The Tree's Charlotte Gainsbourg is doing it tough at the moment. First she accompanies Lars von Trier into the dark woods for a close encounter with a talking fox and a borderline deranged Willem Dafoe in Antichrist. Next up, she's back with the Dane to await the end of the world in Melancholia. Between times, she's got a lot on her plate in her new Australian melodrama.
As this clip from **The Tree **shows, Gainsbourg's young widow Dawn has been left to cope with the extremes of life in the Queensland bush after her husband dies of a heart attack. The soul of her dead partner is, she believes, absorbed into the mighty Moreton Bay Fig tree in their yard, something she takes solace in.
brightcove.createExperiences();
In this case the extreme is only a killer storm, though if our comprehensive knowledge of Australian botany teaches us one thing, it's only a matter of time before she and her brood are set upon by a high-speed landcrocs, knife-wielding dingos and flying death adders. This is not a place for the faint of heart.
The Tree, warmly received in Cannes, is directed by French filmmaker Julie Bertuccelli, a one-time AD to Krzysztof Kieslowski. It's out is out on August 5.
apologies for that pun. We momentarily took leaf of our sense