You guys, sit tight, because I’m still working on bringing you comprehensive coverage of awards season and Sundance. But in the meantime, please enjoy this, via Variety, what may be the most perfect arthouse movie synopsis of all time:

“Top of the Lake” (Australia-New Zealand) — Directed by Jane Campion and Garth Davis, written by Campion and Gerard Lee. A six-hour film in which a pregnant 12-year-old girl stands chest deep in a frozen lake. Stars Elisabeth Moss, Holly Hunter, Peter Mullan and David Wenham.

(*thunderous finger snaps*)

You think all those actors play the pregnant 12-year-old standing in a lake at different stages of her ordeal? I’m intrigued.

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Here’s Australian actress Emily Browning, aka Sucker Punch‘s Baby Doll, in the Cannes poster for the Jane Campion-produced Sleeping Beauty.  While the poster doesn’t show us much (how about a little sideboob there, huh, cowboy?), the synopsis sounds positively delightful:

Browning plays a girl lured into a world of secret prostitutes, who is convinced to take a drug that makes her comatose as clients fulfill their most twisted sex fantasies. |HuffingtonPost|

It doesn’t seem like “secret prostitutes” would make much money. Kind of defeats the purpose.  In any case, we’ve already learned that the fantasy fetish-slut zombie-fighting WWI pterodactyl action in Sucker Punch was actually a perfect metaphor for the mental retreat of child sexual abuse victims during acts of abuse.  Thus, there seems to be a pattern developing in Emily Browning’s choice of roles.  If she’s not careful, she may end up another Jennifer Jason Leigh, or Maria Bello, third slot down on the we-need-a-rape-victim emergency call list every casting director keeps tacked to the office cork board.  Unless it’s just typecasting. She must give off a real I’ll-find-a-way-to-endure-this vibe.

Bright Star is a film starring Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, from The Piano director Jane Campion, about the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, “an outspoken student of high fashion.”  The film was much loved by critics at Cannes, who I don’t trust for a second.  Here are some out-of-context audio snippets from the trailer:

- “Mr. Keats knows he cannot like you.  He has no living and no income.”
- “He was a dreamer… she was a realist.”
- “But every word he wrote… inspired the rapture of first love.”
- “…a romance, that would live forever.”
- “You taught me to love, you never said only the rich!”
- “There is a holiness to the heart’s affections, you know nothing of that!”
- “Based on the true story of a brilliant poet, and the BRIGHT STAR who was his shining light.”
- “I almost wish we were butterflies, and lived but three summer days.”

As it turns out, poets and fashion students were just as insufferable in the 1800s.  Tuberculosis FTW.