Light Years | Little White Lies

Light Years

26 Sep 2016

Lush, verdant forest with people walking and repairing a bicycle on a moss-covered path.
Lush, verdant forest with people walking and repairing a bicycle on a moss-covered path.
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Anticipation.

Heat-hazed adventure with folk favourite Orton.

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Enjoyment.

Feels much slower than a light year...

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In Retrospect.

Fuller is the brightest star in this constellation.

Edith May Camp­bell cracks open a frac­tured fam­i­ly in this over­ly ambi­tious debut feature.

I want to be inside some­one else,” is per­haps the most rel­e­vant line in Light Years, but for all the wrong rea­sons. This debut fea­ture from Esther Camp­bell drowns in visu­al beau­ty but falls short in the plot and dia­logue. The dis­con­nect­ed talk par­o­dies oth­er­wise duck soup per­for­mances from a young, act­ing novice cast. Sweep­ing land­scapes set to sul­try music fill this film up. It looks, sounds and feels like a 90-minute per­fume advert.

Folk icon Beth Orton gives a meek per­for­mance in a role with room for so much more. As Moira, she is a moth­er unrav­elled by a mys­tery ill­ness, while her hypochon­dri­ac off­spring Ramona (Sophie Bur­ton), Ewan (James Stuck­ey) and Rose (Zami­ra Fuller) play run-around for the day. Fuller, almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly, dri­ves Light Years from a clum­sy Still Alice mim­ic to heart-break­ing in its own right.

Yearn­ing for the vibrant moth­er every­one but her can remem­ber, their ill-fat­ed bud­dy-expe­di­tion to the sea­side ends in tragedy. Camp­bell draws on her own expe­ri­ences of per­son­al loss in what is a great­ly self-indul­gent project. Death, life after death and death in life are mulled over in purga­tive mur­mur­ings of long-dead stars that shine on.

Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, Camp­bell blurs lines like a con­tro­ver­sial pop song. A smat­ter­ing of super­nat­ur­al ele­ments (a naked, white-haired man appears often and with­out expla­na­tion) is unfit­ting for a film that oth­er­wise grounds itself in social real­ism. What is real? What is not? Either Camp­bell likes to tease in this para­dox­i­cal world, or the answers got lost in the cut­ting room.

In infre­quent spasms, Light Years is a har­row­ing vignette of a fam­i­ly undone by nat­ur­al forces. Set in in wheat fields and blue­bell mead­ows, this is film that cel­e­brates and con­demns nature in one fell swoop. The biggest fail­ure is Campbell’s pre­ten­tious mus­ings. Any hope­ful depth is lost in a mire of If I was a cave­man… sleep would be hope”-like quips. What may have worked in Campbell’s BAF­TA win­ning short Sep­tem­ber, hasn’t quite found its feet on the big screen. Iron­i­cal­ly, with so much talk of glob­u­lar clus­ters”, Light Years fails to make a star of its director.

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