Travelling Light (2003) User Reviews

Travelling Light fails to ignite the screen

[strangie · 6/10 · 17 September 2003]

Set in the early 70s, Travelling Light follows the story of two sisters growing up in surburban Adelaide.

Leanne is thoroughly uninspired by the idea of becoming a teacher and thinks that she would be a better photographer than a teacher. Bronwyn would much prefer to back teaching than being a housewife. Enter hippy American poet, Lou, to shake things up.

This is a meanderingly slow film with very few shadows and most of the time the cast look bemused trying to do their best with the screenplay (though there is one very funny inspired scene with Ray Sugars (Simon Burke) as a 70s singing/TV personality). An interesting look back to the 70s but not worth a movie ticket. Wait till it's release on dvd/video.

Adelaide in the early 70's - you had to be there

[JBOZ2003 · 4/10 · 13 September 2003]

Disappointing effort from film maker Kathryn Millard as she enjoys on a self-indulgent journey into Adelaide in the early 1970's and the conflict between conservatism and the Age of Aquarius.

The film follows the struggle of Leanne (Miranda) as she shrugs off the stability of a career in teaching to explore her other talents, principally photography, and other alternatives to the straight and narrow.

Leanne is inspired to do this partly by a visiting American poet (Stiller) and also by the difficulties faced by her sister Bronwyn (Horler) in adapting to "normal" family life with her new husband. Other friends and family are also thrown into the mix.

The viewer gets the feeling that you had to be there (Adelaide in the early 70's) in order to enjoy the film. Had the film been written and produced better, then it would have had broader appeal.

Pia Miranda, who carries the dubious honour of being considered "second cab off the rank" behind Rose Byrne for the next actress to be picked up by Hollywood, put in a mediocre performance. She was upstaged by Sacha Horler, a little known Australian actress who shows great promise in this film.

The cuts from scene to scene were novel and one of the more interesting parts of the film.

Overshadowed by a bumper crop of great Australian films this year, Travelling Light is highly missable.

Not going anywhere

[jay-aus · 4/10 · 7 March 2007]

Movies set in Adelaide aren't that common, so when one comes along, its sometimes nice to see something that isn't always just set in Melbourne or Sydney. Unfortunately, the Adelaide references were almost non-existent, and the dry suburban scenes could've been set in any Australian capital city's sprawl. And that was the closest thing to a highlight. For the most part, it was the directing and editing that let this film down. Decent actors saddled with flat, lifeless characters also didn't help. At times it almost seemed David Lynch-esqe, but alarmingly, by accident.

Even the shining light of Pia Miranda couldn't save this one - it went nowhere fast.

Its not a terrible film at all, just a little pointless.

a film without purpose

[shirlty56 · 2/10 · 10 January 2004]

Travelling Light is a film that really doesn't go anywhere. It is a film about 1970's Adelaide which had very little life but the director fails to find an interesting angle on this. It could have been interesting but it really does not capture anything new. It's another lost opportunity.

Pointlessly nasty, or just pointless? Hard to tell, hard to care.

[Spleen · 1/10 · 18 March 2004]

least, she stood out the front bravely enough BEFORE we'd all seen the film, and presumably stuck around for the screening itself, although I don't blame her if she didn't – and her mere presence at the screening made me curiously reluctant to say anything bad about her film. But then I come here and read someone actually PRAISING this valueless work and my reluctance vanished.

Barring comments on Sacha Horler's performance, which I suppose is up to her usual high standards (not that that it's easy to tell in a film like this), the nicest thing that can be truthfully said about the film is that it accurately conveys what it was like to live in suburban Adelaide in the 1970s ... to people who lived in suburban Adelaide in the 1970s. And if you think THAT'S an artistic achievement of any worth, you obviously haven't thought very much.

We do manage to gather that suburban Adelaide wasn't a very pleasant place back then. Everything looked sterile, and every single person who ever said anything, said it in the context of a sterile conversation. What it's like to LIVE in this impossibly bleak and mind-numbing environment, it's hard to say; there's nothing human about the film, so watching it gives us no means of telling. What it's like to sit through 88 minutes of flat conversations flatly acted in flatly lit flat settings, though, is obvious enough. It's boring. Or if not boring, AT BEST irksome. It's not as though the individually tedious scenes ever connect with one another, to produce something more than the effect of very many of them in succession.

Poor Sacha and Pia go through the motions in this dull mess

[PeterM27 · 2/10 · 19 December 2021]

This film contains two great Australian actresses, but a dull script forced this film into my Ten Worst Oz Films list. It tries to be "Alibrandi of Adelaide" - with Pia Miranda doing her coming-of-age thing again, this time in Adelaide of the early 70s.

Personal favourite actress, Sacha Horler, has a lacklustre role of unhappily married older sister, and the arrival of Ben Stiller tries to contrast US hippy culture against dull Oz suburban conformist values, but the satire is too low key here. The film could have been good, but, like Adelaide in that era it is too slow, flat and predictable.

Doesn't work

[tonyjanice · 4/10 · 28 February 2012]

This film looked vaguely promising, but at the end of the day, it didn't really say much- and the viewer is left feeling rather empty and slightly bewildered.

Supposedly set in 1960's Adelaide (it was actually filmed there), there are no specific Adelaide references in it. I looked hard for them, because I grew up in Adelaide during that era; but there aren't any- it could be any Australian city. The shots of brand new houses springing out of empty paddocks did reflect the expanding Adelaide outer suburbia of the time: but the outer fringes of every major Australian city was like that then.

I think the only hint of a local reference point is the Ernie Sigley-esque local TV personality, played by Simon Burke. But the director doesn't really take this character anywhere, and his presence seems fairly pointless.

The attractive and likable actress Pia Miranda is wasted in a silly role as an outer suburban girl who gets into Uni and is training to be a school teacher. However, she decides that she would prefer to be a photographer- not a "normal" photographer, but a self-indulgent "arty" photographer. She throws her school teaching career away in order to make this futile gesture towards sixties modernism.

We are supposed to feel some sort of empathy towards the main characters who are "trapped" in dreary suburbia and trying to move their lives in a more meaningful direction. But one of them already has an interesting job at a TV studio, and the other two are tertiary educated school teachers- so surely they have already achieved their escape? The sixties in Adelaide were not that grim and claustrophobic: the City and Uni were only a 25 minute bus ride away for most people...