The Tree: Charlotte Gainsbourg as Misbehaving Widow

Baruch Rafic/Zeitgeist Films

Gainsbourg versus the tree.

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Varsity

4329 University Way N.E.
Seattle, WA 98105

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: University District

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Runs at Varsity, Fri., Aug. 12–Thurs., Aug. 18. Not rated. 100 minutes.

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More About

• Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Morgana Davies
• Julie Bertuccelli
• Judy Pascoe
• Otar Left

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No one grieves onscreen quite like Charlotte Gainsbourg, here playing Dawn, made a widow within the first 10 minutes of The Tree (adapted from Judy Pascoe's novel Our Father Who Art in the Tree). When not sobbing or sleeping, she expends her depleted energy wrangling her four kids, ranging from toddler to teenager, who scamper around their stilt-built house in Boonah, a tiny, dusty town in Queensland, Australia. Dawn's only daughter, 8-year-old Simone (Morgana Davies), manages her sorrow by insisting that her father is communicating with her from high up in the Moreton Bay fig tree in the yard; soon Mom is talking to branches, too. In her second film (after 2003's Since Otar Left), writer/director Julie Bertuccelli is sometimes partial to scattershot pacing and clumsy dialogue ("Would you say we're a happy family?" Dawn asks her oldest). But Gainsbourg and Davies, almost feral with her mass of untamed blond curls, make a memorable parent/child pair, first as supernatural-secret-sharing friends, then as foes, especially after Dawn takes up with the plumbing-supply guy. The massive timber becomes the family's most formidable enemy, its roots clogging drainage systems and its branches crashing through bedrooms. If the message of "Let go and move on" is suggested a little too obviously by Bertuccelli's destructive title character, it at least serves as the arboreal opposite to Terrence Malick's cosmic mumbo-jumbo— The Tree of Death.