Fest Pt 2 - the revenge

WARNING!

***CONTAINS KOOKINESS***

Gus Van Sant's latest, Restless, shares a major theme with 50/50 whilst taking a very different approach. Far from being some kind of weird mortality obsession on my part (though this film certainly has one), instead my interest was piqued by the presence of Van Sant (because whatever else he's done, Good Will Hunting remains a wonderful film) and of Mia Wasikowsa, with whom I've become slightly obsessed after her astonishing performances in shrink drama In Treatment (season one: Sky Arts; season two: Sky Atlantic, where I can't watch it. Fuckers.)

Restless begins with our hero Enoch laying within his own chalk outline; we then follow him on his way to a funeral at which, it becomes quickly apparent, he has no business being. Here he meets Wasikowska's Annabel for the first time, who then saves Enoch's bacon when it he's about to be busted at another funeral he's gatecrashing. We quickly learn that Enoch has an imaginary Japanese kamikaze pilot as a friend, his parents are dead, he's dropped out of school, and his deadpan expression is not easily removed. Rake-thin, floppy-fringed and twitchy - yep, he's a Tortured Teen (TM) alright.

Annabel's life, meanwhile, is far from straightforward. Her mum is an alcoholic, her older sister is trying to hold the family together and oh yeah, she's only has three months to live thanks to an inoperable brain tumour. Thus is the scene set for a low-key, quirky teen romance with a great big dose of melancholia thrown in.

First thing to say is that Restless could have been a mumbling, navel-gazing disaster, so Van Sant, Wasikowska and Henry Hopper as Enoch deserve plenty of credit for ensuring that it's always watchable. Enoch in particular teeters on the edge of being very annoying at first, but the slow drip-feed of his backstory goes a long way to clarifying his motivations, and Hopper does well at not laying the kookiness on too thick. Wasikowska meanwhile is the possessor of an extraordinary face - super-expressive in a similar way to Carey Mulligan's, with the ability to appear childlike one minute and weighed down with a lifetime's burdens the next.

The script even dares to toy with convention now and then - such as when Enoch and Annabel rehearse their perfect death scene, which goes wrong when she doesn't approve of his post-mortem intention to commit suicide Romeo-style. He retorts that the lines she has scripted are far too corny. That is not something you could accuse Restless of being, but for me - and this is probably down to personal taste as much as anything -  it never felt entirely fresh either. Something about the film's minimalist style just feels unsatisfying, and like its damaged protagonists it's so fragile and slight that it might float away at any moment. However, if you're a lover of quirk who likes your colour palette to be washed-out, and your soundtrack liberally sprinkled with Sufjan Stevens tunes, then you may well be quids in here.