The Tree

Directed by Julie Bertuccelli.Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg,Marton Csokas, Morgana Davies, Aden Young Club, IFI, Dublin, 100 min

FILMS NEVER open with a husband tenderly taking leave of his wife unless it's the last we'll see of him. So it proves with this clunky Franco-Aussie bereavement drama, in which an errant tree assumes the improbable tenacity of the shark in Jaws: The Revenge.

In the wake of her husband’s untimely demise (inevitably the fellow drives into the titular trunk) friends wonder how Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Dawn will cope with two small children in the middle of nowhere. Mightn’t she be better off moving on? “I can’t,” answers La Gainsbourg in her divinely plum Franglais.

Dawn is right: sadly, the poor woman is mired in an inescapably puerile allegory. When her eight- year-old daughter misses daddy, the girl finds him whispering in the branches. When Dawn calls

in a plumber to trim the hardwood’s roots, a relationship, ahem, blossoms. Not to outdone, new, unruly shoots soon threaten to engulf the homestead. “You growing somewhere?” the demented shrub doesn’t quite say.

Oh dear. You'd normally have to look to Atlas Shruggedfor pathetic fallacy this pathetic. But The Treegoes for broke with a heroine named Dawn and a central metaphor that wouldn't cut it on Jackanory. This adaptation of Judy Pascoe's novel falls well short of the ditzy levels of magic realism required to successfully transplant (get it?) the central herbaceous concept into cinematic terms. The tree is alternatively anthropomorphised and invested with mysterious powers, yet remains firmly rooted in vague parable.

What’s the deal with this twig, anyway? The film ambiguously suggests sentience: it may be possessed or inhabited by a

ghost; it may be feeling resentful and forlorn; it may be an expression of the heroine’s romantic malaise. Yet the useless thing fails to respond with fury befitting, say, an Indian burial ground.

To be fair, director Julie Bertuccelli’s efforts are distinguished by a sublime Australian earthiness. Pillow shots of dappled sunbeams and scuttling ants make for handsome presentation. Gainsborough is effectively pained despite a flatly written character, and the headlining star is an impressive 130-year-old Moreton Bay Fig.

But, really? We think that we will never see a thing so harebrained as The Tree.