Rating: NNNNN
PROOF (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1991) is the sort of film that draws critics like flies. It’s a smart, dry-eyed Australian first feature. (First films appeal to our need to nurture.) It’s also got metaphor inscribed all over it, which makes it pretty near irresistible. And nine years after its release, it’s taken on even more juice, because it stars Agent Smith from The Matrix, with Gladiator in a supporting role. Hugo Weaving plays a blind photographer who engages in nasty but mutually rewarding games of deception with his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot) and friend (Russell Crowe). It’s a twisted little romance, but above all this is a film about the dependability of images, the split between what you see and what you can know. If it’s reductive to call it Epistemology 101, it’s fair to place Moorhouse in the company of other filmmaker-philosophers doomed to seek truth in perception. NNN (August 21 and 22, Paradise)
