Indice dei contenuti per No. 201 in Metro

With The Nightingale (2018), her follow-up to the acclaimed The Babadook (2014), writer/director Jennifer Kent contributes to the ongoing cinematic process of reframing Australia’s closely held mythology around colonisation and nationhood as one rooted in a genocidal war of attrition. While the most recent, and stark, manifestation of this process was seen in Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017), we can also look to older examples such as John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005), Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and more. Yet, while The Nightingale does follow in the footsteps of these grim historical dramas, it is also, arguably, angrier and more ambitious. A relentlessly confronting and violent drama in the rape-revenge model, the film seeks not just to dramatise the inherently oppressive…

It starts with a wide shot of a department store. Looking at it, it’s hard to tell what era we’re in. The building has Art Deco details, but the people are too far away, too small for us to use fashion as an indicator. Then there’s a close-up of a package – intriguingly made out to the ‘Adventuresses’ Club’ – which we follow until the camera pulls back, passes through a doorway and shows us a grand Victorian mansion. It’s Labassa, Melbourne’s storied homestead turned flats turned bohemian hub turned National Trust treasure and popular film and wedding location.1 For our purposes, however, it isn’t Labassa at all; it’s the headquarters of the Adventuresses’ Club, and it will feature throughout all four movie-length episodes of 2019 Seven Network series Ms…

The history of cinema is one defined by the tension between possibility and constraint: constraint, because filmmaking has so often wrestled with serious limitations, be they technical, commercial or political; and possibility, because, in the face of these challenges, artistry has nonetheless flourished, from the great achievements of the silent era to the radical and ambitious underground works that have emerged without the support of established funding bodies.1 It’s hard to think of a contemporary figure in the film world who better embodies that struggle than Jafar Panahi – nor many other national cinemas that have served as a backdrop for it quite so acutely as that of his homeland, Iran. It’s fitting, then, that his latest work, 3 Faces (2018), has both of those at its centre: the plight…

The 2019 documentary 2040 takes a small-scale situation (the lives of writer/director Damon Gameau’s immediate family) and pairs it with a big idea (climate change) to create a unique blend of pedagogy and personalisation. The film starts and ends with present-day scenes of Gameau with his wife, Zoë, and their young daughter, Velvet, planting trees. Gameau frames the film around the concept of approaching the future through his daughter’s eyes: he wants to explore what life will be like for her in adulthood. Acknowledging today’s often gloomy, dystopian visions of the future, especially from an environmental perspective, he comments that we are ‘renting the Earth from our children’ and admits that he feels he owes it to Velvet to explore more sustainable possibilities. 2040’s tagline – ‘Join the Regeneration’ –…

It feels like there’s more than one legacy at stake in The Eulogy (2018), Janine Hosking’s documentary about Geoffrey Tozer. Most immediately, the film aims to bring the life, work and legacy of the Australian pianist and composer – whom it largely presents as being unfairly neglected by the local arts scene despite his numerous accomplishments – back into the public consciousness. But The Eulogy also draws heavily on the connection of former prime minister Paul Keating to Tozer, particularly in the form of the titular forty-five-minute eulogy that he delivered at Tozer’s funeral in October 2009.1 Added to this is the on-screen guiding presence of celebrated Australian conductor and music educator Richard Gill, who died in October 2018. Hosking explicitly asks us to consider the question ‘What went wrong?’…

Documentary offered itself as the form par excellence for affirmation film, partly because it is cheaper and easier to do tolerably than fiction, partly because of its historical association with progressive movements, and especially for its supposed special relationship to reality.—Richard Dyer1 The police didn’t like seeing a lot of homosexuals together being happy, and they wanted to put us away for that and that seemed to be our crime. From being like an outsider in society, a deviant or what society sort of chooses to call us, we didn’t have any legal protection then. We were outside of the law.—unnamed lesbian 78er2 ‘Fearless’ was the theme for the 2019 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. This upbeat festival branding nods to the courage required to live an authentic identity,…

Lauren (Miranda Tapsell) is a confident young Aboriginal corporate lawyer living in Adelaide; her partner, British immigrant Ned (Gwilym Lee), is a Crown prosecutor. While she is thriving in her career (albeit clumsily – trying to hide broken heels under her desk, frantically brushing pastry sugar off her lapel), he is struggling with the morals of working to prosecute elderly women for minor infractions. She is offered a promotion; he quits and, rather than telling Lauren he has done so, proposes. It is, of course, a ‘yes’ – but there is quickly a catch: her boss, Hampton (an icy Kerry Fox), has offered her an immediate ten days off work before her promotion kicks in, and Lauren wants to get married now. In Darwin. With her parents. Easy enough, thinks…

It’s not a big surprise that a film like Reflections in the Dust (Luke Sullivan, 2018) might court controversy. In an era of monolithic mega-blockbusters, a micro-budget slice of arthouse Australiana demands some kind of hook to pierce the bubble of cinematic complacency. So why not promise scandal? Suggest a whiff of something illicit, something beyond the realms of polite society? Anyway, it worked on me. When an email from distributor The Backlot Films arrived in my inbox offering something ‘too extreme’1 for audiences, how could an aficionado of fringe cinema deny the call? The full quote – which has been reproduced in various synopses of the film online – is as follows: The Australian government deemed the film was too extreme for audiences and strongly suggested it not be…

Arcadia Heights isn’t really supposed to be anywhere in particular. Like Ramsay Street, Summer Bay and Wandin Valley before it, it doesn’t represent a real place, but more an idea of a place. Just as Neighbours plays out in a typical suburban street, Home and Away is set in a generic beachfront community and A Country Practice unfolds in an archetypal small country town, the ABC’s The Heights creates a broad canvas from a setting little explored by Australian soap operas to date: the typical inner-city neighbourhood. It’s a bold and timely choice. Up until now, the Australian soap landscape has been largely, if not quite entirely, the province of the comfortable middle class. To be fair, Seven’s long-running A Country Practice had a large, rotating supporting cast of farmers…

In a second-floor room, a young woman picks up her phone from a table and swipes at the screen, as though willing an expected text or call to arrive. She diverts her attention to the window, where she stands on tiptoes, craning her neck. Anticipation denied again, she tramps downstairs to sit on a bench outside, the camera staying fixed at the head of the stairwell, looking down through the window at the bottom. Frustrated once more – though it is not at all clear what or whom she is waiting for – the woman strides inside and up the stairs again, pausing at the top to gaze in futility at the unseen phone, still resting on the table. She marches back down, then up again. And then again and…

Since the turn of the century, an intriguing subgenre in music documentary has emerged that sees filmmakers looking to revive the songs and reposition the legacies of certain artists whose compelling work was not met with commercial success. Arguably the most famous of this cohort is Searching for Sugar Man (Malik Bendjelloul, 2012), about the Detroit-born singer-songwriter Rodriguez. Other, similarly excellent films have been made about musicians Gene Clark, Gram Parsons and the band Love (even if those artists all attained relatively respectable levels of fame). These documentaries share a common denominator: they all celebrate American artists but were made by Europeans. The late Bendjelloul was a Swede; the 2004 Parsons film, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, was created by a German (Gandulf Hennig); and those on Clark (The Byrd Who…

In 2016, Screen Australia released two major studies on the value of Australia’s screen sector: the first, prepared by Deloitte Access Economics, measures the economic value of the screen sector,1 while the second, undertaken by Olsberg•SPI, appraises its cultural value.2 The findings of both were collated into a report entitled Screen Currency: Valuing Our Screen Industry.3 When the Screen Currency summary document4 became available to the public, it was widely welcomed among screen communities because it provided hard data to bolster claims for the importance of the sector to Australia’s economy and national culture.5 However, when I read the cultural-value report itself, I was disappointed to see that it did not make mention of the teaching or studying of film; critical writing about film; film reviews and journalism; or forums,…

Surrounded by racks of blisteringly white dresses, Tyler (Alia Shawkat) reaches for her sunnies and accepts the shop assistant’s offer of champagne. Her best friend, Laura (Holliday Grainger), is trying on potential wedding gowns – all pearls and lace, customarily virginal. Laura shouts from the changing room, ‘It’s going to be a very modern wedding.’ Tyler rolls her eyes. Both women are a little bleary from cumulative weeks – months, years – of partying, yet they debate marriage’s contemporary value and significance with verve and assertiveness. Hedonistic Tyler believes the institution is, by definition, archaic and oppressive. Laura says her personal feminism is about ‘blazing a new way through old traditions’. PORTRAYING DECADENCE AND DECAY IN EQUAL MEASURE, HYDE’S FILM LAYS OUT THE ROAD MAP OF HETERONORMATIVE ADULTHOOD AND ASKS,…

‘Quiet Night Thoughts’, one of China’s most famous poems,2 by Li Bai,3 one of the country’s most historically significant poets, may have been written over twelve centuries ago, but its spartan, homesick imagery and the liminal, dreamlike state it evokes have peculiar kinship with three very different yet thematically similar 2018 arthouse films from across the East Asian region. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Chinese director Bi Gan, a shady antihero goes on a surreal search through his home town for a lost lover. In Cities of Last Things, by Taiwan-based Malaysian director Ho Wi Ding, a police detective’s hard-boiled psychology is reverse-engineered from past relationships with women. And in Winter’s Night, by South Korean director Jang Woo-jin, a long-married couple are forced to confront their relationship when…

Would it surprise you to learn that the third-biggest film in the world so far this year grossed over A$1.5 million in Australia,1 and yet it has hardly been reviewed in the English-language press here? Meet the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon that is The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019). And there is some urgency to familiarising ourselves with this film, because it looks like the face of the future. Released over the Chinese New Year period, it has grossed over US$690 million in China, making it the second-largest grosser of all time in that country.2 At the time of writing, the film had a worldwide gross approaching US$700 million, making it third on 2019’s international box-office charts, behind Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo) and Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan…

It was the thing that she got up in the morning for. And I’d say to her, ‘But what if you don’t recover from the surgery? What if you die?’ And she’d say, ‘But I’d die a woman.’ She loved the idea of seeing herself in the coffin in a fully female body. So says Rowena Bianchino, director of Harbour Therapy Clinic in Coffs Harbour, of Colleen Young – the increasingly frail, elderly transgender subject of Ian W Thomson’s documentary Becoming Colleen (2019), from where these words were taken. Oh, had Doris Wishman only not gotten there first with the title of her notorious 1977 transploitation quasi-documentary, or else the perfect subtitle for Thomson’s film would have been ‘Let Me Die a Woman’! Instead, the filmmaker opted for ‘Finding the…

Three minutes into Now Sound: Melbourne’s Listening (Tobias Willis, 2018), I saw myself on screen. I didn’t know it was coming, but there I was: in a crowd cutaway at the Northcote Social Club, watching electro conceptualist Sui Zhen perform. I expected the documentary to be full of people I knew – friends; foes; fellow broadcasters on Melbourne’s iconic community-radio station 3RRR, where I’ve presented a program, The International Pop Underground, for (oh god) two decades. And, indeed, it was. But I didn’t know that, for the first time ever as a critic, I’d see myself in a movie, and have to critically parse what that meant. My unofficial, ephemeral on-screen presence inevitably changed what this resulting essay is – something evident from all the ‘I’s I’ve already used. Having…

SPENDING NOT-SO-LIBERALLY: VIDEOGAMES REMAIN UNFUNDED Dan Golding It’s hardly the biggest issue to come out of the 2019 federal election, but many in the Australian games industry will be wondering where the re-election of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister Scott Morrison leaves them. Videogame policy became an unexpected topic of discussion late in the campaign. This was largely driven by the suite of cultural policies put forward by the Australian Labor Party (ALP); among many other commitments to the arts, it promised – if elected – to restore the now-defunct Australian Interactive Games Fund (AIGF) to the tune of A$25 million. The AIGF has had a long and storied history. Established by Julia Gillard’s ALP government in 2013, it boasted a pool of A$20 million, to be awarded to…