‘Praise’: Unguarded Intimacy and Clashing Eroticism

The impressive Australian import “Praise” isn’t a “sex movie” in the conventionalsense. It certainly isn’t puerile or exploitative. But it is largely a movie about sex--about the role of sexual chemistry in relationships, and about the toll that a clash of erotic temperaments can exact, even when (or perhaps especially when) the partners are helplessly addicted to each other.

The film’s central characters, Gordon and Cynthia, could easily have been stereotyped as rootless young urban slackers. Instead they are irreducibly specific personalities who can’t be explained away as instances of an alarming social trend.

Hard-drinking Cynthia (Sacha Horler) is always heedlessly in motion, usually pursuing raw pleasure. Glum Gordon (Peter Fenton), a chain smoker who seems to be playing chicken with his chronic asthma as if daring the disease to flatten him, is almost catatonically inert.

In dreary Brisbane, Cynthia stalks hungrily from thrill to thrill, while Gordon slouches through life in a dingy flophouse full of bickering old men. Gordon barely has enough drive to hoist himself out of bed in the morning, so he’s no match for Cynthia’s gale-force appetites.

*

What’s most startling about “Praise” isn’t the graphic visual content but the almost claustrophobic emotional intimacy. We are drawn so close to these characters so quickly that we never feel like mere onlookers. Because the lovers don’t seem to be performing for our benefit, the director, John Curran, can get at the things that people really say and do to each other in the clinches, in their most unguarded moments, without provoking either grimaces or giggles. There’s no hidden voyeuristic agenda.

The performers, like the characters they play, are egregiously mismatched, but in a way that works for the movie. Cynthia pursues sensation with the shameless desperation of a junkie, as a form of anesthesia, and she’s literally thin-skinned, with a case of eczema that leaves her cracked and bleeding. A character this extreme should be almost impossible to watch, but Horler is the real thing, the kind of actor who can go all out emotionally without losing control even for a second. We never lose sight of Cynthia’s bruised humanity.

Fenton, on the other hand, isn’t an actor at all. He’s the lead singer of the Australian rock band Crow and had no prior film experience. Fenton seems to slip in and out of focus as we’re staring at him. He has a formless, fuzzy screen presence, but it’s the point of the movie, in a way, that Gordon is just about impossible to pin down. He is presumably a stand-in for the author of the movie’s autobiographical-source novel, Andrew McGahan, who also wrote the screenplay.

*

But when McGahan, like Gordon, took a pass on the upper-middle-class life that had been mapped out for him, he did it for a reason: He had bigger fish to fry. We never get a clue what Gordon might have cooking, if anything. When Cynthia explodes at him in impotent frustration, we know exactly how she feels.

“Praise” is a lovely piece of movie making: precisely controlled but with a lived-in scruffiness. Curran has a remarkable sensitivity for the textures and rhythms of ordinary life. But there are also some nagging limitations. Gordon and Cynthia may look like hyper-realistic characters, but they are also much more limited than any of the real people we know. They seem to be completely defined by their “personalities,” without any higher interests or aspirations. They have been boiled down to their basic instincts.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film’s realistic, non-exploitative depiction of a troubled relationship includes frank nudity, graphic depictions of sexual activity, strong language and scenes of drinking, chain-smoking and drug use.

‘Praise’

Peter Fenton: Gordon

Sacha Horler: Cynthia

Marta Dusseldorp: Rachel

Joel Edgerton: Leo

Ray Bull: Vass

Strand Releasing presents an EMCEE Film. Director John Curran. Writer Andrew McGahan, from his novel. Producer Martha Coleman. Director of photography Dion Beebe. Editor Alexandre de Franceschi. Costume designer Emily Seresin. Production designer Michael Philips. Music Dirty Three. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. (323) 848-3500.