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15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen) has cancer and falls in love with the drifting boy Moses
Photo: X rental
In this film, the family is not the nucleus, but the padded cell of society.
The father works as a psychiatrist and is so annoyed by the whining of his patients that he sneaks out of the treatment room into the house next door, where he smooches with the heavily pregnant neighbor's wife.
The mother is a retired miracle pianist and manically exhilarated thanks to many colorful antidepression pills.
The young protagonist herself, 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen), drives her parents' care to such a frenzy that once at dawn she looks up into the treetops of her garden and proclaims with envy: "You birds are perfect!"
"Milla Meets Moses", the film debut by Australian director Shannon Murphy, is characterized by poetic obstinacy.
The film begins with the encounter between the two main characters, who obviously come from opposing worlds.
On the platform of a suburb in the city of Sydney, a wildly tattooed and disheveled but pretty drug freak (Toby Wallace) bumps into the girl Milla, who is well-wrapped in a school uniform.
Narrow old people or cheerful eccentrics?
The stranger tries to dab away the blood that trickles from Milla's nose with his dirty T-shirt and plays the savior.
As soon as the wound has been taken care of, the pupil invites her new acquaintance, who is already 23 and named Moses, to dinner in her parents' bungalow - she obviously wants to shock what she sees as creepy, narrow-minded old people.
In short scenes, each opened with a faded-in chapter title, the director Murphy provides insights into a comical, by no means unsympathetic, but severely tested nuclear family.
Milla's parents, who are played by the Australian actors Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn, who are known from Hollywood productions, celebrate terrific dreary sexual rituals with one another and seek erotic confirmation outside of their marriage.
In front of their daughter, they act like cheerful eccentrics - in the hope of concealing how much they care about her.
Because Milla has cancer, and because her hair will soon be falling out because of chemotherapy, she wears different wigs.
To the horror of the parents, the girl becomes more and more enthusiastic about the loiter Moses.
He was put on the street by his own middle-class clan, often huddled around with a few buddies on a basketball court and quickly turned out to be a bastard to his new girlfriend.
"Milla Meets Moses" tells of betrayal, of death and love, and of a civilization in which both adults and boys are used to combating any pain with legal or illegal drugs.
Surprisingly, the film is still a highly entertaining romantic comedy for a long time.
You watch the shy approach of these two extremely dissimilar young people, as well as the idiocies of the parents who seem to know how embarrassingly they articulate their affection.
Big city neurotic portrait
Last year Murphy's work was a critical success at the Venice Film Festival.
The themes dealt with in the film may sound familiar to many viewers from cinema dramas such as "American Beauty" or "Fate is a lousy traitor";
they are processed in a similar way in the series "Sex Education" or in books such as Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections".
But the speed, wit and elegance with which the psychodynamics of a late bourgeois nuclear family and a contemporary Romeo and Juliet story are presented make this urban neurotic portrait a really outstanding film.
The director Murphy has previously made mostly TV series and short films.
She trumps here with a willingness to tell elliptical stories, which is clearly trained in the snapshot communication of channels such as Instagram and TikTok;
and she amazes with sometimes daring changes of mood.
Milla and Moses were just on the run together through the glitter of nightlife when the boy leaves his mate alone - and she hovers over the dance floor in a club, very lost.
A film projector beams the images of a magnificent fireworks display onto your face.
Basically, the film is about the longing of its heroes to take off from reality, just like fireworks rockets.
Or to fly like the birds from the treetops in the suburban garden.
It is an invitation to celebrate your own existence with maximum intensity - and the rejection of a serious, orderly adult life.
It is fundamentally the fault in the system of a society determined by constraints that you have to decide what you want to work and where you belong in life, Moses once lectured at the dinner table of his new, terribly nice host family.
"Because then it's all about functioning and no longer about beauty."
Could it be that he's right?
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