In my experience Australian films are either very good or extremely bad. This film fell towards the later category.

A bastard in action…well in this scene it was

Careless Love was all in all a bad remake of the french television film Student Services with a quasi-feminist diatribe thrown in your face throughout. Evidence I suppose that Australia still only has soap-opera script writers who can’t change their approach when writing films.

The film drew heavily on the tragic legacy of Jane Champion: the only good men are father-figures every other man is an evil-in-some-way-complete-bastard. Of course in fairness it is hard to find too many redeeming men in a film about Asian prostitutes being exploited and maybe redeeming men would have been inconsistent with the sordid little world they were trying to paint.

The film lacked all the emotion and psychology of the original and its sex scenes were quite unbelievable due to the contrived feminist discourse in play (but then you only have to watch Underbelly to see the same problem). In its sordidness the sex scenes in the original film found a beauty and some artistic interplay, Careless Love was far too busy applying middle class feminist values to what is commonplace in Vietnam today and Vietmanese culture, to try and be artistic or ask questions about sexuality in such a situation. The central character represented as a hardcore working prostitute throughout, a far cry from the French film in which the central character is an awkward, wary amateur forced as a last resort by circumstances.

Student Services left the viewer feeling nothing but sadness for the central character and even somewhat for her protagonists, Careless Love left me feeling completely indifferent toward pretty much all of the characters.