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TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US

You have to admire a director who takes his title from T.S. Eliot (in this case, the last line from " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock " ). And for a while the murky atmosphere and intriguing performances in Michael Petroni’s film raise the hope that something worthy of Eliot might be going on. Sam Frank (an intensely repressed Guy Pearce) is an Australian psychiatrist taking the train back to his home town to attend his father’s funeral. Sam is still in denial about another loss, the drowning death years earlier of Silvy (Brooke Harmon), his handicapped teenage love. On his journey he encounters an amnesiac mystery woman (Helena Bonham Carter) who has flashes of memory (lines from " Prufrock, " for example) that lead Sam to suspect she might be the reincarnated Silvy. Then again, it might just be the recurrent flashbacks he has whenever he drifts off, which he does almost as often as those still watching the movie. Writer/director Petroni, who wrote the screenplay for the far better The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, starts with the makings of a supernatural mystery and ends up with a clumsy pop-psychological allegory of memory, guilt, and loss; he might have been better advised to draw his title from Cats. (101 minutes)

BY PETER KEOUGH

Issue Date: April 3 - 10, 2003
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