Alena Lodkina's dreamlike film, about a pivotal friendship between two young Melbourne women, has a poetic and sometimes surreal narrative style that conveys a vividly emotional take on the world; it reveals profound truths about the characters, even if the precise detail of their story remains slightly – and deliciously – cryptic.
The second feature from the Melbourne-based writer-director arrives in limited release on Australian screens 10 months after its world premiere at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival and its local debut at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival (which co-financed it through its Premiere Fund for new Australian features).
It's travelled the world since, showing at Marrakech International Film Festival and most recently the New Directors/New Films festival in New York, where it garnered glowing reviews.
It's a testament not just to its excellence but to its universal themes.
And yet, the film has a distinctive quality too, derived from its contemporary Australian setting and characters.
Russia-born Lodkina proved she could breathe new life into our cinema's vernacular back in 2017 with her debut, Strange Colours, about a young woman's homecoming to the opal mining town of Lightning Ridge in northern New South Wales. Using the familiar framing device of the outback landscape, she tackled common themes of alienation and belonging with uncommon imagination.
Petrol shifts the gaze to Melbourne's inner-city artists and students, offering a contemporary vision of a milieu that has inspired films like Ken Cameron's gritty Monkey Grip (1982) or Emma-Kate Croghan's film school rom-com Love and Other Catastrophes (1996).
It resembles the latter more than the former, in that it's about a friendship between Eva (Bump's Nathalie Morris), a Russian Australian film student grappling with self-doubt, and Mia (a gothic, ethereal Hannah Lynch), a performance artist.
But tonally, it recalls the psychoanalytic turn in art cinema of the 1960s and 70s (think Bergman's Persona).
The women's first encounter – the film's opening scene – is fleeting but fateful and pre-empts Petrol's exploration of subconscious desire and its potential dangers.
This encounter occurs on a stretch of rocky coastline where Eva has come to record the sound of the wind howling in from the ocean. Moments later, as she gingerly navigates the cliffside to find another vantage point, she sets eyes on Mia, who's involved in some sort of film shoot near the crashing waves, dressed as a vampire.
It's a scene laden with symbolism, but there's something about the vulnerable ordinariness of Morris's performance here, against the imposing black cliff face (and her disarming, candid acting style more generally throughout the film), that counterbalances the hefty overtones.
Lodkina's lightness of touch is a precious constant in Petrol, providing the cinematic foundation to support her flashes of extravagance and surreal non sequiturs.
Integral to her sophisticated style is Michael Latham's lyrical, naturalistic cinematography – where we often see everything in frame and believe everything we see.
Until we realise what we're seeing is not reality – or not just reality – it is Eva's perspective.
As seen through her eyes (enabled by some clever editing by Luca Cappelli), a bathroom mirror bounces back an unexpected reflection, a body levitates above the floor, and objects appear as if by magic.
Lodkina ties this mystical and counter-rational dimension to Eva's mother (an excellent Inga Romantsova) and an elderly Russian lady (Becky Voskoboinik) who Eva works for as a carer.
In their company, tea leaf readings, discussions of new age philosophies, and even a séance alternate with everyday activities such as clothes shopping or translating, establishing a sense that Eva's view of life has long embraced mysticism as normal.
There's a warm-hearted generosity to these depictions that is striking, given that migrant life in Australian films — when it occasionally appears — is so often viewed as a source of personal tension, especially for second generation characters.
Lodkina does not place Eva in a cultural limbo of migrant dislocation, caught unhappily between two cultures and languages.
The only limbo Eva finds herself trapped in is the limbo of her 20s.
Early in the film she moves into Mia's place — an inner-city house that belongs to a wealthy man no one seems to know, where parties go late into the night and art school kids have long conversations over red wine.
Eva, whose faltering demeanour at film school betrays a lack of confidence, initially finds this new scene stimulating.
Of course, the film has enough distance from the characters to know that everyone is wearing a mask of some sort; trying out identities, practising rhetorical positions.
Foremost is Mia's radical leftist boyfriend (a spot-on, jaw-clenchingly annoying Robert P. Downie), but there's also some guy talking about a scheme to make money on the stock market. Pass the wine.
Eva mainly has eyes for Mia, who appears confident and capable to her, and is beginning to inspire an idea for a film. But no sooner has their friendship begun than Mia becomes distant, and then disappears altogether.
By this point, Lodkina has drawn us into the mystery.
As the film spirals into a woozy climax, there's a clear nod to Jacques Rivette's enigmatic films about female double acts, particularly the trippy, elemental Duelle (1976), but there's also a gentleness and empathy that stems from Petrol's semi-autobiographical core.
It shouldn't be mistaken for timidity.
Petrol is a powerful film about love and women's friendships. It's a fable about both finding yourself and dropping out.
And Lodkina maintains a remarkable focus on what she wants to convey.
Your 20s will leave you battered and bruised. Friendships will change you profoundly and some will nearly destroy you. But there are also moments of grace. She captures how all of that feels, beautifully.
Petrol is showing at Golden Age Cinema in Sydney now and at Cinema Nova in Melbourne from June 15.
