Envy essays

Envy essays Director Julie Money's Australian feature veers slightly around the usual themes, but creates an interesting and new mix of character study, role reversal, and sexual politics. The story is basic, but its presentation is tantalisingly different. Envy opens with a fragment from a scene that doesn't appear fully until the film's climax. It draws the audience into confusion, and sets up the possibilites for unconventional storytelling. Envy grabs the attention immediately as the camera settles on young, blonde and nervous-looking Rachel at a suburban shopping mall. As if caught by a surveillance camera, she looks briefly down the lens (and directly at us in the audience) before leaving the frame. Later we will discover the significance of this moment but for now it's all the information we're given as the destinies of Rachel (Anna Lise Phillips) and Kate (Linda Cropper) collide. At a public swimming pool, Kate, a married professional recognises what she believes to be her stolen black dress being worn by Rachel, a beautiful young thief. While Rachel is swimming, Kate reclaims her dress and bolts. The actions turn Kate's family upside-down and unwittingly sets off a dangerous chain of events. When Rachel and her two friends come calling for the dress back, the result is a brutal stir in her of passionate revenge, combining a modern woman's power with a dangerous taste for retribution. It's that change in Kate that gives Envy its step above normalcy, its extra set of layers that make it worth watching. Envy explores an ordinary suburban family, mother Kate , father Phil and son Matt, who through a minor act of defiance become the victims of three anarchic young people. On the surface Envy is about a successful, secure middle class woman and a young thief fighting over possession of a black dress. Underneath it's about class and sexual politics - rich topics given a vivid examination after Kate's house is invaded by Rachel and tw ...