On Song NAVIGATING THE PAST IN BEN HACKWORTH’S CELESTE
Memories of happiness lost haunt the script of Brisbane-based writer/director Ben Hackworth’s sophomore feature, Celeste (2018) – both on the page and between the lines during its writing process.
Radha Mitchell stars as the eponymous opera singer, who gave it all up for love just as her career was reaching its high notes. Retiring to a crumbling but fecund and fanciful retreat in Far North Queensland, she finds herself, years later, all but alone after her husband’s death a decade earlier, hitting the bottle hard and dreaming of a comeback. This unfortunate event is clouded in half-glimpsed mystery, teased out in flashback and connected to her estranged stepson Jack, played by Kai Lewins as a teen and by In Like Flynn (Russell Mulcahy, 2018) lead Thomas Cocquerel as an adult. With shades of lonely, tragic female figures like Charles Dickens’ jilted spinster Miss Havisham, Celeste is a nuanced creation who still burns with a creative passion that’s very much alive; the film paints her as nurturing a genuine care for those around her, if occasionally punctuated by jealous outbursts and self-indulgent introspection.
Critic Neil Young, reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter after its debut at last year’s Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), describes the titular character as [e]xuding a brittle wistfulness […] Mitchell’s fortysomething Celeste nevertheless manages to
