Soft Fruit

According to Christina Andreef it was not easy to sell her story about a heavy-weight mother dying of cancer and her three fat daughters. Nor surprising, maybe. Yet the former assistant to Jane Campion succeeded in combining fresh humour and sympathy in her Soft Fruit. Three sisters and a brother come together again after fifteen years when their mother is dying of cancer. Mother Patsy (a great role by Jeanie Drynan) puts up with the suffocating care of her daughters Josie, Nadia and Vera. The three fight about everything, from their many diets to medical care for their mother. Father Vic keeps out of it and shoots birds out of trees. Patsy wants to use the last weeks of her life to go to the beach one last time, to visit Paris and to see her daughter Vera get married. She also wants to be embalmed after her death and honoured with a 21-gun salute. Her son Bo, out of jail for the occasion, helps his mother enjoy her last days. He reads from her favourite book (the biography of Jackie O.) and manages to escape from the house with her for a nice day on the beach. The cynical Australian tone, combined with an excellent cast and beautiful soundtrack, make Soft Fruit a sensitive, enervating but also funny film. Or as Andreef says: ‘A film in which you make an emotional journey and feel what is it to be a person.’