It seems a good opportunity to talk about film and nationhood, given that so many of this year’s local films – not only A Family but Alice, Buoyancy, and Animals – were shot overseas, with foreign casts. As part of MIFF, I appeared on a panel that discussed the fact that very few Australian movies are set in our cities: directors tend to default to the bush and the outback, despite the fact that almost 90% of the population lives in urban areas. The majority of our daily experience is simply not reflected on film. Although Melbourne and Sydney can be dressed up to look like any number of international destinations, they are rarely called upon to play themselves. It has become apparent that Australian cinema is visually avoiding our cities – and avoiding contemporary culture as a result.
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Of all films this year, I was most looking forward to Richard Billingham’s fiction feature debut, Ray & Liz. Billingham is one of our greatest working photographers, known for his series Zoo, in which he observes the inhabitants of a run-down tourist attraction in Dudley, England. At this Midlands institution, the lions, bears, apes, and rhinos have all seen better days. These pictures are remarkable for their lack of life force. A languid giraffe mills around, its great neck rendered comically useless by a small enclosure. Tigers and lions have no room to prowl; they are reduced to pacing the same few steps, their gestures cut short by bars. These apex predators have been brought to their knees – not through acts of violence, but by the rhythms of the institution, which have deadened and dulled their hunting instincts. Unable to exhaust themselves, they dawdle or lie down, their massive energies still coiled inside them.
Throughout his career, Billingham has been fascinated by a particular kind of torpor: an animal ferocity made meek through restriction and repetition. It is the mixture of lethargy and rage that makes his characters so distinctive. In Ray & Liz, we watch the daily routines of a family in ’80s Birmingham. In their cramped council flat, there is no space to think, let alone move: the soundtrack is clotted thick with other people’s sighs, breathing, and swallowing. Two adults stalk the undersized rooms: the quick-to-anger mother (Ella Smith) and the subdued father (Justin Salinger). The mother alternates between brutality and resignation; when she’s not yelling she kills time with chain-smoking, jigsaws, and needlework. Meanwhile, the two young sons marinate in boredom, their vigor already going to seed.
As a result, these children don’t quite believe in reality or change. The family has no regard for itself or for its bleak surroundings. Whatever fierceness these bodies once possessed – ambition, sexual drive, the need for physical exercise – has been forcefully domesticated out of them. Even a pet dog does not provide spirit or companionship; it lives in a small cardboard box, confined to one corner.
A soft, ineffectual uncle named Lol (Tony Way) comes to visit. He, at least, has an ounce of fellow feeling; in a rant that is hapless but still humanist, he rails against the evils of fascism (a point of view that can no longer be taken for granted). However, Lol is destined to be humiliated by both the mother and the young lodger she seems to fancy. Will (Sam Gittins) is lean, sly, and angular, the one sleek animal in the pack; this bloated household is easy pickings for him.
The sadistic Will is alone in pursuing the possibilities of action. The flat is a reflection of the parents’ long-standing inertia: the peeling walls are covered with posters, illustrations of beauty or eroticism entirely irrelevant to the family’s existence. Some have a chocolate-box prettiness, testament to the cold comforts of Thatcher’s England. But the most arresting images are of animals: a painted tiger looks incredulously onto the domestic scene. Although somewhat faded, the wildlife on the walls have more vitality than the whole household put together; these creatures are markers of energy and curiosity, much more than the glassy-eyed specimens they live with. In a reversal of Billingham’s Zoo photos, it is the animals who are scandalized by all the life going to waste here: tigers, owls, and dogs witness human bodies compressed and stunted over time.
Years later, we see that the father (played as an older man by Patrick Romer) has decided to put his body to bed for good – he lives in one room, subsisting on sleep and alcohol, opening the window only to take a smoke. For Ray, it is a relief to have finally disposed of his urges: his body is now safely tamped down, sodden with layers of drink and blankets.
As a photographer, Billingham’s primary interest has been in captive animals and their audiences. In Ray & Liz, he brings his forensic attention to the subjects on offer: dead-eyed, unresponsive, marking time in their cubicles. When the camera does venture outdoors, it can pick up wonders: strange blobs of pearlescent light in the sky, captured by cinematographer Daniel Landin, who worked on the equally oppressive Under the Skin (2013). But these glimpses are all too rare in a culture where passions are regarded as liabilities. Ray may not have had a tiger’s grace or magnificence, but he was the one adult who seemed capable of something fine, offering a humorous or sensitive word rather than a put-down. That he spends his days anesthetized, a mass rising and falling under a blanket, is a tragedy rather than an inevitability.
Matthias & Maxime, by the prolific 30-year-old Canadian Xavier Dolan, is a welcome burst of energy: a barrage of fast cuts and offhand allusions. The editing is both expressionist and representational, the visual correlative of the in-jokes that link a gang of intimate friends. This is a group of people bound by unusual word choices and references (Dolan can’t resist naming two of them Rivette and Ruiz), but their camaraderie jumps off the page. We get a sense of the way cinematic glamour injects itself into real relationships when feelings arise after a scripted kiss, and one guy casually frames the “bedroom eyes” of another with his hands.
Identities are at stake in this play of word and image. You need to see this film for its portrait of a Montréal Valley Girl (Camille Felton), who uses a California accent as shorthand for sarcasm and attitude. English is the language of cliché and trope here, of ideas picked up by the chunk. Dolan seems amused by this local version of a “basic bitch,” while looking with the concern of a native Quebecois as US slang supplants French ideas, meme by meme.
This is Dolan’s most sheerly fun and delightful film – looser, livelier, and less restrictively stylized than his early work. Like his previous film, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018), it is open to emotional risk: unafraid of the kind of intensity that could be mistaken for sentiment. In Matthias & Maxime, Dolan shows a great feeling for bodies, using the continuous surprise of his editing to set them in dance-like motion (the early scenes are cut like a sizzling showreel, comparable to the opening of Christopher Honoré’s similarly themed Sorry Angel, 2018). The quick-witted style is a reflection of the humor that continues to bind these childhood friends, a sensibility that has been stifled in the adult corporate world. The film treats its characters’ feelings with gravity, but also parodies their self-seriousness – as when a stricken Matthieu (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) throws himself down and tries to brood, but is foiled by the wave motions of his waterbed.
With his last two features, Dolan is becoming a more intriguing, unpredictable director than earlier films such as Tom at the Farm (2013) might suggest. Although The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (not screening at MIFF) opened at Toronto to scathing reviews, it is an emotionally committed film about a highly unusual subject: men blossoming under the eyes of women. It is less interested in its fanboy protagonist (Ben Schnetzer) or its title character (a closeted teen idol played by Kit Harington) than in great performances from actresses, who carry the film’s weight: Thandie Newton, Amara Karan, Kathy Bates, and a never-better Natalie Portman.
Newton enters the film as a stock character: Audrey, a jaded journalist who comes to appreciate that her subject is the real deal. However, this tired narrative device is exploded by Newton’s acting: Audrey never stops thinking and feeling during the interview, crackling with wit and derision that give way to intellectual curiosity. Against the odds, the film portrays fandom as a nourishing experience, the gift of being in total thrall to an image that any of us would be lucky to share.
Dolan’s gift for working with cliché is evident in the soundtrack; he chooses absolutely commonplace songs and makes them newly affecting. The film kicks off with Adele’s ubiquitous “Rolling in the Deep,” its signature refrain “We could have had it all” hitting between the eyes just as Harington’s face comes into focus. Dolan manages to squeeze the last vestiges of feeling out of the old chestnut “Stand By Me” for the young hero’s tearing scene with his mother (Portman). And even that perennial wedding theme, The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony,” is given a chance to shine, spiraling away as Audrey reluctantly reconciles herself to the value of a mere “human interest” story. Here again, Dolan takes clichéd emotional beats and makes them hit home.
At the start of Friedkin Uncut, Francesco Zippel shows filmmaker William Friedkin making comparisons between Hitler and Jesus, as evidence that people have “many sides.” It is the right approach for a film about the director of The Exorcist (1973) and Sorcerer (1977). Friedkin specialized in a kind of sparkling diabolicism that seems characteristic of ’70s cinema. He had an appetite for excitement and sensation that enabled unlikely hits; his best-known work has a glittering sense of evil. The Exorcist contains one of the most ghastly sequences on film, in which a young girl receiving a brain scan is blasted with horrifying, high-contrast images inside the machine (the director’s cut, released in 2000, is very effective in prolonging this torture for the audience).
For the most part, Zippel sticks to popular consensus on which films are worth talking about, giving the bulk of his attention to The French Connection (which is rather less suspenseful than its fame suggests), The Exorcist, and Killer Joe (2011), a bracing but minor work which happens to star Matthew McConaughey. There is not nearly enough time for Sorcerer or Cruising (1980): both bleak, beautiful films that are hypnotic rather than just sensational. While Sorcerer flopped, with critics blaming the misleading title, it is an electrifying film that does evoke a sadistic magician behind the scenes.
With Cruising, a murder mystery set in New York’s male S&M community, Friedkin lived up to his reputation for nasty glamour, showing a cop (Al Pacino) irresistibly drawn into the underground scene. The film was understandably picketed, given that its extreme violence was one of very few depictions of homosexuality in cinema at the time.
However, to this contemporary viewer, Cruising is intoxicating, locking us into its jittery rhythms right from the start. Today we can only look in awe on its vision of New York as a grimy, glamorous playground, a pre-AIDS culture with tantalizing forms of role-play on offer. Having experienced the volatility of S&M, it seems impossible for the protagonist to return to a staid girlfriend (Karen Allen) and a prescribed relationship.
Throughout the documentary, Friedkin is a very grand talker, glorying in his seat-of-the-pants reputation (“Rehearsal is for sissies”). His self-image is reflected in the way actors speak about him (McConaughey describes his style as “let it rip” and “no fucking around,” or as Juno Temple puts it, “Fucking bring it!”). He has a coterie of famous admirers (Wes Anderson, Edgar Wright, Tarantino) and is known as a blowhard with unusual sensitivity, good at crafting character and great with a one-liner. There’s no doubt about his eye for the freak moment: Friedkin personally chose the technician who played the radiographer in The Exorcist, impressed by the way he handled a needle. The man turned out to be serial killer Paul Bateson!
First-time director Zippel doesn’t go beyond simplistic illustrations of talking points, nor does he probe Friedkin’s complicated relationship with women, other than blandly observing that the films have some good female roles. I would have liked to hear more about the director’s reputation for getting terrified reactions from actresses, including Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist and Gina Gershon in Killer Joe. According to Burstyn, Friedkin’s refusal to relent during an action scene left her with permanent spinal damage, for which he has never apologized, even though they were in a relationship at the time.
In his personal life, Friedkin pulled off an impressive feat, which the film makes little mention of. Confoundingly, he has married two of the most formidable women in film history – iconic actress Jeanne Moreau and Sherry Lansing, the first female head of a Hollywood studio. However, while Lansing may have been a pioneer in terms of gender, she promoted exactly the kind of corporatized cinema Friedkin’s generation were fighting against; under her regime, stars and directors were assembled as part of an agency package. How does Friedkin feel about that? It’s hard to put the facts of the director’s history together – let alone a serial killer – but Zippel doesn’t even try.
A Family, a debut shot in the Ukraine by an Australian director, feels neither Eastern-European nor Australian. Instead, Jayden Stevens’s film behaves almost exactly like a product of the Greek New Wave, in the vein of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Chevalier (2015) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009). As in those films, the plot is a preposterous diagram involving human beings, where feelings are twisted to accommodate a design for living. It has a stark synopsis that deserves to be delivered deadpan, so here it is: A morose man holds auditions for new family members, having misplaced his own or found them inadequate. These actors must perform as a family for his camera, never deviating from a script.
A Family has a bland, normcore look to set off the extravagance of its premise, as if the merest hint of visual style would upset its banality – and the film is determined to be the driest of the dry. The wan faces, nondescript apartment, and forlorn surroundings create the feeling of a single-camera sitcom, in which wacky actions pass without comment.
The protagonist ends up casting a jolly round-headed actor as his father; this man is required to sustain beaming good vibes for the length of a take. Everyone plays out visions of family togetherness gleaned from commercials, before falling into glumness post-cut. They are put through experimental acting techniques, humming to get themselves on the same wavelength. Improvised touches – such as when an actor tries out a “rakish” gesture or wears leopard-print – are not welcome, but points are given for fond looks and convincing warmth.
This approach doesn’t seem so different from Mike Leigh’s famous acting method, in which he has his cast sift through memories and build up a shared back-story, before progressing to scenes set in the present day. The film might also describe the kind of emotional autism seen in the recent Greek comedy Pity (2018), which has a similar protagonist, heartlessly insistent on visual conditions. In A Family, the goal seems to be a spotless mind and memory. If your own family didn’t shape up, here’s one who will.
Overall Stevens follows a template that has been well-established for a decade, since Dogtooth. He does not add much stylistically: the dialogue consists of the short declarative phrases, delivered with stilted abruptness, that we know from Lanthimos. As in Lanthimos, emotions are militantly enforced, with imperatives such as “You can now relax”; the acting is a combination of mannerism with flat line readings.
However, one reason why Lanthimos’s career has continued to thrive (even when Alps, 2011, and The Lobster, 2015, felt like retreads of Dogtooth) is that he has maintained high standards of weirdness for his characters’ actions. The behavior we witness in A Family is only mildly strange. Is it so unlikely that being part of a family requires a degree of rehearsal and performance? Even if we aren’t all consciously going through the motions, we are often invited to make up the numbers in other people’s lives, sometimes for decorative purposes. Like speed-dating, “casting” for family seems like an ideal solution to loneliness – and one can help the process along by provided a suggested script. The hard part is getting everyone to stay in character.
A Family is at its best when it moves from po-faced farce to genuine oddity, such as when the protagonist reveals he has only been taught a certain section of the alphabet. Does this explain his incomplete reading of the world: the fact that he’s always behind the beat, missing everyone else’s cues? And the idea of filming in the Ukraine, rather than Australia – even though most scenes were shot indoors – was certainly inspired, if puzzling. Did translating the script into Ukrainian – a language the director does not speak – give it the opacity it needed for an Australian audience? Was Melbourne insufficiently drab?
It seems a good opportunity to talk about film and nationhood, given that so many of this year’s local films – not only A Family but Alice, Buoyancy, and Animals – were shot overseas, with foreign casts. As part of MIFF, I appeared on a panel that discussed the fact that very few Australian movies are set in our cities: directors tend to default to the bush and the outback, despite the fact that almost 90% of the population lives in urban areas. The majority of our daily experience is simply not reflected on film. Although Melbourne and Sydney can be dressed up to look like any number of international destinations, they are rarely called upon to play themselves. It has become apparent that Australian cinema is visually avoiding our cities – and avoiding contemporary culture as a result.
Part of the issue may be that Australian cities do not have an established filmic character – unlike, say, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, or even Baltimore (a completely convincing fictional space, thanks to John Waters, Barry Levinson, and The Wire). Without making structural adjustments, one cannot film a plausible rom-com, an action thriller, or even a sex-and-shopping movie like Pretty Woman (1990) in Australia any more than one might shoot a fairytale in a suburb. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, the protagonist questions his reality because he cannot imagine himself to be a man of action, whose gestures are significant to the storyline. Can we imagine Melbourne on film to be a place of action, that drives narratives? Does it have visual legitimacy?
Steering clear of our cities is necessarily an avoidance of diversity – the casts of Australian film and TV are startlingly homogenous, nowhere near the levels of inclusion that US, UK, Canadian, and New Zealand viewers take for granted. Rather than exploring our changing urban centers, Australian cinema sticks to landscapes, where the same character types can be recycled over and over. Strangely, considering our demographics, the outback film is seen as being far-reaching and all-Australian, while the local urban film – particularly one with a diverse cast – is regarded as a niche item. When Australian films do cast actors of color as leads, they tend to be international stars such as Dev Patel or Lupita Nyong’o. Local nonwhite actors have difficulty being considered mainstream. Many of them – Geraldine Viswanathan, Stephany Jacobsen, Dichen Lachman – have had to travel overseas in order to be seen as believable onscreen.
That seems unlikely to shift in the near future. Australia does not have the same faith in stardom as Hollywood or French cinema. Instead of a regular turnover of stars, who might provide new ideals of style and charisma, we use the same stalwart performers again and again, especially when it comes to male actors. One veteran can be exchanged for another: no particular actor is seen as indispensable.
How can the face of Australian cinema ever change? One might look to the examples of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, comparable deserts as far as diversity is concerned. Much has been made of the near-total whiteness of these directors’ films. But I don’t think it would make much difference if Allen or Scorsese were to cast, say, black or Latin actors in supporting parts. Looking quietly dignified in the background never did anyone much good. Change could only occur if the camera were to believe in an actor of color, the way it believes in Diane Keaton and Robert De Niro. It would need to see the star as singular and irreplaceable: not one of many, just the one.
