Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Ever since the release of Ozzie director Peter Weir’s Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and, perhaps more significantly, Bruce Beresford’s `Breaker’ Morant (1979), South African film-makers have been notoriously envious of the Australian film industry, and with good reason.
`Breaker’ Morant, which tells the story of three Australian soldiers court-martialled for murdering Boer prisoners, is the only cinematic evocation of South Africa’s “great” war.
And then there’s Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), which too deals with issues that pertain to South Africa.
Based on a novel by Thomas Keneally, it tells the tale of a half-caste (read coloured) man who, on the eve of the federation of Australian states in 1900, discovers he has no rights and declares virtual war in a mass of killings.
Apart from the hard dramas, Australian film-makers have excelled in producing wacky comedies. International hits Crocodile Dundee, Strictly Ballroom and Muriel’s Wedding spring to mind.
Years earlier, comedian Barry Humphries, of Dame Edna fame, scored a hit with Les Patterson Saves The World, a coarse comedy that closely resembles a local Leon Schuster movie. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as South Africans film-makes have got in terms of feature film-making.
The Australians also have to their credit one of the finest and grisliest movies ever made – John Hillcoat’s Ghosts … of The Civil Dead. The film’s brilliance lies in the fact that it has no single sympathetic character – everyone is a bastard and the mix of pornography, murder and rape is dealt with raw flair.
Basically, next to the French, the Ozzies are the best “art movie” makers in the world. And yet their movies remain defiantly commercial.
Cathy Robinson of the Australian Commission, who visited this country over the past two years and consulted with the Department of Arts and Culture as well as industry players, said to me: “The success of our [film] industry, I believe, is that we’re parochial to such an extent that we’re universal.”
It was the governments of John Grey Gorton and Gough Whitlam that spurred a massive revival of the Australian film industry more than twenty years ago.
Oz films still compete with Hollywood products Down Under, but there’s enough of a market for home-grown products to see local film-makers thrive both at home and abroad. In fact, Schepisi, Weir and Philip Noyce (Newsfront) now work in the United States.
As critic McKenzie Wark noted: “Australian screen culture takes advantage of what art critic Paul Taylor called `positive unoriginality’ – the unself-conscious borrowing of what works from others, its mixing and matching with earlier borrowings and conventions.”
Australian film-makers are not afraid to be commercial, but they always revel in a home-grown sense of kitsch and provincialism.
Take this week’s latest Australian release, The Castle, which was conceived by the team behind a hit Australian television series, Frontline (a send up of smart alec current affairs journalism).
The Castle is a broad, funny movie about Darryl Kerrigan (played by Michael Caton) – a naive, good-hearted tow truck driver who lives with his family in a rundown house on the edge of Melbourne airport. To Kerrigan it is not just a house, it’s a very happy home. So when the council plans to expand the airport, he takes the matter to court.
It’s the classic “little man versus the system” story that American film-makers have used as a plot strategy for years. The film is not as gentle or self-effacing as most Australian movies, but it’s still a real gas. We are caught between sympathising with the Kerrigan family and then laughing condescendingly at their simple-mindedness and kitsch though endearing lifestyle.
The Castle is quirky stuff indeed, but it was the biggest money-spinning film at the Australia’s box office in the past year.
What’s more, the film educates in the way it explores the legal system. The sympathetic solicitor who defends the family is no expert in litigious matters. He takes on the case when persuaded that a “man’s home is his castle”, but because of his lack of experience, he loses the case. Enter a retired Queen’s Counsel who saves the day.
South African film-makers should take note when watching Australian movies, whether it be Doing Time for Patsy Cline or The Castle.
Both films mix humour (Patsy Cline has more low-key laughs) and social realism, but what is more important is that they don’t try to tell the whole bloody story of the country.
You know how everyone carps on about “when is there going to be the `great South African movie'”? Well, in Australia they’ve got the right recipe; there’s no all- encompassing major movie, just loads of gems.