Careless Love (2012, MA15+)

Dir: John Duigan, Australia, 102mins, digital

Vietnamese-Australian university student May (Nammi Le) is intelligent, level-headed, practical and curious about the world. She makes what seems a necessary economic choice to fund her studies through brothel work. Many of her regulars (played by Peter O’Brien, David Field and others) come and go in a series of matter-of-fact client ‘transactions’. But there are also irrational fantasies, asymmetric expectations and sometimes-dangerous power dynamics underlying her work, their expectations – and most painfully, the reaction of her conservative Vietnamese family. After nearly 15 years away from Australian cinema and five away from international filmmaking altogether, veteran director John Duigan returns with a small, probing, modest work of cinema naturalism. It may be coincidental that it joins the recent cycle of Australian films about sex workers, alongside films like Black and White and Sex. Or it may be a return to thematic territory always central to Duigan’s work and with renewed meaning in a post-GFC Australia of 2012. Like the milestone social realist features Duigan made in the similarly recession-hit Australia of three decades ago (Mouth to Mouth, Winter of Our Dreams), Careless Love is a movie about socioeconomic rites of passage; the few, tough, limited and easily exploited economic options young Australians have in hard times.

On Saturday 21 July, we’ll mark the return of John Duigan to Australian cinema with a reprise screening of his 1982 AFI-award winner Winter Of Our Dreams (M), with Judy Davis, Bryan Brown and Baz Luhrman.

An Antidote Films Release.