/ 11 July 1997

Down under on the up

As the Australian Film Festival gets under way in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we look at the peculiarities of their cinema

Howard Feinstein

WHO can forget the over-the-top talking heads and flashy gestures in Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom? The loud anti-heroine and her siblings in PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding? Or the bizarre sisters and the half-man- half-fish they compete for in Shirley Bassett’s Love Serenade, not to mention the manic pianist in Scott Hicks’s Shine? Or, now and forever, Terence Stamp and co in drag in Priscilla: Queen of the Desert?

Australian film is on a roll. Loud, garish, camp – and commercially successful. But, oddly, the world is not seeing the best of Australian film. What we have been presented with – outside of festivals like the one currently on in South Africa – is the “export version” with its kitsch, weirdos and scatological exchanges. Meanwhile, Australia has been producing less eccentric movies. These films – more believable and profound explorations of the Australian sense of separateness – have often not only failed to find a release abroad but have found few takers at home. Even stranger, while America and Europe begin to celebrate Australian cinema, its golden age may already be over because of government cutbacks.

Since 1975, the Australian Film Commission and, since 1988, the Australian Film Finance Corporation, have provided marketing and financial support to the local industry. But the film-industry magazine Variety says: “International kudos for Oz pics in 1997 … has been offset by … audience indifference toward local product.” Australia may have cornered the world market in outsized eccentrics, but according to Sue Murray, director of marketing for the commission: “The comedies encompassing the wry humour of the everyday have not travelled so well.”

Creating outsize mannerisms for a receptive foreign market infuriates many Australians. David Rooney, an Australian expat who heads the Variety bureau in Rome, says: “These camp films reflect a self-loathing, a nastiness about Australian provincialism put on display for foreign audiences.”

The actress Judy Davis is returning to Australian films after eight years away, playing an activist who is impregnated by Stalin on his last night alive in debut director Peter Duncan’s brilliant black comedy, Children of the Revolution. She says: “White Australia has grown up with the international perception that there was this country down in the southern ocean that was essentially a penal colony. So Australia’s obsession with what other countries think of it makes perfect sense. It’s neurotic.”

Australian film-makers have stretched their eccentrics into the realm of insanity. Michael Ryman’s Angel Baby (1995) stars Irish actor John Lynch and Jacqueline MacKenzie as schizophrenics and Mark Joffe’s Cosi (1997) is a loathsome comedy about the inmates of a lunatic asylum who secretly mount a production of Cosi fan tutte.

The best-known “Australian” film-maker who showed marginal characters without excessive embellishment is New Zealand transplant Jane Campion. The title character in Campion’s first feature Sweetie is an overweight, living id, who hides in trees and throws tantrums. Campion skews her angles, but imposes no other artifice in depicting this misfit and her dysfunctional lower-middle- class family.

Greek-born Nadia Tass, another of the many gifted women directors working in Australia (it’s no accident that the rise of its film industry in the 1970s paralleled that of the feminist movement), went unnoticed at home with Mr Reliable.

But Australia is such a strange place. The uniqueness apparent in its cinema was there from the beginning of its settlement by whites, as you can understand if you read The Fatal Shore, in which Robert Hughes labels it the “geographical unconscious” – a place demonised by Britain – “that was to become the continent of sin”.

“We were the fatal Antipodes,” says Variety’s Rooney, “where everything cultural could fit on a postage stamp. Australian film-makers have dealt with it by focusing on the opposite: tacky suburbia. It’s the opposite of the American indie concept of cool.” Australian film-makers go for the “cultural underdog”, people in towns where no one knows what to wear or read.

For many directors, this has meant leaving Sydney to delve into a personal past they left behind. It’s no accident that these movies set in the ‘burbs are often coming- of-age tales, like Bruce Beresford’s terrific Puberty Blues (1981), about teenage girls in the surfer boy scene, and John Duigan’s The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and Flirting (1991).

But whether the films are set in provincial townships or urban centres or in the future, like the Mad Maxes, almost all hate authority – hardly surprising given the genesis of white Australia. As a sausage salesman in Mr Reliable scolds a stupid policeman: “I won’t have anyone, especially another Australian, telling me where I can or cannot barbecue!” Muriel and Strictly Ballroom’s Scott Hastings take up against their folks; David Helfgott flees his tyrannical father in Shine; a betrayed Aborigine mows down whites in Jimmie Blacksmith; and everyone rebels against the leadership in Flirting, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and Fred Schepisi’s The Devil’s Playground (1976), all set in boarding schools.

Picnic At Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career showed the power Australia’s huge spaces have on its better film artists, many of whom lose their bearings in Hollywood: consider Phillip Noyce’s The Saint, a far cry from his sharp Dead Calm, Bruce Beresford’s silly Paradise Road, or anything Fred Schepisi has done outside Australia.

As Wally affectionately tells his new wife at the unexpected conclusion of Mr Reliable: “It’s a strange bloody country, Beryl.”