And The Ocean Agreed Review
A gorgeous looking, nuanced look at dementia and the freedom of memory.
Directed by Tanya Modini, And The Ocean Agreed explores the life of Vina (Chrissie Page); an elderly woman with dementia, who rediscovers herself for a short moment when her granddaughter Evie (Jazz Zhao) and daughter Morgan (Jacy Lewis) take her back to the beach.
Modini approaches the short with a capable hand, her prior work with the excellent The Moths Will Eat Them Up on show. The short is well paced and engaging, easy to follow and dealing with a topic that, if not ubiquitous in the specific, certainly calls to mind similar issues with age and loss that every person can relate to. On the other hand, while the first half confidently and assuredly builds to Vina’s self-discovery in the water, the ending feels rushed; perhaps by virtue of the films status as a short.
Visually, this is a very professional and engaging piece of work. DP Julian Panetta brings a wonderful bokeh and blur to the edges of the frames in this film that makes the entire thing feel a little like a memory.
On the performance front, Page, Zhao and Lewis are all standout, if perhaps not matched by some of the more fleeting cast.
Ultimately, as shorts go this is a wonderful, high-quality piece of a filmmaking. It certainly is one that feels appropriate for the shorts genre, given the subject matter already pushing it at the current runtime and the rapid wrap up towards the end, and perhaps doesn’t touch the heights of Modini’s previous short, but nevertheless this is the sort of film that helps cement her status as one of the strongest, most exciting shorts directors in Australia today.
