Life Could Be a Dream: Romantic fantasies and family violence in poignant Australian drama

Screenwriter Courtney Collins was really excited, dying in fact, to talk about Mr Darcy.

Collins wrote the screenplay to new Australian drama Life Could Be a Dream, which was directed by her longtime friend Jasmin Tarasin.

The film is a poignant and quietly powerful portrayal of a woman, Sarah (Maeve Dermody), who, turning 40, decides to leave her husband, Jake (Alexander England), taking with her their teenage son, Otis (Sonny McGee).

Life Could Be a Dream doesn’t unveil its story through huge chunks of dialogue but through soft, often flowing, visuals that could be the present, the past or, as the title suggests, a dream.

Dreams and fantasies are key to the film, and that’s where Mr Darcy comes in. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the camera skims over a copy of Pride and Prejudice placed on a bedside table. It was a very deliberate choice.

“Pride and Prejudice is a recurring cultural phenomenon,” Collins explained. “Mr Darcy is a long-held fantasy because he changes.

“Under the sway and influence of Elizbeth Bennet, he changes. This is a fantasy that many people, many women, hold. You meet someone and discover their limitations, and you have a fantasy that they will change. Not everybody can change, and this is very much what is holding Sarah in place, this fantasy that her partner will change.”

Through flashbacks, we see the start of Sarah and Jake’s courtship, presented as interludes in spaces we associate with romance – at the beach, for example - when they are still mostly representations of the fantasies we have about swept off our feet, of these grand romances that transcend practicalities and realities.

There are markers in Jake’s behaviour that, in hindsight, scream “red flag” – the way he (playfully) takes her phone while she’s on a call to her mum, how he tells her she doesn’t need any friends because she has him.

“In the early days of a relationship, it’s such a heady cocktail of hormones and attraction, and it’s dizzying,” Collins said. “What we wanted for anyone seeing the film was to learn to see these things in plain as they’re happening, not in retrospect. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, but when you’re in it, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s love’.”

Coercive control is increasingly being recognised as a form of family violence, and in Queensland, there is now legislation that could be used to prosecute offenders.

But even with the public conversations we’ve been having about family violence, often in the wake of women murdered by their intimate partners, there is still not widespread understanding or acceptance of the warning signs.

Life Could Be a Dream is trying to bridge that gap, but by focusing not the partner relationship. At the heart of it is the one between mother and son, Sarah and Otis, so that it could portray change and hope. Otis has been witness to his father’s actions, and has heard his father’s views, but he is also his mother’s child, and through their bond, there can be growth and grace.

“We wanted to centre a relationship that wasn’t a romantic relationship, it’s a relationship between Sarah and her son,” Collins said. “She’s isolated because that is a tactic of coercive control, right?

“But resilience and hope comes from building your network and a trusted network beyond one singular person.”

Tarasin said she has a daughter and it was a conscious act, when her child was younger, to “shut down” the myths of romantic love that surrounds us.

“Whether it’s Pride and Prejudice, or Disney films, that conditioning of Prince Charming or someone coming to save you, someone who’s going to look after you, I had to shut it down because it’s such a terrible message we all grew up with.

“It’s so ingrained in us so deeply from media, storybooks and fairytales. We’ve been carrying them around with us. I don’t care who you are but everyone has a fairytale about what the perfect family looks like, what that success in love looks like.”

For Sarah, she wanted Jake to be her Prince Charming, her Mr Darcy.

Tarasin and Collins have been showing Life Could Be a Dream to preview audiences before its wide release today, and many of the reactions they’ve had from the community have been bolstering.

“We live in a bubble for a very long time and just not really knowing how the world was going to take the film,” Tarasin said. “What’s been really fantastic for me, personally, is the intention I had and the feelings I wanted people to feel watching the film has been coming back at me.”

There is a self-selecting audience that would come to a film like Life Could Be a Dream who already have the language to talk about family violence and women’s agency, but it’s who they’re bringing with them that’s key to widening that conversation.

“We have people bringing their children, their sons, their mother, so it sits in the middle ground for co-viewing, and that’s what I loved about the audience response (so far).”

If the relationship on screen between Sarah and Otis, and how she is able to bring him along with her as she steps out of a dangerous situation, can be mirrored in a small way, of women sharing this cinematic experience with other people in their lives, of talking about it more widely, then it’s a move in the right direction.

Life Could Be a Dream is in cinemas