Butterfly Tree review: Beauty overwhelms story arc

The butterfly tree is a venerable fig with a gauzy tent rigged up in its branches. Beneath it, Fin (Ed Oxenbould) lies watching butterflies whirl about its leaves while dreaming of his mother, Rose, who's been dead for three years.

There's a lot of dreaming in this first feature from Australian writer-director Priscilla Cameron.

Along the road from Fin's house Evelyn (Melissa George), a former burlesque dancer is enjoying her own romance with the past by setting up a florists-cum-op shop decorated with items from the 1940s and '50s.

Clearly, she's on the run from something but Cameron has already given notice that she's going to take her time about telling us what it is.

Fin's father, Al (Ewen Leslie) is also caught in a time warp. His low-slung vintage convertible seems emblematic of the fact - or maybe it's just another symptom of the film's emphatically retro production design.

In any case, Al, like his son, is consumed with memories of Rose - even though there's at least one person who's eager to convince him of the joys of the here and now.

He's teaching at a local community college and he's become embroiled in an affair with Shelley (Sophie Lowe), one of his students, who's resisting all his attempts to end it.

The film was shot in the south-east Queensland hinterland and it's filled with sunlight overlaid with a hazy, soft-edged amber glow. It looks beautiful but the idea, it seems, is beauty for beauty's sake, with any thought of dramatic tension consigned to a bit part.

The action is as languorous as the atmosphere.

Fin is the first to discover Evelyn, who's lonely enough to respond to his adoration by letting him take a topless photograph of her with the camera she's given him.

Theirs is an innocent attachment but Oxenbould looks so young for his 16 years that there's something slightly queasy about her willingness to indulge him.

Certainly that's the way Al regards it when he finds out. By then, he's formed his own crush on Evelyn and it's worsening the already fractured relationship between father and son, leading to a lot of acting up from Fin which speeds up the plot without really encouraging you to care about him.

Al and Fin have had so little to say to one another from the very start that it's hard to see what they must have meant to one another when they were happy. Their only bond is their longing for Rose and for reasons eventually revealed, they're not sharing that.

Up to this point, Al's numbed state of self-absorption has Leslie trudging through the action with a hangdog air and a shortage of dialogue. When at last he gets a speech worth delivering his performance comes to life - as does the film. Cameron may be an expert when it comes to creating visual magic but images aren't everything. Words do matter.