Sweet As (2022)

Another film festival I attended in February, my first month in Melbourne, was one with a thematic focus a little closer to home than the Europa! Europa Film Festival, namely the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. It was, I gather, the seventh edition, and it’s not a big festival — there were only a handful of films, along with the screening of an old Clara Law film (itself hived off from a larger celebration of Law’s work that’s been screening over the last few weeks), and a couple of programmes of shorts as well as workshops and discussions. I only attended the opening and closing night films, but both came with unexpected (to me, because I hadn’t read the website closely) free drinks, and a generally celebratory atmosphere which is always welcome! Long may the festival continue.

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Focusing on a young First Nations woman, Murra (Shantae Barnes-Cowan), who has been let down by her family — most immediately her drug-using and wildly erratic mother — Sweet As blossoms into a really wholesome film that I certainly hope connects with the right audiences. Murra finds herself pushed into going on a group trip with other troubled kids, where they are encouraged to discover their voices via old-fashioned film cameras that one of the guides, an enthusiastic Nicaraguan guy (Carlos Sanson Jr), is particularly keen on. Naturally this idea of photography as a way into taking control of one’s own story means the pressure is on the film’s cinematographer to capture something beautiful, and there’s definitely a sense of some tourist board-approved visuals here, though I suppose you don’t have to work hard in this bit of Western Australia to find something stunning to photograph. The core of the story, though, remains focused on Murra and the way she first resists and ultimately bonds with the others on the trip, as a sort of coming of age road trip. Perhaps it does all feel a little bit soft pedalled (and it fits rather neatly into a familiar generic framework), but this is ultimately a very hopeful film about restoring connections with other people and with the natural world.

CREDITS
Director Jub Clerc; Writers Clerc and Steve Rodgers; Cinematographer Katie Milwright; Starring Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Pedrea Jackson, Mikayla Levy, Carlos Sanson Jr, Ngaire Pigram; Length 87 minutes.
Seen at ACMI, Melbourne, Thursday 23 February 2022.

The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. This Australian revisionist western film by an Aboriginal woman director, writer and star came out at festivals in 2021, but I caught up with it on a flight (it would fill a big screen though, and for some reason in my mind that’s where I saw it). Not a perfect movie, but it had a lot that I really liked.

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I suppose that, strictly speaking, this isn’t a Western (because it’s not set in the American West, or even the West of Australia) but it shares a lot of characteristics with those kinds of frontier dramas, where (white) settlers are put in precarious situations due to their low socioeconomic status and lack of protections afforded by ‘opening up’ a country not previously inhabited by them. But as this film knows all too well, that kind of work doesn’t lead to great outcomes for indigenous populations, and while it’s based on a classic 19th century Australian short story, it’s also very keen (being written and directed by an Aboriginal woman director) to strike out in a new direction that can acknowledge the complicated history and stories being interwoven here. Which is all by way of making it sound pretty dull and well-meaning, when actually this has a lot of the striking widescreen compositions and tense drama that the best of the Western genre brings, plus some excellent lead performances from the director herself in the title role, plus Sam Reid as a well-educated indigenous man who come across her cabin and who she tries to help. By the end I felt invested in the story, even if not every element worked so well for me (the music had a tendency to push a little hard at times).

CREDITS
Director/Writer Leah Purcell; Cinematographer Mark Wareham; Starring Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid; Length 104 minutes.
Seen in flight from Auckland to Nouméa, Saturday 8 October 2022.

In My Blood It Runs (2019)

It’s the end of my themed week of films by Australian women directors, so here’s a film I have seen while actually visiting Australia. I could have gone to see the Miss Fisher film (although strictly speaking it’s not directed by a woman), but instead I chose to see this one about Aboriginal people that touches on all kinds of issues that permeate many societies, my own included, but are specific perhaps in their details to this place.

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It’s fair to say that Australia certainly has its problems, none more vexed than around the treatment of Aboriginal Australians. The legacy of colonialism, brought by the British, means that many are more or less confined to rural areas where inadequate support is provided for education and employment, and it’s through the case of one child (Dujuan) that this documentary focuses itself, and it credits Dujuan and his family as co-directors of the piece (some of his video footage is seen during the film too, meaning he’s an assistant cinematographer too). Dujuan is being brought up by his family to know about his own culture and language, while also being given an education by a Northern Territories school that seems to little understand or care for his cultural background (a schoolteacher absentmindedly laughing off her lack of understanding of Aboriginal beliefs is pure condescension). As a result he is unhappy and finds himself at odds with the state, which is increasingly under pressure for its violent and repressive treatment of young ‘delinquents’ who fall through the gaps (and as one on-screen statistic points out, 100% of NT youth being held in detention are Aboriginals). But while the film itself is never strident, it makes clear the need for changes and for better understanding and empathy towards the young kids being left behind.

CREDITS
Director/Cinematographer Maya Newell; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Wednesday 4 March 2020.

The Nightingale (2018)

Some of the best Australian films really plumb the bleakness at the heart of (their/our) society, and you get the sense that some of that violence and nastiness goes back to the (European, colonialist) foundations of the modern country. That’s certainly the history that Jennifer Kent is confronting with The Nightingale, which took a year or two to get a release in the UK.

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Ah yes, the history of Australia: it’s a bit like American history in some respects. It can get quite dark, and The Nightingale is a film that’s intent on peering into that darkness. It’s not a genre film in the way that the same director’s The Babadook (2014) was, except in so far as it plays with a rape-revenge narrative. It tells a gnarly, suffocating tale of British colonialism and state-sanctioned violence, as young officer Lt Hawkins (Sam Claflin) heads north from his rural posting in Van Diemen’s Land (modern Tasmania) to the local city in order to seek a promotion, despite his clearly being unfit for command due to his sadistic violence and inability to discipline his troops (well, perhaps those qualities can’t truly be said to disqualify anyone from command in most colonialist enterprises). Aisling Franciosi’s Clare is the prime object of Hawkins’ violent tendencies, at least at the start of the film, and this section presents a bit of an endurance test (let’s just say that she at least starts the film with a husband and a baby), as the film sets out the circumstances for her pursuit of Hawkins.

Clare begins the film as someone who has been transported to Australia due to a criminal conviction, and the grinding circumstances of criminality, poverty and lack of opportunity, combined with the high-handedness of the British authorities, creates a toxic environment of bitterness and hatred that extends not just within the British settlements but outwards towards the native Aboriginal inhabitants of the country, and at no point does the director spare us from the language or the violence used in pursuit of colonialism. Indeed, at a certain level this film reminded me of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), but only if that film were remade to remove all the elements that make it appealing to cinema audiences, and left only the brute fact of colonial violence and exploitation.

I can’t say that I entirely loved The Nightingale, but I feel as if it fits into a context of films which confront something in history that few films seem prepared to do, territory that in recent Australian cinema is occupied by Sweet Country as one example, though very few other films that have been distributed here in the UK, at least.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Jennifer Kent; Cinematographer Radek Ladczuk; Starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman; Length 136 minutes.
Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Saturday 30 November 2019.

Jasper Jones (2017)

For the next two weeks I’m in Australia, and even though I’ve already done one Australia theme week, here’s another. I probably don’t have enough films left to manage even one more week, to be honest, so I’m not sure what the theme will be next week, but here goes a few more Oz flicks.

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Small town Australia in 1969 has the kind of vibe we’ve become accustomed to in American films about the 1950s, of communities made up of like-minded individuals with pent-up issues around women and racism that resolve themselves in violent, self-lacerating ways — the same director has already handled this very time period (albeit in a comedic musical format) with Bran Nue Dae (2009), while Celia (1989) deals with a similar small town vibe (albeit set in the 1950s). Jasper Jones is named after the part-Aborigine boy (played by Aaron L. McGrath) who is distrusted and blamed by most of this small community, but it’s really mostly about a kid called Charlie (Levi Miller) who gets involved with the (possible) suicide of a girl in the town, which he spends much of the movie trying to uncover the truth about. It’s a stylish evocation of a period, and is mostly very successful, with some fine filmmaking and acting (not least from the ever-reliable Toni Collette). After the initial shock of them finding the girl’s dead body, glimpsed only briefly (thankfully), the tone evens out into being a slow-burning drama about the secrets being hidden within this community. It may not perhaps be surprising, but it’s all done very well.

CREDITS
Director Rachel Perkins; Writers Shaun Grant and Craig Silvey (based on Silvey’s novel); Cinematographer Mark Wareham; Starring Levi Miller, Aaron L. McGrath, Angourie Rice, Toni Collette, Hugo Weaving; Length 105 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Sunday 22 December 2019.

Bran Nue Dae (2009)

A friend suggested my recent Australian cinema week was lacking in bright and cheerful musicals, and short of re-watching something by Baz Luhrmann, this musical from ten years ago fits the bill rather nicely, and also focuses on Aboriginal communities.

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This isn’t a perfect film: it has an underlying cheesiness to it, a sort of sentimental cheerfulness that sometimes seems at odds with its story, and yet it’s at heart delightful and criticising it would feel wilfully cynical. The film is based on a stage musical, though it certainly doesn’t hide that — and the way characters will break into song and choreographed dance is one of the pleasures of the form, after all. It presents Aboriginal Australian lives in the late-60s in what feels like an ahistorical way, but it also doesn’t hide some of the unfairness of the way they’re treated as a group: it just couches this in a gaudily-coloured musical ensemble treatment. This is a film about characters who have all the same generic desires as American teenagers in films made 10 years or more before this one is set (the concession to the late-60s moment is a VW van driven by two hippies, although the young man’s German accent is surely one of the worst in recent memory), but set in the Australian outback. There are times when the forced cheerfulness feels so positively sugary that I felt a bit queasy, but I can’t fault its heart and the colourful staging by director Rachel Perkins and DoP Andrew Lesnie.

CREDITS
Director Rachel Perkins; Writers Reg Cribb and Perkins (based on the musical by Jimmy Chi); Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie; Starring Rocky McKenzie, Ernie Dingo, Jessica Mauboy, Geoffrey Rush; Length 85 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 23 September 2019.

Films by Warwick Thornton

In my week focusing on Australian films, I’ve already covered some modern classics including Aboriginal director Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993) and a number of documentaries interrogating Australia’s colonialist and racist societal dynamics, notably Another Country (2015). Warwick Thornton is probably the most prominent director from an Aboriginal background currently working in the country, and over the course of a number of short films and two features has burrowed into this history, stepping back to the 1920s with his most recent feature Sweet Country.

Two Recent Australian Documentaries: Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) and Another Country (2015)

Australia, like a lot of Western countries, has a demonstrable problem with white nationalism and racism, and a number of recent documentaries directed by women have addressed this issue head-on. This racism, a holdover from the colonialist politics of the British (the country only gained its independence at the start of the 20th century), is directed not just towards the indigenous Aboriginal population but also towards those seeking refuge and asylum from nearby conflict zones (this latter dealt with admirably by Gabrielle Brady’s Island of the Hungry Ghosts). An increasing number of feature films, including those by Aboriginal filmmakers like Warwick Thornton as well as (rather more eliptically) beDevil (1993) by Tracey Moffatt, have examined some of this prejudice historically and as it functions today, and it’s also the subject of director Molly Reynolds in Another Country, which follows the experience of prominent actor David Gulpilil (probably still best known as the boy in Walkabout, and from his appearances in the Crocodile Dundee films). It’s worth noting here that, while I wouldn’t want to sideline his troubling personal history (which includes alcoholism, violence and domestic abuse), it is undoubtedly deeply tied into the conditions still experienced by Aboriginal people in Australia, and some of this comes across powerfully in the documentary.

beDevil (1993)

Following contemporary women-authored stories set amongst communities within white Australia, like Celia (1989) and The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), it took artist and photographer Tracey Moffatt to become the first woman of Aboriginal background to make a feature film, one distinctive and idiosyncratic enough that she never did make another. I saw it at Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered festival, a fantastic long weekend of cinema which is modelled after Il Cinema Ritrovato, and takes place at the end of July each year.

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An extraordinarily stylish one-of-a-kind film (not least because director Tracey Moffatt never made another feature), it has a heightened unreality that recalls not just studio-bound 50s Hollywood hothouse melodramas but arthouse experiments like Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) or Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982). The three ghost stories share not just this visual stylisation but the way they leap between past and present with ease, for these are not just stories, but collective memories or perhaps cultural touchstones, channelling a sort of Australian mythology that (for a change) isn’t rooted just in white men ‘going bush’, but a wide variety of ethnic identities, not least Moffatt’s Aboriginal roots. It’s quite possible the range of reference points is too specific for me (a non-Australian) to pick up on much of it, but it’s a heady watch all the same, a knowing wink at the audience without the suffocating irony and cynicism that too many directors of the 90s considered cool. Maybe that’s why it never made much of a splash at the time, but it’s ripe (in every sense) for rediscovery.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Tracey Moffatt; Cinematographer Geoff Burton; Starring Tracey Moffatt, Lex Marinos; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Watershed, Bristol, Saturday 28 July 2018.