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LOOK BOTH WAYS
Directed & Written by: Sarah Watt.
Produced by: Bridget Ikin.
Director of Photography: Ray Argall.
Edited by: Denise Haratzis.
Music by: Amanda Brown.
Released by: Kino.
Country of Origin: Australia. 100 min. Rated: PG-13.
With: Justine Clarke, William McInnes, Anthony Hayes, Lisa Flanagan, Andrew S. Gilbert & Daniela Farinacci.

Artist Meryl (Justine Clarke) sees disaster happening everywhere she looks. She imagines that the train she’s in will derail. She imagines men strangling her. She imagines earthquakes swallowing her whole. And so when she finally witnesses a disaster that occurs outside her own head, it doesn’t affect her all that much – directly at least.

That same morning, Nick (William McInnes), a newspaper photographer, has been diagnosed with testicular cancer and has been seeing doom and destruction ever since. Memories of his father’s slow battle with cancer have been filtering back to him in brief flashes, making the news hit all the harder. As Meryl is walking home from her father’s funeral, she witnesses a freight train run over a young man. So when Nick is dispatched to photograph the disaster, they meet not-so-cute, becoming the conjoined bundle of nerves they were always meant to be.

The charm of writer/director/animator Sarah Watt’s first live action feature is its commitment to being a lighthearted romantic comedy amid so much disaster. Watt is careful to make her scrappy, downtrodden characters fear life rather than death – death by itself is nothing, it only gets bothersome when it reminds us of all the things we want to change in our lives so we can eventually die happy. After Meryl, Nick and a medley of other characters confront their flaws, they stop daydreaming about the end and start putting their lives together.

Grounded in humor and refraining from dragging the viewer through pretensions and melancholy, Look Both Ways walks an enjoyably lackadaisical line between serious and lighthearted fare, despite a series of by-the-book endings. The quirky premise is made even more so with Watt’s intermittent watercolor animation, which periodically appears whenever Meryl’s vivid imagination asserts its disaster fetish. A more straightforward digital animation emerges whenever Nick imagines what his tumor is doing inside his body. The two styles even collide during sex when neither one can still get death out of their thoughts. (Gradually Meryl’s vision of herself drowning combines with Nick’s tumor, which fuses into a Meryl-shaped cancer – giggling, naked and drowning in the cells of Nick’s testis.) Zachary Jones
April 14, 2006