The Birthday Trip is highly entertaining and hopefully it finds a wide audience.
The Birthday Trip is both a humorous and dramatic look at relationships in crises and how a couple of days away with friends highlight the rifts between them.
The Birthday Trip is set in the Southern Highland wine country of New South Wales, with three well-to-do couples traveling to a large luxurious estate to celebrate the 30th birthdays of the women. The three women have been best friends since school but it is the first time the men have met each other. Bubbly Isabel (Annelise Hall) works in production development at the ABC and her arrogant partner Mark (Ben Gerrard) works as a customer manager for an arms firm. Angie (Josephine Starte) is a documentary filmmaker and her partner Lars (Luke Jacobz) is a knockabout Aussie financial trader. The third couple are Clare (Nicola Frew) who is an artist and her partner is cynical Jim (David Quirk). The couple are met by the “experience curator’ Felix (Robert Preston) on their arrival to the estate.
As the birthday getaway progresses the cracks in the relationships of the three couples play out and the interplays between the couple begins to develop. Meanwhile, despite putting on a pleasant exterior to the couples, Felix is being berated by his disgruntled partner, Sapphire (Sapphire Blossom) about the state of the workers house they live in on the estate.
The Birthday Trip is the feature debut of director, screen writer, cinematographer, and editor James Robert Woods who has produced a funny and insightful narrative of the couples. The smart script portrays the couples as, at times, pretentious and irritating and later develops moments of clarity about the couples relationships. One of the funniest moments of the film his dig at the Australian film industry and Lars’s statement that he fell asleep during The Dry.
Wood’s cinematographer style is a hand held technique which often produces a shaky effect that, while adding to the realism of the scenes, becomes a little trying at times. There is a night time drone scene which is outstanding. The performances of the whole cast are excellent with none standing out more than someone else as all are superb.
James Robert Woods’ first feature is highly entertaining and hopefully it finds a wide audience.
Reviewed by Rob McKinnon
Rating 4 out of 5
Distributor: Badlands Films
