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A Blazing Fantasy

"Blaze," an entry in the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival's International Narrative competition, is an unusual coming-of-age story from Australian director Del Kathryn Barton that veers from straightforward framing to elaborate fantasy in its telling of a horrific real-life situation. This shifting approach sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't.

Barton grew up in the bushland west of Sydney, often living in sheds or tents with her hippie-like parents. She suffered from depression as a child and art became her therapy, leading her to draw obsessively from an early age and live in her imagination. Knowing this about the director's background helps to explain how she wrote and directed the film.

Blaze (Julia Savage) is a twelve-year-old girl who is the sole witness to the rape and murder of a young woman in an alley. She hides nearby and is frozen in fear, unable to even scream out, which would most likely have led to the woman's survival, but it's not her fault. She's only twelve.

After viewing the incident Blaze withdraws into an alternative world in her room, where dragons live and breathe and inanimate objects come to life - it seems that even before the trauma Blaze was already living in a semi make-believe world.

There is some reality in the film that deals with the trial of the man who committed the crime, with Blaze being the sole witness, but that might involve less than a total of 15 minutes of the film. Most of the rest is watching life through the fantasies Blaze lives in.

Sometimes the fantasy adds to the story. At other times I found it distracting, although it is undeniably artistic. It's not difficult to imagine that a young Barton also must have fled back and forth between fantasy and reality like Blaze does.

To me, the biggest problem with the film is the sound. It alternates between whispering conversations between real people, and ear-splitting noise in the fantasy scenes. At the beginning, this device works. By the end, it's just annoying.

While I had issues with "Blaze", it's stunningly beautiful to look at and it would not be surprising if down the road, Barton might have some very worthy projects coming.