The Current Cinema - another new Australian movie that might fall through the cracks - ALPHABET LANE (James Litchfield. Australia, 2025)

Anna (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), Alphabet Lane 

I'm warning you. Pay attention. Remember the first line of Alphabet Lane. Think about the last. It takes less than  an hour and a half to get from one to the other.

Dont think about the title. Unless I missed it, there's not even a road sign to indicate what it means. 

Alphabet Lane is set in the Monaro. High up. A young couple have left the big smoke for a quieter life, which proves to be a duller life. She's a doctor who works nights at the local hospital. He works on the Snowy Hydro. They start telling stories to each other to brighten up their humdrum existence. They invent things about their neighbours, indeed invent neighbours.

But you'll be asking questions. Why do the couple park their cars a hundred metres apart ...Why didn't Michelle just get in her car and drive away...and why dont they put stamps on the letters. Such mysteries... 

You might, if you wanted to be critical, ponder just what a master like Claude Chabrol might have made of this material. The Chabrol of the 60s and 70s, of La Femme Infidele and Juste Avant La Nuit might have produced a much more beefier movie, something with some serious consequences for role playing and games, something with some eros and more danger to make the stakes higher. But Chabrol had made maybe twenty movies before then and on more than a few was just marking time or perfecting his craft as they say. Nobody in Australia ever gets to have those options unless doing tv soaps counts.

Two starting points. Alphabet Lane and Le Beau Serge. Does James Litchfield have a career stretching out before him making interior melodramas and mysteries about the wayward middle classes. If his career trajectory is like everyone else in Australia we'll likely at best get a second look in about three or four or five years. Not at all satisfactory for someone who just might offer something a lot more thoughtful and subtle than the squalid horror derivatives that seem to be the lot of our commercial film-making.