Prescott review

Celluloid Junkies

Nick Prescott

Though we have seen periods during which Australian cinema has been synonymous with period-set narratives and idealised evocations of the outback, there has always been a darker side to our cinematic imagination, a gritty, hard-edged element that is just as crucial to this country’s feature film output as are the sepia-tinged dreamscapes. Many of the pivotal films of the Australian New Wave brought a vivid, finely judged aesthetic to the bleakest of subject matter. Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) conjured a harrowing tragedy of grisly murders and manhunts, while Peter Weir’s darkly comic feature début, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), presented a paranoid, murderous rural community whose raison d’être was maintaining its seclusion, even if that meant killing any outsiders who found their way into town.

It must be remembered, however, that in the 1970s ours was a film industry that was out to make an impression. Following the conceptualising efforts of Phillip Adams and Barry Jones, the Australian film industry was quite literally recreated early in that decade. In order to make Australia’s film output as attractive as possible for festival directors overseas (and as a means of redefining what Australian cinema could be seen to be), some sense of the controversial was, perhaps even unconsciously, regarded as a desired element in the films themselves.

Now, of course, the Australian film-making landscape is decidedly different. Through the 1980s, when changes to investment incentives gave rise to the production of dozens of utterly forgettable thrillers and horror films, the industry seemed to realise that to induce funding injections was one thing, but to maintain script quality was quite another. This has remained something of a conundrum; early in 2005, following the very public discussion about the dire state of Australia’s film industry, further changes were made to the ways in which the Film Finance Corporation funds new projects. As the industry now lives through its third decade after the New Wave, developing technologies and complicated exhibition arrangements have further changed the parameters within which Australian film-makers operate.

Coupling these broad ideas — the history of provocative content in Australian films on one hand, and the changing production and distribution landscape on the other — we have a useful premise from which to examine the recent wave of low- and medium-budget Australian films whose salient feature is that their subject matter is, at its simplest level, strikingly grim. From Rowan Woods’s Little Fish (2005) to Neil Armfield’s Candy (2006), and to the recent features 2.37 and Em 4 Jay (both of which are screening this month), many high-profile Australian films of late have been characterised by subject matter that is even more troubling and confronting than the works of the New Wave were in the 1970s. It is fascinating, too, to consider just how many of these films concern what might be called the ‘heroin subculture’.

Little Fish represents the beginning of the most recent wave of Australian films examining drug addiction. Given Woods’s harrowing feature début, The Boys (1998), a film in part inspired by the Anita Cobby murder case and featuring one of the most terrifying Australian screen performances in recent memory (that of David Wenham), one could hardly have expected the director to nurture a romantic comedy as his next project. Little Fish, based on a premise concocted by Woods himself and written by Jacquelin Perske, follows a series of lower-middle-class characters who live and work in a sort of vivified Cabramatta, and whose lives are shaped in large part by their past or present addictions to heroin.

Cate Blanchett plays the film’s central character, Tracy, and brings an indelible screen presence to the project. As an ex-junkie who wants nothing more than to pursue a scaled-down version of the Australian dream by owning and running a video store, Tracy appears as a fractured angel in the midst of suffocating darkness. Woods uses Blanchett’s physical beauty in an intriguing way: Tracy appears as a pale, delicate, waif-like figure surrounded by bleak, grimy streetscapes and crumbling suburban dwellings. The claustrophobic nature of much of the film’s physical environment wears down many of the other characters, but somehow Tracy is immune; her gentleness and beauty allow her to glide through the decay and violence, and emerge intact.

While much of the film’s action follows Tracy’s efforts to secure a bank loan and start her business, there are gestures toward numerous other ideas, and Woods juggles several parallel plotlines with mixed results. Complex and important ideas about political corruption, racism and the power of criminal networks are all touched upon, though with so much secondary narrative occurring around the central characters that many of their dilemmas are dwarfed by the story’s complex tangents. Nonetheless, Woods has again managed to help his actors create startling work. The incendiary turn in Little Fish comes from Hugo Weaving, who provides what is arguably the most harrowing and affecting depiction of heroin withdrawal yet seen on screen. Ultimately, however, with actors of Weaving’s and Blanchett’s calibre surrounded by an unwieldy narrative and the distractingly elaborate cinematographic style the director has favoured, Little Fish stands as an accomplished though flawed artefact.

Candy, however, though the logical successor to Woods’s film with regard to its heroin theme, is tellingly different in both its visual style and its narrative shape. If anything, Candy’s material is even more harrowing than that of Little Fish; in translating Luke Davies’ startling semi-autobiographical novel of the same name (1997) to the screen, Armfield has charted the inevitable descent into tragedy of two junk-fuelled lovers whose attachments to each other are overwhelmed by their physical needs as addicts. Heroin, in Candy, is the poisoned elixir that eats away at the lovers’ false Arcadia. In contrast to Little Fish’s crowded Cabramatta, Candy’s milieu is essentially internal. By distilling the landscape of the film to the point that it contains little other than the two central characters and their gnawing dependencies, Armfield has heightened the ways in which audiences can feel the tragedy of the story.

Confronting material is foregrounded here; as we do in Little Fish, we see withdrawal, alienation and suffering, though Candy’s wrenching narrative adds the anguish of terminated pregnancies and the horror of prostitution as means-of-supply. Heroin is at the centre of Armfield’s film, and it is a bleak and troubling film indeed. Like Murali Thalluri’s 2.37, a début feature that is currently generating much discussion, Candy came, as a narrative, from a deep and personal place in its writer’s experience. Much has been written about Davies’ excoriating novel, and the author’s experience of seeing Candy emerge as a film has been, for him, both positive and harrowing. The close working relationship Davies enjoyed with Armfield evidently helped him survive the process of revisiting this disturbing material for the screenplay.

With Armfield guiding the project, Candy attracted the most committed and accomplished actors to play the central characters, and the director’s emphatic concentration upon performance has ensured that the film’s visual design does not overwhelm its narrative’s thrust and timbre. Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, Candy’s leads, excel under the great director’s guidance. In Armfield’s hands, Candy stands as a dark fable about a doomed love triangle whose two human participants are overpowered by their chemical mistress.

Most recently, Alkinos Tsilimidos, the director who was rightly lauded for Tom White (2004), another complex study of a life unravelling, has delivered his own take on heroin in Em 4 Jay. Working with a screenplay shaped by playwright Daniel Keene, Tsilimidos has drawn raw and edgy performances from young actors Laura Gordon and Nick Barkla, and has generated provocative and haunting results with this unflinchingly graphic film.

Many critics responded to Tom White’s calculated use of ambiguity. There is little such ambiguity in Em 4 Jay; this is stark, bleak drama, the stuff of the darkest imaginings of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Tellingly, though, Tsilimidos opens his film with a shot of the characters’ intertwined hands; despite every devastating thing that occurs throughout the course of the film, the narrative’s emotional centre is made very clear. This is a jarring love story, and it doesn’t provide anything like an uplifting conclusion.

We know from the outset that Em and Jay will struggle to transcend their addiction. While there is a larger narrative complexity at work here, Em 4 Jay’s lifeblood is the depiction of this shared dependency. As devoted as Em and Jay are to one another, they will, like Candy and Dan, have to confront their true master at some point in the future. Various forms of self-exploitation are depicted, and while much of that material is deeply confronting, what Tsilimidos is really showing us, in a superbly affecting way, is the inevitability of the film’s bleak conclusion. The moment Jay resorts to violence, we realise that the descent has begun. Em 4 Jay’s concluding images will haunt viewers’ minds and viscera for some time after they have faded from the screen.

What are we to make of this recent Australian film cycle? Statistically, few of these films’ viewers will be part of the subcultures depicted on screen; are the films, then, harrowing fables offering catharsis from one remove? When we vicariously inhabit the milieux at issue here, we are, to appropriate David Fincher’s idea, being scarred by the experience. We can enjoy the complex aesthetic approaches being wielded here, from Woods’s crystalline visuals to Tsilimidos’s grungy, digital video design, but the narratives being given life in this ‘heroin cycle’ are troubling indeed. If the New Wave gave us, in both visual and mythological senses, Russell Drysdale mixed with Sidney Nolan, this decade’s Australian film is the bleakest Brett Whiteley mixed with the steeliest Jeffrey Smart.

Nick Prescott is a lecturer in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Flinders University. Since 2004 Nick has been ABC Radio's weekly film critic for the Evening Show in South Australia.