Įven when Steve takes note of an upco ming date, the occasion is hardly more 21st-century-specific than Louise’s taste for Jung and Sartre : the release of the new Bob Dylan albu m “Love and Theft”, scheduled for September 11. “The outside world does not exist ”, reads a manifesto Louise tacks to the door, while the inside world of the apart ment is furnished with ite ms that evoke no specific era other than Middle Period Op-Shop: postcards and knick-knacks, a sagging orange couch, a pile of Penguin Classics. Having quit their white-collar jobs, they lock the mselves away like honeymooners, spending their days either rolling around in bed or pursuing their respective vocations (music for him, literature for her). Like many aspects of Mousoulis’ realism, this specificity is paradoxical, given how far Steve (Clay Ravin) and Louise (Holly Marshall), the central couple of Lovesick, are bent on re moving themselves from any context beyond the one they shape together. 2 The fictional action stays close to reality in ter ms of time as well as place, starting on Septe mber 7, 2001, and ending exactly 15 weeks later on December 21 – both days being Fridays, as the opening and closing captions of the film spell out. Mousoulis’ fifth ultra-low-budget feature, Lovesick was scripted in Septe mber 2001 and shot the following December, a process recorded in a frank and extensive fil mm aker’s diary which re mains online. That was a little more than two decades ago, both in reality and fiction. T he protagonists of Bill Mousoulis ’ Lovesick (2002) would have been paying even less for their one-bedroom apartment further down the hill, upstairs in a red-brick six-pack, as inner-suburban Melbourne as it gets. I managed it myself for a few years as a recovering arts student, when I moved with a couple of friends into a three-bedroom workers’ cottage off Smith St, total rent just over 200 dollars a week. Those were the days, when you could have no income to speak of and still live in Collingwood. “If a viewer understands the story and characters fully, then I have failed.”
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