusual generosity toward even the most minor characters that even those glimpsed for a few wordless seconds seem thoroughly real to us. It’s not a terrible problem for a movie to have, leaving the audience wishing for more of what it does so well. And Blaze does so much so well that, wish all you will, what it delivers is enough both to sustain one’s interest throughout and to signal the arrival of a pair of bona fide new talents on the Australian movie scene in Del Kathryn Barton and Julia Savage.
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