High Tide (film)

High Tide (film)
Directed by	Gillian Armstrong
Starring	Judy Davis Claudia Karvan Jan Adele Bob Purtell Colin Friels John Clayton
Cinematography	Russell Boyd

High Tide is a film directed by Australian film maker Gillian Armstrong, from a script by Laura Jones, about the mother-daughter bond. Gillian Armstrong reported that when she began work on High Tide she pinned a note above her desk : "Blood ties. Water. Running Away."

Synopsis

Two-time Academy Award nominee Judy Davis, (Sybylla in My Brilliant Career, and Adela Quested in A Passage to India) plays Lilli, one of three backing singers for a touring Elvis impersonator. She is fired, and she's left alone at the beginning of winter in a ramshackle beach town on the windswept coast of New South Wales. This remote, working class, tourist-town Australia has a pervasive sense of rootlessness and movement. The people survive by changing their occupations with the seasons and work hard in small businesses. Here , stuck in the Mermaid Caravan Park, she encounters her teenage daughter Ally (Claudia Karvan). When Lilli's young surfer husband had died, she felt lost; she gave up her baby to her mother-in-law Bet (Jan Adele in her film debut). Lilli has been drifting ever since, and getting wasted. Bet is a rowdy, belligerent woman, and she's devoted to Ally - she has taken care of her for thirteen years but she has no idea how unhappy the girl is. Lilli has an immediate rapport with the lonely Ally even before she knows that Ally is her daughter, and after she knows, she can't take her eyes off her. They belong with each other. But Lilli's terrified of taking on the responsibilities of motherhood, and Bet tells her she's riff-raff. When we first see Ally she is in the water; surfing is - "her refuge from the noisy junkiness of life with Bet. Bet isn't a monster, she's simply the wrong person to be raising the pensive Ally, whose emotions are hidden away, like her mother's. The drama is in our feeling that Lilli must not leave her daughter in the embrace of this raucous old trouper."

Awards

High Tide was nominated for 7 Australian Film Institute awards, and won two. One for Davis in the Best Actress category and one for Jan Adele in the Best Supporting Actress category. Karvan was also nominated. Davis also won the Best Actress award by the National Society of Film Critics.