Chez Nous, for you monolinguals, is a French expression meaning an Australian household made up of a French husband (the German-accented Bruno Ganz), his Aussie writing wife (Lisa Harrow), the latter's would-be writing sister (Kerry Fox), presently on the rebound from an affair abroad and pregnant ("You know the arguments for and against abortion. Could you just run through them for me one more time?"), a teenage daughter, and a male student boarder about the same age (very nice for them, though they attract little attention). Anyhow, on this occasion that's what it means. And "Last Days" means that when the wife goes off on a quality-time expedition in the hinterlands with her estranged father (Bill Hunter), the husband and the sister-in-law will become much closer than recommended for such relationships. From an original screenplay by novelist and short storyist Helen Garner, the movie summons up the sort of intimist women's fiction, wherein a misunderstanding over the value of a wheel of Brie becomes a major event, that is apt to hold the page more readily than the screen. On screen there is no automatic equivalent to the individual voice, tone, vocabulary, syntax, point of view of the author -- all the things that might go under the general description of "spellcasting." At any rate there's no equivalent in the muddy, gritty, chilly imagery of Gillian Armstrong. The job of sustaining interest, of detailing and texturing, falls, as so often in this sort of thing, to the actors. Which is all right when the director has an interest-sustainer, a detailer, and a texturer as adept as Judy Davis (see Armstrong's High Tide). The actors here seem forced when they are supposed to seem most relaxed and natural; they do better, or are better camouflaged, when the characters are more strained or more "on." There is little difficulty telling when is when: the shading of emotion tends to split into the black and white, or charcoal and pearl, of throwing things and smashing things for dark times and dancing and prancing and putting an overturned colander on your head for lighter ones. Possible difference, there, of writing for the screen as opposed to the page. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd