"Proof" 1991

Watching an odd little Australian movie about two men who seem to have deep feelings for one another - though completely not sexual or even romantic, just very friendly, almost brotherly. The story is about a love triangle (I always thought that to have a proper love triangle, there has to be a complicated emotional relationship between all angles) between an emotionally unavailable Martin, played by always awesome Hugo Weaving, who is blind and believes his mother 'left him' (died), because she was embarrassed by him. This is not true, but it makes him very bitter and nursing several social issues, namely that of believing people's attitudes towards him. (Reminds me a little of the Station Agent, actually.) To try and catch people in a lie, he takes photos and asks another person to describe it to him. He marks the photos using a Braille label-maker. 

His housekeeper Celia is an emotionally unstable young woman also with abandonment issues and she exercises her loneliness problems by being a little bit mean. She places furniture in Martin's path, hides his things, trains his dog to obey her, drives his friends away, even blackmails him into intimacy and does the best she can to emotionally manipulate him - alas, to little actual success. she makes an effort of being obsessed with him, though she isn't really, she just needs some meaning in her life and Martin makes for the ideal dramatic subject.

Their third character in their drama is a young, bit punk-ish Andy, played unusually adorably by a very young Russell Crowe in one of his earliest roles :) Andy is drawn to Martin ever since Martin almost kills his stray cat, and the two become close friends since Andy describes the photos very honestly and with fun observations. This of course won't sit with Celia, who seduces Andy (easily, really) just to show how untrustworthy he is. But it all works out well in the end. 

It's really an amazing movie. I've come across it often before, but never watched it, because I thought it was going to be much darker (maybe because all the promo material looks like it's been done by the same people who did some of the creepy Jeremy Irons films of that time.) But it's not dark, it's actually really nice. It's one of those - whoa, this was unexpectedly pleasant for a Sunday-morning-let's-watch-something-we've-never-watched-before.