On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Born to laugh appeared first on Inside Story.

That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •

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The protagonist of this narrative is Sir Nicholas (“Nicky”) Winton, a London stockbroker of German-Jewish background who became appalled at the plight of refugees who had fled Germany to Czechoslovakia during the years leading up to the second world war and became committed to their rescue. The film, with its moving articulation of Winton’s life, moves back and forth over fifty years, between the exploits of his younger self, played by Johnny Flynn, in 1938, and his older self, played by Anthony Hopkins, who in 1987 is feeling he ought to have achieved more, that his earlier efforts should have borne more fruit. One of the film’s triumphs is how these two versions of the same man interact so convincingly over the decades.

The film opens with black-and-white images of refugees and a title announcing Hitler’s takeover of Austria and Sudetenland in 1938. It then cuts to the old Winton pottering round in his very messy study — a study full of documents presumably connected with the late 1930s — in Manchester in 1987 and his younger wife Grete (Lena Olin) is wondering what this mess is all about. The next image depicts the old man diving into a pool, the crash cutting to a sequence of wartime mayhem and refugees. By this time both periods of the film have been established, as well as Winton’s happy marriage in old age.

Back to London in 1938 the young Winton, in a reversal of time, echoes his older self by calling out “Home” as he returns, such detail reminding us that we are watching two men who are both, at different times of their lives, preoccupied by the need to put “one life” to good use.

“I have to do something,” says the younger one. This need leads him to Prague, where he is appalled by the plight of refugee children, most often Jewish, and recognises the need to organise their rescue. He makes contact with his forceful mother (Helena Bonham-Carter, in what may be a career-peak performance), who is also trying to push for wider concern, and financial support, for refugee children.

This is a film of telling images rather than a conventional series of cause-and-effect related events and it may sometimes seem a little straggling as it pursues the anguish of the children in refugee camps and their separation from their families. American reviewer Brian Tallerico’s somewhat negative response — “What One Life is about is powerful, but this is not a powerfully made film” — seems scarcely justified, even if the film doesn’t conform to the structural elements of “classic Hollywood cinema.” There is no denying the passionate and poignant feeling that underlies such moments as those revealing children on the kindertransport that is intended to carry them away from the dangers of Prague.

Also at issue is the crucial importance of raising the money in England to arrange for further such rescues. It is never just a matter of Winton’s becoming a hero; others are similarly motivated, including the tough-minded Doreen (Romola Garai), with whom Winton makes contact when he goes to Prague, his similarly formidable mother, who stresses the desperate need to raise financial support for further rescues, and his strongly motivated friend Martin (Ziggy Heath as the young man, Jonathan Price as the friend of Winton’s later life).

Hawes stresses scenes of children waving farewell to their anguished parents as they are being sent off to foster homes rather than lavishing attention on the heroic status of the young Winton. Indeed, as suggested above, the older Winton, fossicking around letters and papers of fifty years earlier, is almost self-reproachful that he did not achieve enough.

Like some of the most memorable recent films, including Past Lives, One Life relies more on such images and the emotional responses they set in motion for the viewers’ attention than on the more usual plotting of commercial cinema. Though relationships emerge, such as those between young Winton and his mother, or between young Winton and Doreen or Martin, or in the married life of the older Winton and Grete, these moments are not allowed to dominate the narrative: more important is how they work their way through the larger and often dreadful war-generated events.

When the older Winton meets up again with Martin, he asks reflectively, “Do you ever think about the children and what became of them?” This concern is what focuses our response to the ageing Winton, who seems not to have sought accolades for the acts of goodness that his younger self helped to bring about.

This reflection on what happened fifty years earlier brings the film to its denouement. Hawes, working from the screenplay by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, brings One Life to a heart-wrenching ending that utterly eschews sentimental feel-goodism. Johnny Flynn’s young Winton captures the youthful urge to do something of vital importance without any sense of flamboyance, while Hopkins, reflecting on this, creates a complex sense of the older Winton, who feels he should have done more. Between them (and there is a telling image of them both in the older man’s imagination) these two actors have created a quietly unheroic hero at the heart of a film that leaves us pondering the atrocities of which humans are capable and how selfless goodness might deal with them. •

The post “I have to do something” appeared first on Inside Story.

All right, enough gush; what is going on here? Like last month’s Driving Madeleine but even more so, Past Lives has little to do with the conventions of, say, classic Hollywood cinema, in which an orchestrated collection of cause-and-effect-related events lead to a gratifying closure, whether of crime resolved or romance clinched. Instead, it calls on viewers’ powers of observation, their openness to the circumstances that create relationships and can interrupt them, and shows how, despite separation, the main characters retain — and wish to retain — indelible memories of what that past meant and how the present might deal with it.

Celine Song, director and screenwriter of this South Korean/US production, has also had a career as a playwright, and the film’s meaning is conveyed for much of its length by the placement of its key figures and what their faces reveal. But the film is not the least stagey and never becomes a talkfest, opting instead for a quiet realism.

Song was born in South Korea and moved to Ontario with her parents when she was twelve. The only point of mentioning that biographical detail is that she seems to have drawn on aspects of her own background when planning Past Lives, her first feature, which uses both English and Korean dialogue.

Two youngsters at school in South Korea share a bond of serious affection, which is made clear very early when the boy, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), tries to comfort the girl, Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), as he tells her he has outdone her in an exam she had set her mind on. She is somewhat solemn, but there is a clear sense that they really matter to each other.

When her parents decide to emigrate — like Song’s, though in this case to New York — Na’s mother shows her understanding of the kids’ wish to go on a date when she explains that “if you leave something behind, you gain something too.” In their last moments together in Seoul we see Hae Sung looking bleak as Na talks of departing. They walk together until their homeward paths diverge, and there is nothing sentimental in this touching image.

Twelve years later, when they are both twenty-four-year-olds and their lives have necessarily taken different turns — his including a stint in the Korean army, hers as a writer in the United States — they make contact via social media. What will be crucial to their relationship and to the film’s concern with their lives, and indeed with life itself, is what happens when, a further twelve years later, Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) flies into New York.

Na has now become Nora (Greta Lee), and the two of them spend time together, walking the streets and on a ferry with the Statue of Liberty in the background, before they fetch up at Nora’s apartment. He has had a failed relationship and she is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a likable Jewish man, also a writer, who greets Hae Sung with quiet affability.

This meeting is clearly not going to be a matter of wild pyrotechnics, but rather of three decent people pondering the past. Sitting in a bar with Arthur listening silently, Nora and Hae Sung come to terms in Korean with their meeting’s impact on their present lives. The scene recalls the image with which the film opens: Song seems to have sought to frame the film in a way that suggests its most important preoccupation is with how time can bear on a relationship without ever quite expelling what made it so potent and long-lasting.

In her treatment of such thematic concerns, Song never resorts to triangular romantic tensions or any other kind of melodramatic narrative predictabilities. Odd memory flashes recall something from the years between, but their purpose is essentially to capture a moment that has stayed in the characters’ minds rather than to advance the plot. What is most striking is the extent to which Song relies on her characters’ facial expressions.

Past Lives also makes eloquent use of moments of silence, allowing time for the protagonists (and the viewer) to reflect upon the turn these lives have taken. This technique is especially potent near the film’s end, when Nora (now absorbed into her American life) accompanies Hae Sung to find a cab, and when a moving and complex moment of silence leads to an embrace, the meaning of which is not spelt out.

The point about communication is subtly underlined when Nora first takes Hae Sung home to meet Arthur. As she talks to her husband in English and then passes on their remarks to Hae Sung in Korean, and vice versa, the film makes clear that the action will proceed with as little hurt as possible to any of the three. And in creating these characters Song has secured performances as near to perfection as one might imagine.

In fact, “performances” suggests a degree of artifice at odds with the sense of three people who seem to be living rather than acting. •

The post Life itself appeared first on Inside Story.

Well, obviously, you tour behind the Iron Curtain on a trip sponsored by that well-known popular music aficionado Richard Milhous Nixon.

Veteran documentarian John Scheinfeld’s new film, What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?, tells the story of this unlikely expedition with pace and panache. What might have been a run-of-the-mill rock band biopic — a staple of the big streaming services — is made far more vital and interesting by its cold war angle.

It’s early 1970 and the nine-piece combo Blood, Sweat & Tears is at the peak of its powers. By fusing big-band jazz with a rock-and-roll ethos, these talented musicians have pioneered a new style of pop music, storming up the charts with songs like “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.”

As young men of their time, the band members oppose the war in Vietnam and see themselves as paid-up members of the counterculture. So why do they go into business with the US State Department and participate in a soft-power propaganda junket to promote American values in Yugoslavia, Poland and Romania?

Well, alongside a whirlwind horn section, the band’s powerhouse lead singer David Clayton-Thomas is at the heart of its appeal. And he turns out to be the band’s problem child.

As a Canadian, Clayton-Thomas needs a green card to work in the United States. Unfortunately he’d acquired a criminal record as a teenager and is on the verge of being deported.

Luckily BS&T is managed by a seasoned problem-solver called Larry Goldblatt. Though not in the same class as Allen Klein or Colonel Tom Parker, Goldblatt is a wily operator; in fact, he took over management of the band when he was serving time for passing dud cheques.

Goldblatt quickly negotiates a deal with Washington: BS&T will play Eastern Europe in exchange for a shiny new green card for Clayton-Thomas.

The Yugoslavian and Polish legs of the tour are interesting but not especially newsworthy. The real action takes place in the oppressive monochrome culture of communist Romania, a country run by the thoroughly unpleasant Nicolae Ceaușescu, who had hosted a visit by Nixon just the year before.

Romania is trying to run a foreign policy slightly independent of the Soviet Empire, and the United States is trying to encourage it. But many of the ordinary Romanians who attend BS&T’s two concerts aren’t interested in being diplomatic. They hate Ceaușescu and commit to turning the band’s performance into a political act if they can.

In a brilliant piece of research, the filmmakers hunt down Romanian fans — now in late middle age — who attended the first of BS&T’s two concerts. “The feeling of freedom it exuded was extraordinary,” explains one. Another says simply: “It was a revelation.”

The footage of the gig is both joyous and moving. One fan is seen clearly wearing symbolic manacles. But when these young Romanians start chanting “USA, USA,” you know things ain’t going to end well.

The regime says the first concert was “too successful” and demands changes: basically, tone it down or there will be consequences. The band and their audience have other ideas, and the second concert ends, inevitably, in mayhem. The authorities use dogs against the defenceless concertgoers. One fan asks for an autograph and is badly beaten — in front of the band — for his troubles.

As Clayton-Thomas says, “We have travelled in countries where certain repressions are a way of life, where people don’t enjoy the privilege of spontaneous outburst.”

When the band gets back to America they are caught between activists like Abbie Hoffman, who calls them “pig collaborators” for taking the State Department’s coin, and the avowedly anti-communist Nixon administration, which censors a documentary that was being made about their adventures because it might embarrass Ceaușescu.

Even fifty years later, though, the surviving members of the band look back in anger at the way they believe their reputations were trashed. As the director of that aborted documentary, Donn Cambern, says, “What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears — it just wasn’t fair. They really got screwed.”

One of the very few criticisms I’d make of this impressive piece of work is that it misses the story’s afterlife.

Communism in Europe ended a bit like Hemingway’s famous description of bankruptcy’s arrival: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

In December 1989, nineteen years after BS&T toured Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu attempted to unify his fracturing nation by delivering a speech to a huge crowd in Bucharest.

Well aware of the anti-communist revolutions already taking place across Eastern Europe, the angry throng had gathered to oust the dictator, not to praise him. The famous live TV broadcast of the speech shows the expression on Ceaușescu’s face when he realises that something’s amiss.

He tries to quell the recalcitrant crowd, but they ignore him and continue to whistle and jeer. Ceaușescu suddenly looks like a confused old man rather than a Red potentate with power over life and death. The sound of the crowd in 1989 echoes the catcalls of the defiant Romanians who turned out to see BS&T all those years before.

A few days later, on Christmas Day, Ceaușescu is tried before a kangaroo court and executed by firing squad.

The sudden collapse of that regime has many complex causes — not least the nation’s abject economic failings — but maybe BS&T did indeed play a small part in the gradual decay of Romanian communism.

So, what the hell did happen to Blood, Sweat & Tears? Well, the music industry is tough — fashions change and bands fall out of favour — but politics can be even more brutal. •

The post What goes up must come down appeared first on Inside Story.

As the film opens, a young priest walks urgently across the frame. He is heading towards a meeting with his superior, where he is to receive final advice before embarking on a journey. It is the end of the nineteenth century and Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is being despatched from Denmark on a mission. He is to travel by sea and then by arduous overland trek to a remote settlement on the southeast coast of Iceland, where his task is to oversee the building of a church and lead the congregation in worship. He will be travelling to another country and, crucially, to another language.

Lucas’s gait, bent forward in his haste, suggests his determination to leave no room for doubt or hesitation. He is indeed on a mission. His pace suggests too the importance of getting started, for as his superior, Vincent, makes pragmatically clear in this farewell briefing — delivered in tones both avuncular and forbidding — the church must be completed by the winter. There must be no delay.

The briefing over, Lucas is shown fussily setting up a cumbersome wet-plate camera in preparation for taking a photograph of Vincent, an image intended to serve as a memento and a marker of the occasion. Vincent might be the subject of the photograph, but it is the photographer who is more clearly revealed, as both a traditionalist and a modern man. Lucas is a servant of God and a keen amateur photographer, in thrall to the new technology. We can already see that the two don’t sit easily together.

Vincent is played, in a small but resonant part, by the distinguished Danish actor Waage Sandø, who incidentally gives a masterclass in talking while shelling and eating a boiled egg (a scene that rivals Robert De Niro’s famous boiled egg scene in Alan Parker’s 1987 film Angel Heart, to which it surely alludes). He poses authoritatively in front of a patterned backcloth, his formal neck ruff appearing to separate his head from his body, in the manner of a portrait. In a series of subtle gestures, he adjusts his clothing and his expression as he waits to adopt those necessary seconds of stillness when his image will be captured. There is an atmosphere of theatrical significance. It is indeed an occasion, a moment of enforced calm before the urgent departure.

As we gradually learn throughout the course of the film — including in one brilliantly underplayed and comic scene at its midpoint — Lucas’s commitment to the urgency of his mission is compromised by his propensity for delay and deferral. His bulky camera and equipment also serve as an impediment, a literal burden (a publicity still shows Lucas, about to collapse under the weight of the camera on his back, arriving on the Icelandic shore) that weighs on him and slows him down.

Lucas displays a combination of confidence and uncertainty, of urgency and willed delay, that grows ever more starkly contradictory. It is a theme that permeates the entire film, embodied in the complex series of steps involved in wet-plate photography, which requires the right combination of perfect stillness, as the image is taken, and controlled urgency, as it is developed.

Starting out on his journey across the formidable Icelandic landscape, Lucas struggles to control his horse. The guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), impatiently demonstrates how he must handle the reins more confidently, judging when to apply force and when to let up, to show the horse who is in charge and to control its pace. “Pull a little, then release,” Lucas is advised later on, but he never quite learns a comfortable balance, whether in making a photograph or riding a horse. In everything he does, the strain shows.

We are told during the opening credits that a mere seven of Lucas’s photographs have survived, from which, it is implied, the story of his journey and eventual fate have been constructed and imagined. It is one of many instances in which Pálmason subtly explores the role of photography in helping us to understand ourselves and our place in the world. Just as Godland brings those supposedly historical images to life, so the extraordinary cinematography of Maria von Hausswolff, Pálmason’s frequent collaborator, repeatedly alludes to still photography.

Von Hausswolff’s camera shows characters frozen (sometimes almost literally) in moments of inaction or contemplation. A shot of the Icelandic landscape will appear as if all is unmoving, until a horse or a bird or a small human figure wanders into the frame to remind us that what we are looking at is indeed a moving image rather than a photograph. This intermingling of the two genres, photography and cinema, is characteristic of Pálmason’s and von Hausswolff’s work. A White, White Day (2019), for example, begins with an extended series of near-still shots of a stark and isolated building as it appears in different weathers.

These allusions to photography are reinforced by Pálmason’s habit of centring the subject — a building or a person or a natural object — in the manner of traditional portraiture. We are constantly being invited to pay attention, to look closely at what is before us. This effect is further reinforced, as many commentators have pointed out, by Godland’s 4:3 aspect ratio, with rounded corners, which seems to echo the proportions and appearance of Lucas’s wet-plate photographs.

The decision to deploy that historical cinematic ratio to capture the look of nineteenth-century photographs is immediately convincing, but when it comes to similarly capturing the imposing dimensions of the Icelandic landscape, and forcefully conveying the relative smallness of the people within it, it seems counterintuitive, a rather odd directorial decision.

Yet both the director and cinematographer felt, as von Hausswolff has commented, that “framing Godland in 4:3 aspect ratio on 35mm film created a real connection to the landscape,” as well as to “the portraiture of the people.” That “real connection” is very effectively established by implication as well as directly through the camera. The audience is encouraged to imagine what lies beyond the frame as well as what is within it.

Because the screen’s borders don’t suddenly expand to modern dimensions to take in the landscape, as they might have done, we both see and imagine its vastness through the confines of the more traditional 4:3 framing. The frame seems to say that the vastness and disorienting visual experience of the Icelandic landscape — an experience W.H. Auden likened in Letters from Iceland (1936) to “walking the wrong way on a moving staircase” — cannot be fully captured by the camera.

As if to emphasise this point, Pálmason further plays with frames and framing throughout the film, experimenting with different ways of capturing what cannot be fully contained. We see the landscape through the lens of Lucas’s camera, through the triangle of open tent flaps, through windows and doorways, in near darkness and in the obscurity of fog. We are constantly reminded of how difficult it is to see it all at once.

The vulnerability of humans within this landscape is shown in painterly long shots. Lucas and his party cross the frame on horseback, their slow, deliberate pace ironically echoing the opening scene in which the eager, nervous priest bursts across the screen. Later, nature’s dominance is demonstrated in one slow, impressive 360-degree pan across the landscape, as the focus ever tightens until it lands upon the supine figure of Lucas, lying still, with his eyes closed. Were it not for the sound of his breathing, he could be dead. He could almost be posing.

Stay perfectly still, the ship’s crew are instructed as they assemble for a group photograph earlier in the film, their faces overlaid with white to ensure more effective contrast in the final image. Keep still, they are told again, “as if you’re dead.” We learn almost nothing about this ship’s crew. Similarly, the men and one woman who accompany Lucas on his overland journey, apart from the leading guide, Ragnar, remain virtually unknown, as do the members of the small coastal community when the party arrives at its destination.

We know these subsidiary characters almost exclusively by their faces, and by the attention the camera pays to them, not only in Lucas’s photographs but also in the lingering, portrait-like focus of the cinematography. Almost entirely by visual means, we get a strong impression of their individuality — they are not just figures in a landscape.

The individual and group portraits that Lucas makes — of his priestly mentor, of the crew of the ship taking him to Iceland, of his unnamed translator, of the young woman he seems destined to marry, and of her father — all seem to offer their subjects proof of their existence within an unforgiving world. Meanwhile Lucas, who might nowadays be described as short on social skills, approaches his most meaningful, if fleeting, connections mediated by the camera.

In the film’s most striking instance of this kind of mediated intimacy, Lucas and his unnamed translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) are seen striding into the landscape, camera and equipment on their backs, to “take a picture.” Lucas photographs the translator posed against the landscape, and this seems to lead directly to a greater understanding and connection between the two men. We next see them standing, bare-chested and apart from each other, facing the spray of a waterfall. They jointly raise their arms, if not in worship of nature, then in something close to it.

In another instance of the power of nature, the party of travellers comes to a swollen river that must be crossed if they are to continue their journey. Rivers are “difficult to read,” Vincent has warned Lucas earlier, and Ragnar, the Icelander who knows the country as no other, advises strategic withdrawal. They will try again in a few days, when the waters will have subsided. But Lucas insists on proceeding, putting himself and his companions in danger. At the crucial moment, rather than pausing — easing up on the reins — he plunges forward.

Lucas comes close to death during the gruelling journey. “I want to go home,” he cries in despair. But he then undergoes a kind of resurrection, brought back to life first by the dour Ragnar and then by a Danish widower, Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters — Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), born in Denmark, and Ida (Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir), born in Iceland — who house and care for him. Lucas, in return, makes a portrait of each of them.

In preparing to photograph Anna, Lucas gently gently smears white powder on her face to make her ready for the camera, later calling her over excitedly to the makeshift developing tent to witness the emerging image. I look old, says Anna as her face starts to appear in the developing tray (a reaction that subjects often had to their wet-plate portraits when the complex pattern of contrast had not quite worked to their advantage). Young and beautiful, responds Lucas, uncertain whether to look at Anna or at the image he has just made.

Photography, which tantalises with its apparent promise of facilitating his connection with others, ultimately fails Lucas. In a cruelly dramatic scene towards the end of the film, Ragnar, the man who has guided him across Iceland to his destination and has saved his life along the way, asks Lucas to take his photograph. He wants to own an image of himself. Lucas refuses, rejecting any possible connection. For him, Ragnar is an animal, a “swine.” Much more than language separates them.

Ragnar has earlier had the opportunity to be in a group photograph. But he has moved at the crucial moment, spoiling the image — your dog moved less than you, Lucas mutters angrily — and Lucas destroys the plate in frustration. The failure of the photograph embodies the failure of the relationship — with Ragnar, with Iceland. In a film replete with foreshadowings and visual parallels, it foreshadows the tragedy at the end.

Of all Lucas’s human subjects, Ida, the younger, more carefree daughter, is the only one to adopt the characteristic photographic postures of our time — rather than formal and submissive, obedient to the camera and to the photographer, she is ironic, self-aware, cheeky. She is not at all intimidated. Others sit perfectly still, as instructed, looking “straight into the eye.” Posing with her horse, she stands on its back, then seats herself the wrong way round, then turns her face away from the camera. Lucas allows himself the beginnings of a smile at this performance, while Ida’s horse ambles away with her, out of the frame.

Surrounded by failure and thwarted ambition (“we are all very small and fleeting,” says her father to Lucas), Ida is nevertheless optimistic. She is the only character to be entirely comfortable in both Icelandic and Danish. The rest speak only one language, or speak the other one imperfectly, or are reluctant to speak it at all. Even the unnamed translator sometimes struggles to understand what Lucas is getting at. But Ida slips easily between the two languages, confidently demonstrating, by passing her hand across her face in the manner of a slow camera sweep, how she can move smoothly from one to the other. In a film rather short on optimism, it is a small sign of hope and of faith in the future. •

The post In the frame appeared first on Inside Story.

What is it about people in cars that can make for such riveting film fare? It doesn’t have to be as uniquely strange as Steven Knight’s Locke (2013), in which a single man on a long drive is the only figure seen in the whole film as he engages in a series of mobile phone calls. Think of Fred Schepisi’s dealings with four men in a car as they make their way to distribute an old friend’s ashes from a pier in Last Orders (2001).

But it was Bruce Beresford’s Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy (1989) that came to mind as I watched the new French film Driving Madeleine, and not just because their titles are so similar. Both films focus on the unsought and initially improbable relationship that develops between an elderly woman and her chauffeur/driver.

Driving Madeleine is my main concern here, but we rarely come to a film without intertextual baggage that can strengthen our response. Christian Carion’s film has proved to be very popular with what I suppose must be thought of as art house audiences. On my viewing it for the second time in Melbourne last week the only seat available was in the front row, up against the screen.

Having opened with the image of a TAXI sign, the film shifts to the face of its driver, Charles (Dany Boon), looking far from cheery as he drives along the banks of the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in sight. A male passenger argues with him about directions and they exchange rebukes; left alone, Charles reproaches himself — “I’m such a jerk” — before receiving a phone call offering a well-paying passenger. The next shot gives him, and us, a first view of Madeleine (Line Renaud).

Her thoughtful face contrasts at first with his surly expression. She talks; he doesn’t. She calls him a “charmer” when, at her bidding, he guesses her age to be a mere eighty when she is actually ninety-two, which is later revealed to be twice his age.

Charles is not going to be easily won into cheery chat, but Madeleine is bent on filling him in about her past, and the film goes into flashback as she recalls her romantic life. As a young woman during the second world war (played in this earlier incarnation by Alice Isaaz), she fell in love with an American soldier, Matt (Elie Kaempfen), by whom she had a son after he returned home to the United States and married someone else. That romance, set in the days after the US liberation of France, is played with sensuality and passion, accompanied on the soundtrack by “The Sunny Side of the Street.” We see how this past has helped create the tolerant, intelligent ninety-two-year-old in the back seat of the taxi.

As well as recalling how she dealt with the loss of Matt, she recalls the raising of their son Matthieu (Hadriel Roure, later Thomas Alden), made difficult because of the violent man she married, Ray (Jérémie Laheurte), who beats both her and her son. Her effort to stop this violence led to her being charged with attempted murder.

To go any further would involve spoilers, though this is not the sort of film that generally offers sensational surprises; what matters is how the traumatic aspects of Madeleine’s earlier life and her nonagenarian tranquillity belong to the woman at the film’s centre.

Charles’s life has been quite different — as he says, “I spend my life in this taxi,” twelve hours a day — and we only hear about his domestic life near the film’s end. He begins to smile, deepening the rapport between driver and passenger that will lead the film towards its moving but utterly unsentimental ending.

As is the case with Driving Miss Daisy, both protagonists acknowledge the relationship that has formed but in very different ways, each of which is completely satisfying. There are contrasts between the two women — Miss Daisy is much more austere than the benign Madeleine — and the two drivers: Daisy’s is cheery and outgoing while Charles has to work his way from surliness towards kindliness.

Both films are derived from screenplays that understand how much dramatic content can be revealed by concentrating on faces, and of course the cinematographer, editor and director all contribute significantly to how our attention is held by this focus.

But what stays in the viewer’s mind will be the flawless acting in the key roles. Both Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman deservedly won Oscars for their incarnations of passenger and driver in Miss Daisy, and it would be good to imagine a similar outcome for those who illuminate Christian Carion’s film. Carion’s subtle direction of Cyril Gely’s screenplay counts on the performances of Line Renaud and Dany Boon to engage audience interest in two lives that find they have more to share than might have been expected. •

The post Lives in motion appeared first on Inside Story.

The answer, of course, is yes. Australians have always been “unsettled settlers,” to use historian Jill Julius Matthews’s term; and the mind maps of our theatrical people have, from the beginning of European settlement, ranged widely through the English-speaking world.

Australians were present at the birth of the American movie industry, when D.W. Griffith began filming in the small village of Hollywood. They have remained a constant part of its history as stars, bit players, directors, cinematographers… in fact, in every aspect of filmmaking. At the same time they have struggled to develop and support an industry at home, and have been pushed and pulled between these two poles by changing industry structures in Hollywood and government policies in Sydney.

In Cast Mates: Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home, Twyford-Moore ambitiously sets out to tell the story of this troubled relationship from the 1930s to the present through the stories of four Australian actors who made their mark in the world of Hollywood: Errol Flynn, Peter Finch, David Gulpilil and Nicole Kidman. Each chapter — and life story — illustrates a moment in the attraction between Australia and Hollywood.

Errol Flynn (1909–1959) and Peter Finch (1916–1977) represent the long period, from the 1930s to the 1960s, when Hollywood, trailed by Britain, could command the world’s best talents. This was the time when local moviemakers such as Charles Chauvel and Ken Hall saw their discoveries lured away and built up into world stars by the superior moviemaking machines of Classical Hollywood. David Gulpilil (1953–2021) is a brilliant choice as a representative of the golden period of Australian filmmaking, from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, illustrating its failure to nurture an amazing Indigenous talent.

The fourth, Nicole Kidman (born 1967) is the poster child of the period from the early 1990s, when Australian stars like Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett have been able to remain Australian, moving between their native country and Hollywood, controlling their own lives and careers in a way that was not possible when the Hollywood machine was all-powerful.

Don’t look in Cast Mates for any clear argument about the “gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles, Sydney and Hollywood,” whether psychic or economic. Twyford-Moore is a storyteller rather than an analyst; and he is a very good one. We get no exposition of how Classical Hollywood exerted its control over world moviemaking, or the various schemes by which Australia attempted to battle against that control. This account of the industry emerges instead from the careers of the four main characters and the many cast mates Twyford-Moore showcases along the way, including Judith Anderson, Diane Cilento, Paul Hogan, Brian Syron and Cate Blanchett.

We learn, for instance, that Errol Flynn’s Hollywood career began in a British “quota quickie” in the years when the rest of the world was trying to fight the domination of Hollywood. We learn that young Peter Finch’s career in Australia during the war years was stymied by local representatives of Hollywood studios who preferred more traditionally handsome heroes. During the fifties, when production by Australian studios had virtually ceased, he returned to Australia from England to play in The Shiralee (1957) for Ealing Studios and Robbery Under Arms (1957) for Rank. (Interestingly, that iconic Australian movie, A Town Like Alice, was mainly filmed in England.)

Later, with Old Hollywood dead, Finch’s rugged, world-weary face was perfect for the part of Howard Beale, the NBC newscaster who spectacularly melted down on air, shouting he was “mad as hell.” After building a career despite Hollywood, he was sought out by Hollywood and rewarded with its highest accolade, an Academy Award. Alas, too late: it had to be awarded posthumously.

Although we learn much about the structures within which these Australian stars made their careers, the true richness of Cast Mates is in the telling of their life stories. These are fascinating people drawn towards a certain cosmopolitanism by virtue of birth, upbringing or temperament.

Errol Flynn’s parents were temporary Australians who returned to their native Ireland in retirement. Peter Finch became an Australian at the age of ten after an extraordinary early childhood of abandonment and displacement. David Gulpilil was an Indigenous Australian moving between a remote community and modern white urban life. Nicole Kidman, daughter of an Australian father studying abroad, was born in Hawaii and spent her early years in the United States. With the pale skin of a redhead, she chose reading, theatre and movies over Sydney’s beach culture.

Twyford-Moore tells these life stories with a density of striking detail that can be exhausting; but it is this detail that makes the book. David Gulpilil’s chapter is a case in point. He was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and sometime stockman at Maningrida, 500 kilometres east of Darwin, when he was chosen for his part in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971). He had won a dance competition at the Darwin Eistedfodd and was recommended for the role by the director of welfare for the Northern Territory administration, to whom he wrote of his adventures during the world tour organised by the film’s US distributor, Twentieth Century Fox. He became a good friend of Dennis Hopper (whom he decribes as “fucking crazy”) during the shooting of Mad Dog Morgan (1976). He had a meeting with Clint Eastwood about a possible collaboration that came to nothing.

In a long, sad, discussion of movies never made, Twyford-Moore gives details of an early, rarely seen documentary, Walkabout to Hollywood (early eighties) — in which Gulpilil visits Disneyland with his young family and tries on cowboy boots — made by Bill Leimbach, who had wanted Gulpilil for a movie (never made) that he wrote about Governor Phillip and Bennelong.

Worth the book’s price alone is the section on Biripi actor and director Brian Syron, whose Kicking Down the Doors: A History of First Nation Films 1968–1993 is, for Twyford-Moore, “a wildfire of condemnation” of the Australian film industry. “The paucity of Australian films through the twentieth century,” he writes, “can make Australia look like a victim — hurt by the impositions of Hollywood — but it was a perpetrator too.”

This is a book written by a fan — a very intelligent and hardworking one — and Twyford-Moore lavishes his greatest love on his final subject, Nicole Kidman. Her story is almost as extraordinary as David Gulpilil’s. A very tall schoolgirl, fourteen years old, with pale skin and a mop of unruly red hair, she was noticed in 1983 by Jane Campion, then at the Australian Film and Television School, who had wanted her for her final student film, A Girl’s Own Story. But others also saw her potential: Storm Boy’s director, Henri Safran, cast her in his remake of the Australian classic Bush Christmas, and Brian Trenchard-Smith starred her in the wonderful Sydney Harbour chase movie BMX Bandits that same year.

Kidman emerged as a beauty in David Williamson’s Emerald City in 1988, her hair somewhat tamed but still spectacular. The following year she made her breakthrough film, Dead Calm, produced by George Miller and directed by Phillip Noyce. (You have to read the book for the long story of how they secured the rights from Orson Welles’s widow.) This led to her signing, at twenty-two, with Hollywood “superagent” Sam Cohn, and being chosen by Tom Cruise as his love interest in Days of Thunder (1990), described by one Australian journalist as “a ninety-minute first date for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

We know the rest of the story — the marriage to Cruise; her American breakthrough role in To Die For (1995); Stanley Kubrick’s erotic Eyes Wide Shut (1999); her collaborations with fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Australia (2008); her marriage to Australian singer Keith Urban; her emergence as a producer of independent films such as Rabbit Hole (2010)oleb Hole (2010).HH and successful TV series such as Big Little Lies (2017–19); her life divided between Nashville (not Hollywood) and Sydney. Twyford-Moore fills this out with a plethora of delicious and informative background stories, from Matthew McConaughey’s five months in Gorokan High (the same “shithole public school” on NSW’s Central Coast that Twyford-Moore attended) and Stanley Kubrick’s love of the telephone and the fax.

This is a fascinating book to dip into in short, intense bursts. Its stories will delight you, instruct you, make you furiously angry, make you laugh out loud. Above all it will send you back to the movies these Australian stars made. It will also lead you to read it with Google open by your side, to follow Twyford-Moore even further down some rabbit hole or to get a timeline on the various government policies or changes in the movie industry. You will come away entertained and educated. There is an excellent index, an absolute necessity for any biographical publication, but no illustrations. Not a good decision, NewSouth!

Sam Twyford-Moore’s skills as a biographer are clearly demonstrated in Cast Mates. I predict that his next book will focus on one intriguing individual: perhaps someone from Australia’s new success story, Indigenous filmmaking — Rachel Perkins, Aaron Pedersen or Warwick Thornton — or the multicultural actors and filmmakers he features in his epilogue — Bina Bhattacharya, Geraldine Viswanathan and Arka Das. Whomever he chooses to write about, I look forward to another delicious read. •

Cast Mates: Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home
By Sam Twyford-Moore | NewSouth | $34.99 | 306 pages

The post Fantales appeared first on Inside Story.

The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

The post Does anyone have a pencil? appeared first on Inside Story.

Tina went on editing Filmnews until late 1994 and then began writing for Metro, ScreenHub and other film publications (and on one occasion for Inside Story). She was a board member of the Sydney Film Festival for twenty-five years and a founding member of the Film Critics Circle of Australia, and became an honorary life member of both. Her book about the controversial 1971 film Wake in Fright, based on Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name, was published in the Australian Screen Classics series by Currency Press in 2010.

“She continuously had her finger on the pulse of the filmmaking community,” writes film historian Graham Shirley, “paying particular attention to the news, events, challenges and achievements of experimental, alternative, documentary, non-mainstream, short-subject as well as feature-length filmmakers. Tina had a clear understanding of the ‘industrial’ as well as political context in which all of them operated and was a familiar face at film community meetings and screenings of all kinds.”

We were saddened to learn of Tina’s death in Sydney last month. As some small recognition of her contribution to Australian film culture over many years, we republish the vivid account of the state of the film industry as director Ted Kotcheff was preparing to make Wake in Fright.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were the years of what came to be called the “rebirth” of the Australian film industry, although at the time nobody could have imagined how much that industry would grow over the next forty years and what films would come to be made. It’s fascinating that in 1971 both Wake in Fright and Walkabout screened at the Cannes Film Festival: two films in Australia made by outsiders — a Canadian and a Brit — that have come to be seen as enormously important in that rebirthing process.

Both films are unlike anything that had previously been made in Australia, but of the two, Wake in Fright is perhaps the stronger, more savage and harder-hitting film. The more I discover about it, the more intrigued I am by how such a film got made, at that time and in such an unlikely fashion.

In his book about Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout, Louis Nowra talks about the barren cultural landscape out of which the two films emerged. But even if it appeared barren, there must have been something there to provide the fertility for such an energetic, striving plant to germinate and eventually to thrive. Was that barrenness an illusion? Were there little patches of vegetation and, underneath, many young shoots getting ready to sprout? Was there dormant and emerging filmmaking life in what would appear to future commentators as a wasteland?

Australia had been making films (it could only occasionally have been called an industry) since almost the beginning of cinema in the 1890s, but it had always been a very stop-start affair. In the heyday of production in the 1920s and 1930s, between ten and fifteen features were made a year, but in the years leading up to 1970 production had slowed to something less than a trickle,­ more an occasional splutter.

Of course, there were the overseas productions. In fact, 1959 saw a veritable flurry of activity, with Stanley Kramer making On the Beach in Melbourne, Harry Watt directing The Siege of Pinchgut in Sydney, and Leslie Norman making Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, also in Sydney. And in 1960 Fred Zinnemann made The Sundowners with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. But not one of these directors was Australian; indeed, as critic and former Sydney Film Festival director David Stratton says in his afterword to the new edition of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright:

The high-profile “Australian” films made during this period weren’t Australian productions at all. Most of them, including The Overlanders, Eureka Stockade, Bush Christmas, The Shiralee, Smiley, The Siege of Pinchgut and the 1957 version of Robbery under Arms, were British films, often shot in studios in the UK with Australia used only for the location work; others, including Kangaroo, On the Beach and The Sundowners, were mainstream Hollywood productions made on location here.

And, as Stratton also comments in his book The Last New Wave, “Australian stories were being filtered through foreign eyes, and a strange variety of foreign actors were pretending to be Australians.”

But if very few Australian features were being made, by the mid 1960s an active production sector was making newsreels, television programs and television commercials, while government-funded films were being produced at the Commonwealth Film Unit. Newer, lighter cameras helped the filmmakers who were making surfing, travel and adventure documentaries to go up the coast and into the bush and the outback in search of stories. There were six small studios with sound stages in Sydney, another in Melbourne, and about a dozen laboratories to do the processing and post-production.

In Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years, film historians Graham Shirley and Brian Adams refer to “more than fifty film production companies employing from five to over a hundred people each” and comment that “among these various film production bodies, along with the television studios, underground filmmakers, filmmakers returning from abroad, and individual film critics, the desire for a reborn film industry grew.”

In fact, as legendary filmmaker Ken G. Hall wrote in 1967 in the short-lived theatre and film journal Masque:

There is an Australian film industry at this moment and it is keeping more people in regular employment than ever before. There are available to prospective producers ten times the facilities — studio space, modern equipment — than was available to, say, Charles Chauvel and myself in the 30s and 40s. The days of one camera and, at best, two microphones, together with some equipment made out of Meccano parts and literally tied up with wire, are no more. Much more footage is being shot than in that production heyday and there are more laboratories, including many excellent colour laboratories, than were ever dreamed of then. The trouble is that these people, this studio space and facilities, are not being used to make what most interested people would want them to be used for — feature film production.

Of course, this supposes that the production of feature films is the ultimate goal of any film industry, an issue raised by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka in The Screening of Australia (Vol. 1). “Why is feature film production assumed to be the real point of an industry?” they ask, and continue:

The assumption goes back to the phase of film history, from the silent period to the peak audiences of 1946, when movies were the dominant popular art, when people “went,” on average, two to three times a week, when the industry was the third or fourth biggest revenue-earner in the United States, and there was no television. That’s part of the answer. Another part is that the marketing of films (to paying audiences, rather than to client groups, as is the case with educational films or broadcasting interests) is organised around the event of the feature, which must be large, emphatic and powerful enough to warrant travel, ticket-price and several hours of voluntary attendance in the dark.

While it is the feature film that attracts that paying audience, its production is also what many filmmakers see as their ultimate goal, and even in these bleak years some determined filmmakers did manage to make features.

One was Tim Burstall, who in 1969 made 2000 Weeks, a semi-autobiographical tale about the frustration and isolation of an artist in the Australian wasteland. Actor and writer Graeme Blundell, who was in the film, writes about the experience in his very entertaining memoir of those early years, The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts, describing it as “a subjective view of a writer’s crisis when he calculates he only has 2000 weeks in which to express himself.” It was, as David Stratton (who programmed it in that year’s Sydney Film Festival) says in The Last New Wave, “a remarkably ambitious film.”

Tim Burstall had made a short children’s film, The Prize, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. He’d then made some documentaries and a children’s TV series, had been working in the US film industry for two years on a Harkness Fellowship, and thought he was ready for his first feature. Released in Melbourne in March 1969 with high (probably too high) expectations, it was reviewed badly and taken off after eleven days, while the Sydney Film Festival screening some months later was a disaster. “Burstall was devastated,” reported Graeme Blundell, “and developed a deep hatred for what he called ‘the intelligentsia.’ They were ‘highbrows and ABC types’ and they seemed affronted by the simple decency of the film.”

In 1971 Burstall made Stork and he had to pay for the first screening in Melbourne. It did so well that it got picked up by mainstream distributors Roadshow, not only becoming the new Australian cinema’s first box office success but also reinvigorating Burstall’s career and scooping the pool at the 1973 AFI Awards, the year he made the highly successful Alvin Purple. In that film Blundell let everything hang out, shocking some of the more straitlaced critics but nevertheless delighting the cinema-going public and delivering a very large profit. But Burstall never forgot or forgave the treatment given to 2000 Weeks.

Behind the scenes, many of those working in film and television had been lobbying the government for years for some form of government support for production; broadcaster Phillip Adams, then both a successful advertising man and prospective filmmaker, and his friend, historian and Labor Party stalwart Barry Jones (who had been unofficially advising then Liberal prime minister John Gorton on cultural issues) proposed to Gorton the setting up of a national film school. In 1969 a screening for federal parliamentarians of Anthony (Tony) Buckley’s documentary Forgotten Cinema, an account of the rise and fall of the Australian feature film pioneers, was given some credit for persuading Gorton to finally give some assistance to the industry.

In 1969 the Commonwealth government announced a three-part program of assistance: an investment corporation to support feature films and television programs, a national film school, and an experimental film fund to assist in the making of low-budget films and encourage emerging filmmakers. While the film school didn’t come into being until 1973, the Australian Film Development Corporation was set up in 1970, as was the Experimental Film and TV Fund, initially administered by the Australian Film Institute.

For many of those who have since written about the period prior to government support, it may have seemed a very insular, bleak and unrewarding time. For those who were there, however, it was different: their memories reveal a screen culture buzzing with activity and ideas, infused by commercial enterprise, by television and commercials, and energised by popular, classic and foreign films. Nor was it a one-way street: just as the Australian industry was open to ideas from overseas, Australian ideas, energies and talent also flowed abroad.

Take producer Richard Brennan, for example. As he wrote in early 2009 just after his retirement as a project officer for the federal government funding body Screen Australia, he has been in love with cinema since he was ten: “I have read about films, watched them, and studied them. And since I was seventeen I have worked on them.” That all started when he met Bruce Beresford at Sydney University in 1960, “both dreaming of being filmmakers,” and they made a short film called The Devil to Pay. Richard then made several other short films and, upon graduating, went on to work first as a production assistant at the ABC, and then at the Commonwealth Film Unit (later Film Australia). In 1970 he produced and directed a documentary in support of the May moratorium which launched the anti–Vietnam war movement in Australia, Or Forever Hold Your Peace, which was the first film financed by the newly created Experimental Film and TV Fund. He then produced Peter Weir’s short drama Homesdale, which won the rarely given Grand Prix at the Australian Film Institute Awards.

So, for Richard and others like him, it was a time of terrific optimism. He recalls vividly how cinema opened up the rest of the world for him, telling me:

We’d just seen two locally made features in release, The Naked Bunyip and Nickel Queen, and at Film Australia we were working on two more, Brian Hannant’s Flashpoint and Cecil Holmes’s Gentle Strangers. We actually saw a future in filmmaking. And we were inspired by the films we were seeing; that year, at the Sydney Film Festival, I’d seen Truffaut’s Bed and Board, Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park, Pasolini’s Teorema, Bunuel’s Tristana, Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

Richard’s immaculately kept diaries, which have become a great source of information for friends whose memories or record-keeping aren’t nearly as reliable, record that he thought Wake in Fright “outstanding” and Donald Pleasence’s performance very impressive, and he noted “what a star Jack Thompson is going to be.” They also record what novelist Frank Moorhouse told him on 3 November 1971 — that Wake in Fright “gave him a thirst, an interest in homosexuality and an itchy ‘trigger finger.’”

The next month Richard was off to London to work as production manager on The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, written by Barry Humphries and directed by his old friend Bruce Beresford. Thirty or so films later, some as production manager, many more as producer (and occasionally as actor), Richard remembers this as “one of the highlights of my life; it was my first feature and my first time overseas.”

Howard Rubie, who would be the first assistant director on Wake in Fright, is another who remembers the early years of the Australian film renaissance — and even those before, in the 1950s and 1960s — as a highly productive period. In 1954, aged sixteen, he had started at Cinesound as a camera assistant, working on newsreels, short documentaries for cinemas, corporate documentaries and, later, news footage for Channel Nine. He started about the same time as a young editing assistant, Tony Buckley, and by 1967 they were both working for Ajax Films. “We were making a lot of TV commercials, especially cigarette commercials,” Rubie told me, continuing:

There was an incredible amount of activity in the non-feature area, and commercial production was the cornerstone of that activity. Even in the mid-sixties everyone was aspiring to features. We talked about the UK productions that were being made here by Harry Watt and Ealing Studios. And we talked about Charles Chauvel’s Sons of Matthew and about Lee Robinson and Chips Rafferty’s films as showing the way. There was a feeling of disappointment that the Australian industry had declined so much, but there was always a hope that it could be revived.

Involved in that possible revival was the company that would co-produce Wake in Fright, NLT Productions, so named after its entrepreneurial partners, Jack Neary, Bobby Limb and Les Tinker.

The company had been making “family” shows for television since the early 1960s, centred around the successful weekly variety show The Bobby Limb Show, featuring Limb, who was at the time a popular personality, singer and comedian who’d made his name and reputation on radio and in the clubs. Jack Neary, his manager and agent, also owned nightclubs, while Les Tinker was a Leagues Club manager who had financed the company.

In 1968 this small Australian company got involved with the US company Group W, a division of the major US multinational Westinghouse, which at the time operated a small US television network, and signed a co-production deal to make ten features in five years. This was an incredibly ambitious undertaking even for an experienced production team. There is some uncertainty about how these two companies got into bed with each other, but Howard Rubie thinks it had something to do with the Channel Nine connection.

As explained by film historians Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper in their book Australian Film 1900–1977, “NLT was supported in the venture by Motion Picture Investments, a company directed by prominent Australian businessmen, including Sir Reginald Ansett. Investment was on a major scale and the budget for the first film was $750,000.”

That first feature, Squeeze a Flower, was a comedy about a secret recipe for a liqueur known only to an Italian monk, played by Italian actor Walter Chiari, who comes to Australia to work at a Hunter Valley vineyard. The film was made quickly, with the principal members of cast and crew imported and everyone else Australian. The director, Mark Daniels, was American. Released in February 1970, the reviews weren’t good and it flopped.

But by this time NLT was getting ready to make their second feature — Wake in Fright. •

This is an extract from Tina Kaufman’s Wake in Fright, published in the Australian Screen Classics series, edited by Jane Mills, by Currency Press and the National Film and Sound Archive.

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It is 1862, a few years after the end of the first Crimean war, where the central character, Nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh), has seen all the horrors in a military hospital under the direction of Florence Nightingale. At this point in her story, though, she is on her way to a much less challenging assignment.

As she makes her way alone, crossing the sea to Ireland in the hull of a small vessel, then by train and finally by horse-drawn cart to a small village “in the exact middle of the country,” all the generic components of the vintage ghost story seem to be in place. Lured by an offer of good pay and light duties, she knows little of the situation she will find herself in.

Like Jane Eyre, or the governess in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, she is alone in the world, with no one to call on if she finds herself in trouble. Her destination is remote both in location and from all the business of the contemporary world. With its low, drawn-out whoops and whistles, composer Matthew Herbert’s soundtrack reinforces the anticipation of strange events.

Nurse Wright completes the last leg of her journey on foot the morning after she arrives in the village. A long, straight track stretches across the bare countryside, apparently for miles, before it reaches the door of a lone timber house. Here she is to meet her patient, an eleven-year-old girl who, as Wright has now been informed, has not eaten for four months yet remains in apparently sound health. Is this, as her family claim, “a Wonder”?

As a rationalist and a trained professional, the nurse’s job is to help resolve that question. Shades of The Exorcist loom as she mounts the stairs to the attic room where the girl sits alone, awaiting the new arrival, on a wooden chair. From here, though, all bets are off. There is nothing generic about the rest of the story, or about how Lelio and his inspired cinematographer Ari Wegner tell it.

Remarkably, this is Lelio’s first period film. He brings to it a subtly intelligent pace and perspective that complement the more obvious work of historical recreation in costume and setting. It is “a highly designed film,” he has said, because the relationship between camera and characters requires formal consideration at every point, complemented by restrained editing.

The narrative is anchored in real time by the walks to and from the cottage, where Nurse Wright works eight-hour shifts alternating with a nun who has been contracted as the second observer. Everything here takes time, and surely it is only a matter of time before a living body without nourishment perishes? Crosses in the cemetery outside the village mark the graves of children too weak to endure through the hungry season before the potatoes ripen. Available fare may be rough, but the nurse eats regular meals, seated alone at a table, spooning food from a bowl.

Florence Pugh brings a balance of dour tenacity and human sensitivity to the central role. She has been widely lauded for her performance, but this is very much an ensemble piece, with strong casting throughout. A committee of local authorities assembled to manage the watch over the girl includes Ciarán Hinds as the parish priest, Toby Jones as the doctor and Dermot Crowley as the squire. They sit behind a table at one end of a bare stone room while the two women they have contracted to watch the girl stand at the other.

But the power dynamics don’t play out in the ways that set-up might suggest. The men are clearly in dispute with each other about the meaning of the phenomenon they have agreed to investigate, and fundamental tenets of belief are at stake. But they are agreed on one principle: “the girl is not to be forced, nor interrogated nor badgered.” Neither is Nurse Wright, it seems, and it is she who puts the blunt questions. Why isn’t the child in hospital? Or, if she is in good health, why the need of a nurse?

Scriptwriter Emma Donoghue’s novel The Wonder (2016) is prefaced by a definition. “Nurse: to suckle an infant; to bring up a child; to take care of the sick.” What kind of nursing is really called for here? This is one of the most genuinely unpredictable storylines I’ve encountered in a film, and its unfolding hinges on a bizarre merging of the three responsibilities.

Donoghue takes on the “persistent cultural fantasy” of fasting girls to bring wonder and naturalism onto common ground by working a kind of alchemy between Wright and her charge, Anna O’Donnell. In the film adaptation, the nurse’s initial hostility is modified to make the rapport almost immediate.

The child, played by Kíla Lord Cassidy, does seem to harbour a kind of mystery. She lays out holy cards and interprets them as if they were the major arcana in a tarot pack, and speaks only of “manna from heaven” when quizzed about her sustenance. Although her role in the drama seems deeply passive, the young actor matches Pugh’s grit and maturity with a convincing kind of steadfastness. If there’s an exceptional central performance here, it is a collaborative achievement.

Historical dramas always raise questions about contemporary relevance, and Lelio responds to these readily. Themes of rationalism versus magical thinking, “spiritual elasticity versus fanaticism,” are very much of concern in our time, he says. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, they have resurfaced with all the urgent loading that goes with a shared conviction that survival depends on one form of understanding versus another. •

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Juror No. 10: Well, do you believe his story?

No. 8: I don’t know whether I believe it or not. Maybe I don’t.

No. 7: So what’d you vote not guilty for?

No. 8: There were eleven votes for guilty. It’s not so easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.

So begins the dramatic core of Twelve Angry Men, a 1950s teledrama, and later a movie and a play, that tracks a New York jury debating a murder charge. Writer Reginald Rose specified a jury of twelve men — even though women were seated on New York juries by then — perhaps to ensure that the twelve-handed discussion remained believably angry. But not too angry, which is why he specified an all-white cast to debate the fate of the “boy” he coded as an unspecified minority.

When many of us recently watched the real deliberations of eight women and four men about an alleged rape in the national parliament building, we did it in the usual way: from outside a locked door. Only twelve people were allowed to know what was said or done in that Canberra jury room, and it remains a crime for any of them to reveal anything to anyone who is likely to tell the public.

Highly trusted confidants aside, the rest of us have very little to go on. Attendees at Rose’s fictitious courtroom in New York City heard the jurors ask to inspect two exhibits — the knife used in the killing and a floorplan of the apartment where it occurred — before the jury announced its verdict. But the real jury in Canberra neither asked about evidence nor delivered a verdict.

They said just two things in public. The first was on the morning of their third full day of deliberations, a Monday, when they asked their trial judge, ACT chief justice Lucy McCallum, about “time expectations.” Gone are the days when jurors were detained in the jury room and put up at city hotels until they reached agreement. Modern jurors simply commute to and from their homes like other court officers. That’s why McCallum answered, “There is no rush, no time limit. The only expectation is you remain true to your oath.”

Their second communication came the following afternoon. According to the chief justice’s summary, their note said that they were “unable to reach a unanimous verdict.” Like juries in New York but unlike most other Australian ones, Canberra juries don’t have the option of a majority vote. So McCallum, following a practice laid down by the High Court in 1993, told the jurors to persist a while longer but scrupulously avoided suggesting a consensus would be the best outcome.

She also embellished the national court’s script by sending them home to visit a gym or walk a dog. The jury dutifully spent the entire next day talking, before opting — fatefully — to sleep on things for at least one more night. “No one could suggest you’re not working extremely hard,” soothed their judge.

And that’s all we know. Nevertheless, I’ll venture a few educated guesses about what went on behind closed doors.

My first guess is that the Canberra jurors probably weren’t angry during those five or so days of deliberation. I say that because angry jurors often use communications with the judge to vent or try to resolve their differences. My optimistic reading of the Canberra jury’s relative silence is that their disagreement about the verdict was reasonably friendly.

My second guess is that emotions within the jury room would still have been very high. Except in the dullest or easiest of cases, jurors almost always describe their deliberations as intense experiences, sometimes shattering or even life-changing. There’s every reason to think that’s true of this particular case, which has prompted hard discussions everywhere. There’s no reason to think that #MeToo stops at the jury room door.

My final speculation is that all twelve jurors were probably gobsmacked when their deliberations were abruptly ended.

•••

Guard: Is there anything wrong, gentlemen? I heard some noise.

Foreman: No. There’s nothing wrong. [He points to the large diagram of the apartment.] You can take that back. We’re finished with it.

[The guard nods and takes the diagram. He looks curiously at some of the jurors and exits. The jurors still are silent. Some of them slowly begin to sit down. No. 3 still stands at the window. He turns around now. The jurors look at him.]

Three jurors switch their votes during Twelve Angry Men’s second act, which ends with No. 8 goading his main antagonist into attacking him. No. 3’s cry of “I’ll kill him!” — the very words the prosecution says prove the accused’s wish to murder his father — prompts two more jurors to switch sides, evening the vote. It also prompts the (imaginary) outside world’s only intrusion into the jury’s deliberations.

The sanctity of the jury room is no empty principle. It is enforced not just by physical restrictions on who can enter the room but also, for centuries, by rigid legal limits on what information can leave it. In 1785, England’s most celebrated chief judge, Lord Mansfield, famously refused to act on evidence that an evenly divided jury had reached its verdict by tossing a coin, declaring that doing so “would endanger every verdict.”

Two hundred and thirty years later, Australia’s High Court ordered a partial end to trial judges showing the prosecutor and defendant the complete text of notes sent from the jury room, ruling that they should omit any information about what votes had been cast. The nation’s top court ruled that keeping such details secret “enables jurors to approach their task through frank and open discussion knowing that what is said in the jury room remains in that room.”

The Canberra case illustrates the high stakes. Imagine if, after their fifth day of deliberations, word got out of how the numbers were falling. Such news would have instantly poisoned the ongoing trial — casting a shadow over every subsequent decision by the lawyers or judge — and could have derailed any future one. Likewise, if the content of the jury’s conversations had leaked, both current and future deliberations would be tainted.

Unsurprisingly, the ACT Supreme Court is scrupulous about jurors’ privacy. The chief justice opted to paraphrase the jury’s second note rather than read it out. Court officers responsible for jurors swear an oath that they will “not speak to any juror… concerning the issues before the court.” They also give jurors boxes for storing their documents. And, as McCallum revealed on what should have been the jury’s sixth day of deliberations, “routine tidying” is carried out by “three sheriff’s officers,” a number surely chosen to reduce individual officers’ temptation to snoop.

And yet, in perhaps the most closely watched trial in Canberra’s history, and at perhaps the most closely watched moment of the proceedings, all of these protections failed. At least three things went wrong on the Wednesday evening. First, an officer “accidentally bumped one juror’s document folder onto the floor.” Second, that same officer, while putting the box back on the chair it came from, looked, again seemingly accidentally, through the folder’s “clear front.” And third, presumably instinctively, the officer read some words visible inside.

Had any of these things been done deliberately, the officer would surely have lost their job and potentially their liberty. But McCallum assured the public that the officer acted “inadvertently.” She went further: “The conduct of the sheriff’s officers involved in this trial has been exemplary. They have worked in difficult circumstances. The court is fortunate indeed to be so well served.”

But the officer’s personal blamelessness does not absolve McCallum’s court. Why did any of the jurors’ folders have a “clear front”? How did “tidying” involve any contact with a juror’s folder, much less risk bumping it to the floor? Why weren’t officers instructed to leave fallen items where they lay? Indeed, why were any non-jurors “routinely” entering the jury room at all, rather than (say) leaving whatever tidying was needed to the twelve adults within?

Such questions could scarcely have escaped the jury’s attention on the final day of the trial, and will surely occur to future Canberra jurors too. My guess is that all of these questions are now being given urgent attention by McCallum, who only became the head of the ACT judiciary at the start of this year.

But her court was “fortunate” this time. The officer who read the words visible in the juror’s folder saw no tallies, no intimate reveals, no checklists, indeed nothing written by any of the jurors. And the officer not only resisted the temptation to read further or open the box, but instead quickly fessed up to what happened. (McCallum recorded her “gratitude for the courage, integrity and good sense displayed” not only by the officer but also by their two colleagues.)

Best of all, the series of accidents proved serendipitous. The officer happened to uncover the only category of jury room leak that modern courts are allowed to act on.

•••

[Juror no. 8 swiftly flicks open the blade of a switch knife and jams it into the table next to the first one. They are exactly alike. There are several gasps and everyone stares at the knife. There is a long silence.]

No. 3: (slowly amazed) What are you trying to do?

No. 10: (loudly) Yeah, what is this? Who do you think you are?

No. 5: Look at it! It’s the same knife!

Foreman: Quiet! Let’s be quiet.

[They quiet down.]

No. 4: Where did you get it?

No. 8: I got it last night in a little junk shop around the corner from the boy’s house. It cost two dollars.

Twelve Angry Men’s most memorable scene features two out of five instances of juror misconduct identified by Berkeley law professor Charles Weisselberg in an article he published on the movie’s fiftieth anniversary, titled “Good Film, Bad Jury.”

The fictitious jury’s first bad step is when No. 8 brings something into the jury room that isn’t part of the trial evidence. The Canberra sheriff’s officer’s glimpse revealed that a juror seemingly did the same, bringing “an academic paper” into a trial that otherwise consisted only of testimony, CCTV footage and clothing.

Safety concerns about knives aside, I’m not convinced these are bad acts on their own. Jurors are no longer excluded from their own homes while deliberating and are not required to enter the jury room naked. There’s no reason why they can’t inspect their own belongings at night and bring relevant items in to show to others. Given that Rose’s fictitious prosecutor claims that the murder weapon — identical to one the accused was seen purchasing that day — is unique, why couldn’t a juror check that claim against a knife he owns, and show the jurors if the comparison is revealing?

Rather, the problem is that the knife No. 8 jams into the table isn’t his own, or at least wasn’t until he sought it out and bought it the previous night. That was the second instance of misconduct on Weisselberg’s list. The ACT’s Jury Handbook tells jurors: “Do not make searches on line or visit any place relevant to the case.” No. 8 does the latter. And everyone assumes that a Canberra juror obtained that academic paper by doing the former, perhaps when they were meant to be walking a dog or lifting weights.

And that made Chief Justice McCallum angry. She pointed out that she gave “at least seventeen, and possibly more” warnings to jurors against conducting their own investigations. Most of those were end-of-day reminders in these terms: “Please don’t go googling Brittany Higgins or Bruce Lehrmann or any of the other people you have heard mentioned. Please don’t seek out publicity in relation to this case. For the reasons I explained before, it would be very unfair to the accused if you sought information outside what you are going to hear in evidence in these proceedings.”

But, as far as anyone knows, no juror did anything in this list. The academic paper in the juror’s folder would surely have been written years before the events that were the subject of the trial. It did not mention anyone in the trial, or any place in it, or anything written about it, and contained nothing that the jurors heard in evidence.

Rather, the juror was suspected of conducting some general research about the outside world, akin to a New York juror scanning the shelves of his neighbourhood “junk shop” for switchblade knives. In her opening remarks, the chief justice explained that that wasn’t allowed either.

“You should only be learning about this trial in this room in my presence,” she said. “So, if you find yourself getting curious and undertaking internet research or talking to people about their areas of expertise, think to yourself, ‘Well, Chief Justice McCallum isn’t here so I probably shouldn’t be doing this.’ That is not a bad way of testing what you should hear in this trial. You should only hear the evidence in this trial in my presence when it comes before you in this courtroom.”

McCallum concluded this explanation by saying, “I hope that makes sense.” But Twelve Angry Men demonstrates why it doesn’t.

•••

No. 8: Look at this. [No. 8 closes the knife, flicks it open, and changes the position of the knife so that he can stab over-handed.] Doesn’t it seem like an awkward way to handle a knife?

No. 3: What are you asking me for?

[No. 8 closes the blade and flicks it open, holds it ready to slash underhanded.]

No. 5: Wait a minute! What’s the matter with me? Give me that.

[He reaches out for the knife.]

No. 8: Have you ever seen a knife fight?

No. 5: Yes, I have.

No. 8: In the movies?

No. 5: In my backyard, on my stoop, in the vacant lot across the street, too many of them. Switch knives came with the neighbourhood where I lived. Funny I didn’t think of it before. I guess you try to forget those things. [Flicking the knife open.] Anyone who’s ever used a switch knife would never have stabbed downward. You don’t handle a switch knife that way. You use it underhanded.

Rose’s angry men never solve the murder mystery at the heart of the case, or even come close to doing so. No alternative suspect or motive or means or opportunity ever emerges. Rather, the teleplay charts how each of the twelve learns a little more about the courtroom trial they just watched by talking it over with others.

No. 5 teaches his fellow jurors how to fight with a switch knife (and also about assuming who grew up in a slum). No. 8 schools them about the US constitution’s fifth amendment. No. 3 monologues an unwitting lesson in being a terrible father, No. 7 in being a terrible fact-finder, No. 10, a terrible racist. Several speak of life next to a noisy train line.

After No. 8 uses some back-of-the-envelope maths and the apartment map to demonstrate that a witness downstairs couldn’t have heard or saw what he testified he did, No. 9 speculates that the lonely, elderly witness might have lied to make himself feel important. Asked where he got “that fantastic story,” he explains, “I speak from experience,” prompting a “long pause.” The script’s many silences are central to the drama.

Rose’s point isn’t subtle. Each of these lessons causes at least one juror to switch his vote. But McCallum wasn’t subtle either. None of this learning was to happen in her jury room: “You mustn’t try to undertake your own inquiries or try to re-enact any aspect of the offence or consider any external evidence about the consumption of alcohol or about any matter that might arise during the trial. You must rest exclusively on the evidence you hear in this courtroom.”

Professor Weisselberg would side with her. He rounded out the twelve angry men’s “buffet of misconduct” with No. 5’s “expert testimony about the use of switchblade knives” and No. 8’s calculations about trains and apartments.

But are the chief justice and the professor right? If the juror’s folder had simply contained the juror’s own notes about another juror’s reflections on the “consumption of alcohol,” or detailed a re-enactment of walking through a ministerial suite, would that also have required the trial’s premature end? What if the notes revealed that — as is surely possible — one or more of the Canberra jurors had described their own experiences of rape?

The sanctity of the jury room mostly stops us from considering these questions, but sometimes courts must confront them. In 1999, an English court was asked to judge a movie-like scenario in a mundane case about whether some tyres were stolen or legitimately purchased. The jury wrote the judge a note revealing that one of their number happened to be a “tyre specialist” who knew how to read a tyre’s serial code to determine when it was made. “May we take this into consideration?” they asked.

The question flummoxed their trial judge, who failed to get back to them before they found the accused guilty. But the Court of Appeal overturned that verdict, ruling that the jury should have been told to ignore their fellow juror’s insights. Here’s the judges’ valiant attempt to explain why:

It was not improper for a juror who was not a lawyer and who had specialist knowledge of circumstances forming the background of a particular case to draw upon that specialised knowledge in interpreting the evidence. However that knowledge was not to be used as evidence but as a means of considering, weighing-up and assessing the evidence before the court.

Surely they were tempted to add, “I hope that makes sense.”

•••

No. 4: She did wear glasses. Funny. I never thought of it.

No. 8: Listen, she wasn’t wearing them in bed. That’s for sure. She testified that in the midst of her tossing and turning she rolled over and looked casually out the window. The murder was taking place as she looked out, and the lights went out a split second later. She couldn’t have had time to put on her glasses. Now maybe she honestly thought she saw the boy kill his father. I say that she saw only a blur.

No. 3: How do you know what she saw? Maybe she’s far-sighted.

[He looks around. No one answers.]

No. 3: (loudly) How does he know all these things?

[There is silence.]

No. 8: Does anyone think there still is not a reasonable doubt?

[He looks around the room, then squarely at No. 10. No. 10 looks down and shakes his head no.]

This exchange leaves Rose’s fictitious jury again split 11–1, this time in favour of “not guilty.” But Professor Weisselberg baulked at adding this discussion to the jury’s “buffet of misconduct,” explaining that “the jurors confront a lack of evidence on a key point, but they appropriately treat it as relevant to the existence of reasonable doubt.” Four professors at the same symposium condemned that discussion for a different reason: that the jury’s speculation about the witness’s eyesight was tendentious and didn’t account for her crystal-clear testimony.

When I first learned the topic of the academic article in the Canberra jury room — the prevalence of false allegations of rape — I felt the same way. Absolutely no one knows, or can know, how many or how few rape allegations are false. All we can ever know is that some allegations proceed to investigation, prosecution and, for a few, conviction, and most don’t. But there is no way to know whether most of those allegations are true or not. The rest is just guesswork, and such guesses mean little or nothing during a particular rape trial.

But then I read Chief Justice McCallum’s summary of the juror’s article: “It is a discussion of the unhelpfulness of attempting to quantify the prevalence of false complaints of sexual assault and a deeper, research-based analysis of the reasons for both false complaints and scepticism in the face of true complaints.”

In short, the unidentified article teaches everyone, including jurors, why the issue of prevalence goes nowhere.

After questioning the juror in private, McCallum revealed that they gave “an explanation that the document was not used or relied upon by any juror.” Given the incentives to dissemble and the difficulty of checking, the chief justice responded to such claims about goings-on in the jury room with appropriate scepticism. It sufficed that the academic paper was present in the jury room and “could be deployed to support either side of the central issue in this case.”

Is it true, though, as she declared, that it is “neither possible nor helpful to speculate as to the use to which this information might have been put in the jury room, if any”? I’m sceptical. Here are my guesses about what may have happened behind closed doors.

My first guess is that the prevalence of false rape allegations was indeed discussed in the jury room, probably quite often. I say that because the same issue was raised by almost every person I spoke with about the Canberra case, and most other rape trials as well. Indeed, on the middle weekend of the jury’s deliberations, journalist Louise Milligan complained to the capital’s lawyers that “there are still a significant minority of people who continue to, automatically, assume (against all evidence in international research and tendered to royal commissions) that there are multitudes of false accusers.”

My second guess is that one or more jurors would have nominated a particular fraction of rape allegations as false, according to academic studies. I say this because googling “number of false rape allegations” immediately yields a claim that “a range of studies show approximately 5 per cent of rape allegations are proven false.” This claim is sourced to a “fact sheet” from Victoria Police and the Australian government’s Institute of Family Studies, created as a resource for police and legal practitioners about fifteen “rape myths.” The 5 per cent figure is cited to dispel the “myth” that “the rate of false allegations is high.”

My final speculation: that the juror who brought in the academic article may have done so to help teach their fellow jurors why such figures aren’t reliable enough to be used in a jury room.

•••

[No. 3 looks around at all of them for a long time. They sit silently, waiting for him to speak, and all of them despise him for his stubbornness. Then, suddenly, his face contorts as if he is about to cry, and he slams his fist down on the table.]

No. 3: (thundering) All right!

[No. 3 turns his back on them. There is silence for a moment and then the foreman goes to the door and knocks on it. It opens. The guard looks in and sees them all standing. The guard holds the door for them as they begin slowly to file out. No. 8 waits at the door as the others file past him. Finally he and No. 3 are the only ones left. No. 3 turns around and sees that they are alone. Slowly he moves toward the door. Then he stops at the table. He pulls the switch knife out of the table and walks over with it. He holds it in the approved knife fighter fashion and looks long and hard at No. 8, pointing the knife at his belly. No. 8 stares back. Then No. 3 turns the knife around. No. 8 takes it by the handle. No. 3 exits. No. 8 closes the knife, puts it away and taking a last look around the room, exits, closing the door. The camera moves in close on the littered table in the empty room, and we clearly see a slip of crumpled paper on which are scribbled the words “Not guilty.”]

That’s how Rose’s teleplay ends. The movie opts for a different ending, which you can watch on YouTube. Crucially, in that version, No. 8’s knife is left lying on the jury room table. In real life, it would have been swiftly discovered by a bailiff and would launch an inquiry into juror misconduct. If it was found quickly enough, it might have condemned the accused to a retrial and, perhaps, worse.

An observant journalist afforded a Canberra juror a final word, reporting that they “swore under their breath and put a hand to their head as it was announced they could not continue.” We can all guess that word. But who was their anger directed towards? The sheriff’s officer? The chief justice? Another juror? Themselves? On that question, the jury’s out. •

The post Twelve vexed Canberrans appeared first on Inside Story.

We see how Melbourne was made and remade, from the years leading up to the vibrant, anything-is-possible 1860s through to the long (and not yet complete) postwar enthusiasm for destruction and reconstruction, with buildings, streetscapes, urban centres, gathering places and green spaces disappearing only to reappear in markedly different form. We follow — by means of archival footage, photographs and the part-passionate, part-laconic commentary of a small group of highly engaged experts — how the city got from there to here.

In one sense it is a tragic tale, a story of how nineteenth-century commercial vitality could combine with a commitment to beauty and ornament and aesthetic pleasure, and how that happy combination was abandoned in favour of an equally commercialised faith in the clean and functional yet soulless lines of modernism.

In the later nineteenth century in particular, Melbourne was the most modern of modern cities, but by the early twentieth century the city seemed to be stuck in an earlier version of what it meant to be modern. Extending over many decades, the drive to keep up and go up is now commonly regarded as having got out of hand — a view that will only be reinforced by watching archival clips showing the wrecking ball repeatedly making short work of sandstone and brick and other materials supposedly meant to last.

Towards the end of the film, the tone changes, if not quite to an acceptance of what can’t be undone, then to an acknowledgement that lamentation alone serves no purpose and that we should focus instead on appreciating and celebrating those buildings that have, whether by chance or design, escaped the wrecking ball and now stand isolated or in short, nostalgia-inducing rows.

Buildings that were once imposing are now imposed upon, surrounded by newer and higher structures. From vantage points across the city, we can see architectural history in a single frame, with the metaphor of continuous change and growth made real by the contrast between the squat and solid, satisfyingly proportional yet fancifully decorated buildings of the early days, and the ambitious, straight-up, no-nonsense towers of more recent times.

Not everyone will be convinced by the attempt at balance. The film, with its wealth of archival clips of urban destruction, makes it difficult to understand how wreckers and citizens could have been quite so gleefully enthusiastic about it all. But the urge to knock down and rebuild, which started small, took earnest hold in the immediate interwar years and became rampant from the 1950s through to the 1980s, was not simply the result of philistinism gone mad.

Those statement buildings of earlier times — the insurance offices with their soaring ceilings and abundant curlicues, the lowering hotels with grand public spaces and small, draughty, unplumbed bedrooms, the multi-floor cafes with chandeliers and murals, the picture palaces that later sprung up all around suburban Melbourne — all of them were, in that phrase guaranteed to strike dread into the hearts of architectural conservationists, “no longer fit for purpose.” Replacement seemed the only option.

The fact that Melbourne was always changing, forever being built and rebuilt, meant it was constantly being filmed and photographed. Change attracts the camera, creating a number of distinct golden ages of Australian urban photography, most notably in the 1860s, when the newness of both Melbourne and the photographic medium combined to document the process of urban creation. Mid-century photographers like Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic captured, sometimes in the same image, the excitement of re-creation along with the regret it entailed.

And film of course chronicled these changes in real time: the crowds bustling by Victorian work sites as buildings made their way to unprecedented heights of five or seven or eight floors, right through to Whelan’s ubiquitous wrecking balls making short work of a now-redundant building once expected to last forever — “forever” turning out to be little more than half a century, and frequently a good deal less.

We can’t escape the images’ elegiac tone. And no doubt there were many who at the time regretted the passing of a building they associated with their own youth and optimism, a personal landmark perhaps, one that they were used to making their way by. But regret, by and large, is not what we see on the faces of the witnesses to this assertion of energy and optimism.

The mid-century period of peak demolition was also a time when the most agile and acrobatic of the wrecking crews became urban celebrities, performing breathtaking balancing acts for lunchtime crowds of city workers. Clips from the time capture something of the excitement of looking on as the proudly unknockdownable was swiftly and comprehensively knocked down. Just as people were irresistibly attracted to those makeshift viewing windows that allowed them to peer in at the process of construction taking place, so they could gather to watch the building being demolished, then watch while the whole process started over again.

That was then. Now, the signs everywhere are that, architecturally speaking, we are falling out of love with modernity. Those who long for a return to classical design principles were until recently regarded as hooked on nostalgia, advocates for recreating what could not be recreated except as pastiche. While our fascination with statement buildings and starchitecture continues unchecked in many ways, something has changed.

Organisations and lobby groups that advocate a return to classical design principles (as variously defined) are cropping up all over the place. They appeal, with their accompanying images of medieval hill towns and height-restricted town centres, to what is described as our often unconscious responses to fractals and proportion and ornament. In this traditionalist version of the ideal city, buildings should attract the eye but not stand out — or up — too much. The elements of an urban landscape should go together to form a visually satisfying whole.

Stolen skyline? The Crown Casino building at Sydney’s Barangaroo. Phillip Elwin/Flickr

Ultimately, this is about our unresolved attitudes to density and height. How much should we try to fit in the frame before the composition becomes unbalanced, with the new overshadowing rather than complementing the old? A series of articles last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, assessing the relative success or failure of Central Sydney’s ambitious Barangaroo development project, hardly comes close to resolving this question. The commentaries land heavily on one side or the other, as indeed did the many hundreds of readers who felt moved to comment.

The centrepiece of the Barangaroo development, the Crown Tower — visible from points all over the wider urban area — is either a testament to vulgarity of massively inappropriate scale (“Barangaroo stole our skyline,” in the judgement of journalist Margot Saville) or a bold architectural statement of international significance. The Barangaroo development itself is a missed opportunity (a now standard criticism of any architectural or design endeavour, big or small), just one more example of the triumph of profit over public benefit — or the bold transformation of a redundant eyesore into an instantly iconic destination, a major civic asset.

Between these opposing views is one piece of common ground, and that is the ground on which none of Barangaroo’s buildings stand. A renewed enthusiasm for green space — parks, gardens and landscapes returned to their natural or near-natural state — reflects a long-overdue recognition of the intimate connection of First Nations people to the land, the dangers of climate change, and the boost to physical and mental health that comes with access to nature. But green space has the added advantage of being an increasingly rare focus of consensus, free of public debate’s almost automatic polarisation.

The villains remain, of course — the rapacious developers who push back against the greenery in their aim to create more saleable floor space. But even the most cartoonishly profit-seeking developer will generally grasp that a bit of greenery goes a long way towards enhancing perceptions of liveability in the minds of prospective buyers.

One of the common criticisms of skyscrapers, and the race for the next one to be taller and shinier than the last, is that like all bigger and better feats of design and engineering, they are monuments to excess, to the display and performance of wealth and power. In Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s 2021 film Official Competition, a wealthy and now elderly businessman longs to leave something more behind than his rather prosaic achievements in the world of commerce. “I want to do something that lasts,” he says. “A bridge, for example, designed by a famous architect.”

That he opts instead to finance a film, with a great director, famous actors and the likelihood of critical acclaim, underlines the link between monumentalism and performance. Skyscrapers may be monuments to excess and display, but so were many of the buildings they replaced — the grand merchants’ houses, the imposing and richly decorated insurance buildings, the cafes and hotels with their imported chandeliers, built to last only to give way in their turn to the next performance.

The Lost City of Melbourne asks important questions about the urban landscape, about how we look at it and what we see. What has been lost, and does the knowledge of past loss spoil irredeemably our appreciation of the present? Should we try to replace the past, always assuming that we can? The cycle of demolition and construction has been part of the public identification of Melbourne, and hence of Melburnians, with modernity. It was a particular brand of modernity, one that coexisted with social conservatism, but powerful for all that.

The rush to glass and steel, and the loosening of height restrictions that occurred in the postwar years derived from a fear that Melbourne’s claims to be modern, recently so well founded, were under threat. Perhaps today’s ragged skyline — a jumble of the old and the new — is a new version of modernity we can learn to love. We can see those older survivors as evocative relics in sadly reduced circumstances, just hanging on, or as scrubbing up rather well, all things considered, in the dusk with the height behind them. •

The post Re-creation and regret appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Hot, wild heart appeared first on Inside Story.

These images come to us in atmospheric monochrome, street after Parisian or provincial street, defeated office workers dozing on park benches, women of the night, sad and trapped, bourgeois burghers, struggling to keep up a pretence of prosperity and contentment. It is a world beyond depressing and yet it draws us in until we want nothing so much as to be there, observing the lives of the world-weary, the frustrated and the disappointed, and luxuriating in it all.

Although Simenon was clearly influenced in his novels by the newer arts of cinema and photography — he was for a time a keen and talented photographer — he was not unduly bound by their already well-developed conventions. One of the best and most psychologically penetrating of the Maigret novels, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, begins with a standard opening scene, the discovery of a body (or in this case, a detached arm), but doesn’t quite follow the trajectory we might expect.

A river bargeman makes the gruesome find, hooking it up from the sludge at the bottom of the Canal-Saint-Martin. “It was a human arm, intact from the shoulder to the hand. In the water, it had taken on a pallid colour and the texture of a dead fish.” Contrary to what we might expect, there is no cinematic reaction shot. We are given no clue as to what the bargeman might be thinking. How to respond, and to imagine the horror of the scene, is left entirely to the reader. It is one of many small instances where Simenon establishes and maintains a direct connection between narrator and reader and helps to create that sense that we are part of his world.

Immersed in this world, we might join Maigret for a bistro lunch and a bottle of wine, typically shared with a colleague, while taking note of the habits and quirks of strangers. We can then head back to the Quai des Orfèvres in a regulation black Citroën, complete with suicide doors, perhaps for a restorative snooze before returning to the case. Or instead follow Maigret home for lunch, for something substantial prepared by Mme Maigret in their cocoon-like flat, finishing with a fruity digestif, a rustic prunelle perhaps.

These images come not only from Simenon’s novels but also from the countless film and television adaptations of the Maigret novels, and of some of the one-off romans durs, the hard novels, of which there are hundreds. (No one seems to know how many.) Some of the most recognised directorial names in French cinema — Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Claude Chabrol, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Bertrand Tavernier — have responded to the source material to considerable effect, while Maigret has been brought to life by some formidable actors — Michel Simon, Harry Baur and Jean Gabin among them.

Many other actors, some with the status of icons, some lesser known, have had a go. What is perhaps surprising is how many of them are good in the role, suggesting something about the character of Maigret that brings out the best. Choosing the “winner” has become a bit of a game among Maigret fans. Some favour Harry Baur’s early incarnation (too old for the part, was Simenon’s comment, which seems a bit harsh as Baur was fifty-three at the time) or Jean Gabin, whom he acknowledged got the language right.

Overall, Simenon is reported to have favoured the performance of the less stellar but entirely convincing Rupert Davies, in the BBC television series of the early sixties, so well received that it ran for four seasons and fifty-four episodes, and recently cheered fans old and new when the entire run was released on DVD.

Georges Simenon (second from right) in 1966 with three actors who played Maigret: British actor Rupert Davies (left), Dutch actor Jan Teuling and Italian actor Gino Cervi. Mondadori Portfolio/AAP

As adaptations moved from black and white to colour, something was lost. Black and white just seems truer to Maigret and his world. It speaks directly to images we as readers already have in our heads. Two of the most recent adaptations, the television series with Rowan Atkinson and the 2022 film Maigret, directed by Patrice Leconte and based on Maigret and the Dead Girl, with the great Gérard Depardieu in the title role, are among the least satisfactory.

Disappointed viewers have tended to focus on what are seen as their one-note performances — Atkinson too distractingly deliberate and lugubrious, Depardieu too glacially cerebral. But this is deflection. The real culprit is colour, that and the deadening accuracy of sophisticated twenty-first-century set and costume design.

The novels rely on a bedrock of realism, but the overwhelming impression is atmospheric, a quality that in general is more successfully rendered in monochrome. When the plot of a Maigret novel doesn’t quite make sense, as occasionally it doesn’t, it seems like a trivial criticism compared with the power of the atmosphere that remains with the reader. It is a remarkable achievement, to create a world that resonates so strongly, by means of “simple” prose and what Simenon himself described as deliberately restricted vocabulary.

Among the seventy-five novels that make up Penguin’s recent republication project is one that is not quite a novel at all. Maigret’s Memoirs, in a new translation by Howard Curtis, directly addresses the elision that formed quite early in the public mind between Maigret and his creator. Maigret recalls how his acquaintance with Simenon began, and how it evolved over the years into a wary friendship. He tries hard to provide instances in which his personality, appearance and policing methods have been manipulated and even falsified by Simenon in the interests of creating a character who purports to be him.

Yet for all his questioning of Simenon’s methods, Maigret is repeatedly if reluctantly obliged to acknowledge the point of Simenon’s creative alterations. “The concern for objectivity falsifies the truth,” the creator explains patiently to the literal-minded creation, adding that “the first quality of the truth is to be simple.”

Simenon freely acknowledges the discrepancies between fiction and “real life.” He is fully aware, he assures Maigret, “that a chief inspector… doesn’t run around the streets in person questioning concierges and bar owners.” His objective, he says again, is to simplify in the interests of truth, and Maigret must admit to himself that this is logical. Simenon’s hero is given his own direct voice in the Memoirs, but this merely serves to confirm that it is not a relationship of equals, but one of leader and subordinate.

For someone with a reputation for being unknowable, Simenon talked and wrote a lot about himself. When I Was Old is an absorbing account of his life in the years between 1960 — when he realised that at the age of fifty-nine he was now undeniably old — and 1963, when he achieved some sort of accommodation with this uncomfortable fact and the journal abruptly stops.

Here, his advocacy of simplicity becomes something of a mantra, couched in almost comically simple terms. “I don’t like big words,” he says, justifying his approach by his confidence that reality is “less falsified in the simple.” Yet Simenon is also playing with the reader. He knows that there is a disingenuousness to this apparent forthrightness. He is fully aware that his version of reality “trembles on the brink of unreality.” To put it another way, it’s all about the atmosphere.

Along with the novels, Penguin has also turned its attention to the short stories in which the inspector appears. Many of them, the exact number of which is again difficult to quantify, have not appeared in English before, including three of the five that are included in the recently published collection Death Threats and Other Stories, translated by Ros Schwartz. In the story that gives the collection its title, the plot hinges on a distinction that appears frequently in Simenon, the unbridgeable gap between the young and the old. The young are “healthy, muscular, lively,” they are “normal” and “carefree.” At some point, though, they become old, sometimes disconcertingly early, and in doing so they ruin “beautiful materials, a beautiful life, infinite possibilities.” It is both a highly romantic notion and a gloomy prospect.

This distinction between youth and age underpins much of Simenon’s work, both in the Maigret novels and the non-Maigret. One of the best of those available in English is The Strangers in the House — a novel with a detective of sorts at its centre, albeit very much a reluctant one — published in 2022 in a translation by the indefatigable Howard Curtis.

Hector Loursat is a disappointed man. His career as an attorney barely sputters along, his wife has left him long since and he is virtually estranged from his daughter, even though they live under the same roof. As so often in Simenon, the course of his life is dramatically altered by a sudden, disruptive event. A murder is committed, on the top floor, a part of his house which may as well be in another world, one where he never ventures.

Slowly and painfully Loursat drags himself out of his customary torpor and devotes himself to finding the truth, at the same time saving his daughter’s reputation and the life of the young man accused of the crime. In the process, Loursat recaptures, at least for a time, something of the optimism and energy of youth. The young had adventures, he laments, while their parents “pretended to be alive.”

The key to this reinvention and to solving the mystery is the rediscovery of simplicity, of clearing away the debris and getting to the essence. When the examining magistrate waffles on and on, circling round the point, Loursat interrupts him midstream by blowing his nose, “loudly, cynically, just to get it over with.” In pursuing the mystery, he finds that “it was indispensable to translate every sentence into plain language,” to discover what people are really saying.

The murder that takes place under his own roof offers the prospect of adventure, of the opportunity to play detective. In his dogged quest to get to the truth, Loursat “had the impression he was descending into life.” At the end of the novel, after he has succeeded in more or less resolving the case, we are left uncertain as to whether he will remain in life or once more withdraw. We last see him seated “all alone, still dignified, in a bistro, over a glass of red wine,” leaving the question of what happens next entirely open.

Numerous attempts have been made to capture what it is about Simenon that makes him so sheerly readable, that makes it difficult to read just one or two novels, get the flavour, and stop. The prolific commentator on crime fiction and noir, Barry Forshaw, has recently taken on the task in his Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films, with rather mixed results.

A large proportion of this book, more than half, is devoted to a varyingly annotated bibliography, which goes as far as can reasonably be expected towards the unattainable goal of comprehensiveness. It includes all the works in which Maigret appears, a generous sampling of the non-Maigret novels, and a particularly useful itemising of the film and television adaptations of both categories of novels, stretching from 1931 (sometimes listed elsewhere as 1932) with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads, to 2022 and Jean Becker’s The Heart of a Man, based on the hard novel Les Volets Verts and starring the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu. Patrice Leconte’s Maigret, however, arrived too late to make the list.

Among the more obscure and hard-to-obtain film versions, Forshaw makes an intriguing reference to a Franco-Australian co-production of 1958, The Stowaway, set in Tahiti and featuring a range of well-known Australian and European actors including, improbably, the incomparable French icon Arletty.

More rewarding are the companion chapters on aspects of Simenon and his world, including one on Maigret’s Paris, another on his influence on other writers and, most interesting of all, a chapter on translation that makes extensive use of Forshaw’s interviews with three of the distinguished translators assembled by Penguin to see through its Maigret project. Ros Schwartz, who has by her own count translated sixteen Simenon titles, points to the need for the translator to also be something of a detective in accurately representing the period detail. “In one description of a woman sleeping with ‘épingles’ in her hair at night, I eventually found the exact bobby pins advertised on eBay.”

Schwartz also refers to the real difficulties in replicating Simenon’s “extraordinarily economical” language. The other two translators make this same point. Howard Curtis scotches any thought that Simenon is an easy author to translate. “Time and again,” he says, “you come across beautifully turned phrases that sum up a character, a setting, a mood in the minimum of words, and it’s often a struggle, for a translator, to find equivalents in English.” Siân Reynolds phrases it with appropriate simplicity: “they are hard to translate because they are written simply.” These comments go to the heart of Simenon’s continuing and wide-ranging appeal — his unmatched ability to convey complexity, nuance and, above all, atmosphere in the seductive guise of simplicity. •

Maigret and the Headless Corpse
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $19.99 | 192 pages

Maigret’s Memoirs
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 149 pages

When I Was Old
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Helen Eustis | Penguin | $22.99 | 452 pages

Death Threats and Other Stories
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Ros Schwartz | Penguin | $22.99 | 181 pages

The Strangers in the House 
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 217 pages

Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films
By Barry Forshaw | Oldcastle | $29.99 | 256 pages

The post The simplicity of Simenon appeared first on Inside Story.

That suddenly changed last Friday when treasurer Josh Frydenberg, communications minister Paul Fletcher and ACT senator Zed Seselja descended on the NFSA’s headquarters in Canberra with the surprise announcement of a $41.9 million funding boost, over four years, for its digitisation program. The announcement also provided funds to digitise the holdings of seven other institutions as well, including the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery and the National Library. It recognised the essentiality of preserving Australia’s at-risk audiovisual heritage while properly placing the NFSA at the centre of the action. So how good is that?

Has the government found a new enthusiasm for vintage and recent movies and radio programs? Or are there more basic concerns? Following immediately on a disastrous parliamentary session, the good-news story got blanket media coverage and will do no harm at all to the electoral prospects of the ministerial trio, whose seats are all under challenge from high-calibre “Voices of” candidates.

And, in a classic Yes Minister nuance, something vital is missing: a starting date for the cash splash. In the end, it’s really just a statement of intent. I doubt the NFSA will see the colour of the government’s money before polling day. Post-election, if things don’t follow through as announced, it won’t be the fault of Messrs Frydenberg, Fletcher and Seselja. It will be interesting to learn whether Labor and the Greens have begun to focus on national institutions like the NFSA.

The announcement also diverts attention from much more fundamental matters: the integrity of the NFSA’s governance and curatorial standards. In detailed questions on 18 October, independent MP Zali Steggall asked minister Fletcher whether he would seek to amend the NFSA’s legislation to ensure that its board comprised experts with academic and professional backgrounds directly relevant to the institution’s operations, and whether he would fill the two current vacancies against these criteria. Advocacy groups have suggested plenty of candidates he could choose from. The minister has yet to respond.

While its act requires the NFSA to work to the “highest curatorial standards,” the institution no longer specifies which curatorial, technical or ethical standards and codes it adheres to, thereby distancing itself from its international peers. Its collection-development policy lacks depth and detail. Research has stagnated. Relationships have deteriorated. Redundancies have continued to leach away corporate memory and expertise. Rebuilding those lost assets is a task that still awaits attention.

While any funding increase is a plus, the NFSA is much more than a digitisation factory or government-funded YouTube. The selection, protection, documenting, cataloguing and accessibility of the national collection, guided by trained long-term professionals, are as fundamental to our national polity as environmental protection and integrity in public administration. The archive requires sustained ongoing funding — not short-term, opportunistic grants. It needs the continual interest of elected representatives, such as Zali Steggall and Helen Haines, to keep bureaucrats and administrators up to the mark. It is refreshing that they, and others like them, have a vision of Australia that embraces technological change and an aspiration to respect our heritage through good governance.

Finally, there is a worrying hint in all this that digitisation is a once-and-for-all solution for audiovisual heritage generally. It is not. It’s crucial for access, with all its possibilities, but preservation and curation is a separate and much more complex reality than we might assume when we back up our personal data to the cloud. Archival standards require that analogue originals be retained after digitisation for as long as they remain viable. Among other things, digital files must be protected from decay and viruses, and their integrity maintained against the potential manipulation of their content. They must be refreshed regularly and are permanently on life support. It has been said that digital files last forever — or five years, whichever comes first.

The coming election is a time when all those seeking office, whether party-aligned or independent, can rise to this challenge with imagination and a willingness to ensure Australia has a world class NFSA that we can all be proud of. •

The post Promises, promises… appeared first on Inside Story.

The many representations of the irascible, inspirational Winston Churchill on screens large and small have featured actors including Robert Hardy, Albert Finney, Gary Oldman, Brian Cox and Ian McNeice (Bert Large of Doc Martin fame) in the lead role, each of them finding his own way of coming to terms with possibly the most famous British politician of the past century.

But how many of us know much about Churchill’s involvement in the film industry? Fleet’s documentary goes some way to filling this lacuna.

Churchill and the Movie Mogul’s other protagonist is Alexander Korda, whose poverty-stricken Hungarian childhood didn’t stop him from becoming the most powerful producer in 1930s England, creating such international successes as The Private Life of Henry VIII. Churchill’s long association with Korda began in that decade, and Fleet’s film investigates how the two men came to see film as the best medium for promoting the British cause as the crisis in Europe deepened. This aim became more pressing, of course, as the threat of war became more ominous in the later thirties. And once the war was under way they saw films as even more crucial in making England matter more to the United States, which Churchill hoped to enlist on Britain’s side.

To do this, he felt it was crucial to send Korda across the Atlantic to make films that would create sympathy for Britain’s war aims. This resulted in what became Churchill’s favourite film, Lady Hamilton (1941) — more provocatively titled That Hamilton Woman in America, though neither title suggests that Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton’s foil in the film, would get much of a look-in. Having often been a key adviser to Korda, Churchill saw parallels between England’s situation at the start of the war and its spectacular defeat of the Spanish Armada, celebrated in an earlier Korda film, Fire Over England (1937). Indeed, he increasingly came to see film as a “war weapon.”

Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor obviously played the key role in getting the Americans to the battlefront, but Fleet’s film suggests that we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of the Churchill–Korda offensive. One of the history-changing moments he recounts is a crucial meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt, recalled in the film by son Elliott Roosevelt.

Though documentary is an appropriate label for Churchill and the Movie Mogul, it’s not just a careful recital of facts. Fleet creates a sense of ongoing drama, drawing on a variety of sources and methods of presentation. Helping create that sense of drama are plenty of clips from the key films; for example, the moment from Fire Over England when Flora Robson as Elizabeth I makes her famous (and not terribly politically correct) remark, “I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” We see audiences watching the films with rapt attention, and even cars lined up at an early drive-in, along with clips from the newsreels of the time. Commentators across an impressive range, including Stephen Fry, James Mason and Vivien Leigh, discuss Korda as producer, director and major figure in British film history, and politicians, academics and critics assess one or other of the two men.

The film is as much about Korda as it is about Churchill, and they get roughly equal screen time. Churchill and the Movie Mogul vividly evokes time, place and its protagonists.

I wouldn’t say that the Churchill we view in Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill is necessarily true to the life in every detail. Nor does the film, though an absorbing enough entertainment, always stick to the historical facts. I’m recommending it here as drama, not as documentary.

The film’s historical moment is that of the days leading up to the Normandy landing, Operation Overlord, or D-Day as it became known, on 6 June 1944. Its narrative impulse lies in Churchill’s approach to the operation and how it influences his dealings with the US supreme Allied commander, General Eisenhower, and with Field Marshal Montgomery and others. These others include his wife Clementine (Miranda Richardson) and King George VI (James Purefoy).

When we first see Churchill he is wandering, in a long shot, along a beach, presumably pondering the challenges of liberating France. This vista contrasts with our next view of him, as the camera prowls through his wildly untidy bedroom, littered with papers, cigar butts and whisky glasses.

Teplitzky is interested in evoking his dealings with staff, including a new secretary whose fiancé will have a moment in the landing — and here the film gives Churchill a touching if perhaps slightly soapy moment. There is clear conflict between Churchill, who is portrayed as opposing the D-Day landing, and Eisenhower and Montgomery. Clashes at this military level lead to a meeting with the King, who tells Churchill he “must stay at home and wait.”

However factually accurate, Teplitzky’s film weaves the public and the private to construct a persuasive entertainment that is also occasionally moving as it proceeds inexorably to the famous Churchill phrase, “We shall never surrender.”

I should mention that Teplitzky’s film led me to view two of the many other films based on the cantankerous character who ultimately led Britain to victory against the German military predator: Richard Loncraine’s 2002 TV movie, The Gathering Storm, and Joe Wright’s 2017 film, Darkest Hour. What all three movies have in common is their focus on Churchill’s dealings with a key moment in the second world war — and his relations with his wife Clemmie.

He somehow contrived, in Churchill, to make the D-Day landing redound to his credit despite his earlier opposition. In Darkest Hour, despite a snide reference to his role in promoting the Gallipoli landing during the first world war, Churchill (Gary Oldman) pushes parliament into evacuating from Dunkirk, following which he receives wildly enthusiastic support. In The Gathering Storm, we watch Churchill (Albert Finney) move from a career low point in 1934 to the triumph of taking over from Chamberlain to become the prime minister who would lead the nation to war — and repudiate the criticism of his “mindless optimism.”

In both Loncraine’s and Wright’s films, he is depicted in querulous dealings with various politicians — whether it is Stanley Baldwin (Derek Jacobi), whom he harasses in The Gathering Storm, or Neville Chamberlain, up till the latter’s announcement that “We are at war with Germany,” in Darkest Hour — and numerous others who cross his path. As well as these public manifestations of an imposing but somewhat despotic temperament, the films also offer entertaining insights into his married life with Clemmie, played respectively and superbly by Vanessa Redgrave and Kristin Scott Thomas. Each of them works hard at bearing with his outrages, and each makes credible an underlying devotion.

No doubt, all three feature films sometimes play fast and loose with the facts — a privilege not available to John Fleet — but their portraits of the charismatic and maddening central figure are of a high order, and in each film there is a pervasive sense of a nation at some of its most challenging times. •

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With the several colonies about to federate as the Commonwealth of Australia, the dignitaries move in solemn procession towards the rotunda for the swearing-in of the first governor-general of the first federal ministry. But there’s a larrikin moment: the elegantly togged governor-general, the Earl of Hopetoun, holds up the show by ducking aside to say g’day to a mate. This instant isn’t caught in the official photographs. So how do we know it happened?

Because it’s in the film. Australia was the first country to be born in front of a movie camera. The Federation ceremonies and procession were captured as a living documentary record — by the Salvation Army, no less, which was already expert in the new technology. Its Limelight Department, led by Major Joseph Perry, had been contracted to make this first-ever motion picture film using multi-camera positions: all thirty-five minutes of it. It is preserved at the National Film and Sound Archive, or NFSA.

One first led to another. Australia invented the feature film in 1906 when Joseph Perry’s sons, Orrie and Reg, filmed The Story of the Kelly Gang. The footage was processed by a chemist named William Gibson, who went on to found the film production and exhibition conglomerate known today as Event Hospitality and Entertainment. It’s a sequence of pioneering, mentoring and building.

The arrival of the movie camera, along with mechanical recordings such as phonograph cylinders, discs and piano rolls — to be followed by radio and television — opened up previously unimaginable ways of understanding the world. But preserving these new, constantly evolving formats meant rethinking how we store, organise, curate and exhibit. It required a new kind of institution — the audiovisual archive — along with a new breed of people to run it. These archives were pioneered, naturally, in Europe and North America — but also, surprisingly, in Australia.

Federal cabinet created the National Historical Film and Speaking Record Library in December 1935. Administratively linked to what was then the Commonwealth National Library, it was arguably the first such entity to perceive the logic of preserving moving images and recorded sound together rather than separately.

That’s eighty-six years ago. It was a tortuous journey from 1935 to 1984, when what became the NFSA was unhooked from the National Library (although it had to wait another twenty-four years to gain statutory status). On the way it was often a case of too little, too late, which is why far too much of our audiovisual heritage has been lost or imperfectly preserved.

But from 1984 onwards the NFSA quickly made its mark as a pacesetter, not only enlarging the national collection and technical expertise at home, but also serving as the go-to reference point for emerging archives across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Its innovative collection-management software was adopted by the US Library of Congress. It launched the first (and currently still the only) online postgraduate training course in audiovisual archiving, now offered through Charles Sturt University. It developed the foundational UNESCO textbook on the philosophy and principles of audiovisual archiving that now, in multiple languages, underpins the global profession.

Domestically, the NFSA’s collections have served as a resource for creators in the burgeoning film, television, radio, recorded sound and games industries. Without knowing it, every week millions of Australians watch or hear something from the NFSA collection — perhaps in a documentary or feature film, or on TV news or radio.

Screenings and exhibitions at the NFSA’s Canberra headquarters have been a tourist magnet; travelling festivals have toured the country and overseas. Its five-year-long Operation Newsreel project, launched in 1988 with $4 million in corporate sponsorship, worked to safeguard seven decades of Australian cinema newsreels. A long succession of feature films, television and radio series, and web resources have relied on individual staff members’ intimate knowledge of the NFSA’s collections.

Over the years, the NFSA has produced its full share of internationally recognised experts who have led a staff of passionate and technically adept people. It is fulfilling work: seeking, finding and restoring what has been lost — some of the missing episodes of Blue Hills, say, or an early Cinesound newsreel — offers a satisfaction that can’t be put into words. Keeping obsolete technology functioning requires specialised knowledge and inventiveness; so does anticipating the next phase of technological evolution. And recalling the context and significance of undocumented collection items relies on living corporate memory.

But audiovisual archiving also operates in a public service environment where managerialism trumps curatorial expertise. You don’t do it for the money or the fame, and the commitment and passion don’t end when people retire or leave. An individual’s curatorial memory, contacts and knowledge are unique, and therein lies a dilemma.

Each departing expert is a piece removed from the corporate memory bank. Newer staff are ever more distant from the worldview, knowledge and historical experience of those who built and know the collections they inherit. Memory loss starts to endanger the performance of the institution and the integrity of its collections. Policies and practices evolve without reference to wider curatorial memory. And unless staff already recognise what they don’t know, and therefore need to seek out, it can happen unconsciously.

Recently the NFSA put out to tender seventy-seven pallets of collection items judged surplus to requirements. They included a unique and precious collection of Australian piano rolls — the in-house archive of the eighty-eight-year-old Mastertouch company, which closed in 2005. The media treated it all as a novelty item, a collector’s dream of old curios now up for grabs. But some former senior staff members, acknowledged specialists in Australia’s sound-recording history, were blindsided by the announcement and alarmed at the prospective cultural vandalism — arising, apparently, from insufficient knowledge of the central place piano rolls have in our musical and social history.

The chair of the NFSA board defended the move as “the culmination of many years of work by our senior executive, curatorial, preservation and collection management teams.” After a “rigorous selection process” and “very careful consideration” it had been determined that the material fell outside the scope of the 2020 Collecting Policy. Four retired NFSA staff members sought an urgent meeting with NFSA executives to urge a rethink. The outcome is pending.

While the National Film and Sound Archive Act requires the institution to “work to the highest curatorial standards,” this incident illustrates how standards are affected by generational memory loss. It is a serious problem for audiovisual archives globally, and is currently the focus of Share That Knowledge!, a three-year international study helmed by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, with twelve partners including the NFSA. While the study’s outcome won’t be known until the end of 2022, some preliminary findings are clear.

By its very nature, curatorial knowledge is often not formally recorded. But it remains in the memory of former staff and board members who want to keep it available — as volunteer mentors, trainers, consultants and advisers. They want to stay connected to the institution that, for so many of them, has been an integral part of their life’s work. To do this, they need to be invited back into the tent.

The analogies of the apprentice or the football coach are not out of place here. It takes many years to become familiar with a complex collection, to develop technical skills and knowledge, to build relationships with collectors, creators and users, to grow in the scholarship of the audiovisual media — and to imbibe the enthusiasm and passion that have impelled others into the profession.

Like other federally funded institutions, the NFSA has suffered years of compounding “efficiency dividends.” These have translated into early retirements and redundancies for staff who, in some cases, were global leaders in the profession. Instead of growing, the NFSA has been hollowed out and squeezed to the point that it now employs one-fifth fewer staff than it did a decade ago, despite a vast increase in its workload.

Attention and resources have had to be increasingly focused on large-scale digitisation: the NFSA holds by far Australia’s largest collection of at-risk magnetic tape formats but also needs to make the wider collection accessible in the digital form that is now expected. Nor is this a one-off: with standards constantly evolving, digitisation and file maintenance is an unending process. Collections are permanently on life support.

So the circle keeps getting smaller. The visitor shop has closed; fellowships and research have faltered; the library has been shut; public programs have been trimmed; travelling festivals have ended; school visits have been curtailed; public lectures and award systems have been dropped; interaction with professional communities has shrunk. Keeping the remaining balls in the air has become ever harder. Volunteers, whether former staff or not, can help. But unlike the other national memory institutions, the NFSA has not yet developed an integrated volunteer culture.

When the NFSA gained statutory status in 2008, members of its first governing board were chosen from the advocacy bodies and stirrers who had worked long and hard for this outcome. They brought to the task their shared knowledge and vision for the organisation, relevant professional disciplines, and connections to stakeholder communities and sponsors. At the time, board chair Chris Puplick noted that “the poachers  had been appointed as the gamekeepers and had to deliver on the claims they had made about the benefits of their preferred course of action.”

Like its international peers, the NFSA — and therefore Australia’s audiovisual heritage — had, at long last, achieved the same status as the other national memory institutions, and now had the ability to chart its own professional course.

Now the original stirrers, with their professional disciplines, have gone. Along with diminishing corporate memory, the board has lost close contact with, as well as the confidence of, important contributors and users in the audiovisual industries. After nearly a decade of virtually ignoring its voluntary Friends association, the board has recently rediscovered it, though it is unclear whether it also comprehends the character of the NFSA’s generational problem. It will shortly gain a new chair, who will find ways, it’s to be hoped, of enlarging the circle of engagement.

Australia’s opaque system of ministerial appointments to public authorities tends to mould boards into quiescent extensions of the government of the day rather than independent advocates, stakeholders or experts. But the board has the responsibility to lead the institution to the standards required by the National Film and Sound Archive Act for the benefit of present and future generations.

Persuading the government to provide adequate funding isn’t easy, of course, as the recent campaign for the National Archives of Australia shows. Only under immense pressure did the government agree to provide an emergency allocation to the NAA of just $67 million over four years.

The NFSA’s board is also responsible for appointing and guiding the organisation’s chief executive. Over the past decade it could have undertaken succession planning, nurturing the institution’s potential leadership pool within the national profession. Instead it chose to replace one leader from overseas with another. Although they came with impeccable credentials, made a significant contribution and did the best job they could, they faced the obvious disadvantage of building new relationships in a new country and adapting to a new bureaucratic system. They have since returned home and taken their memory with them.

The NFSA’s next chief executive, Patrick McIntyre, is an Australian and comes with a broad arts administration background, most recently with the Sydney Theatre Company. When he begins settling into the milieu of the national memory institutions in October he will potentially have the support of the NFSA’s stakeholders in establishing partnerships with industry, philanthropists and sponsors who can financially support major projects and activities, as the institution did so successfully in the now-distant past.

The baseload cost of sustaining the NFSA’s physical establishment and services, and its roster of permanent staff, falls where it belongs: on the government. It is unreasonable to expect a shrinking institution to manage the ever-expanding demands of access and collection growth. To restore its budget and staffing to real 2008 levels would take an extra $6 million or so each year: not much to ask in the great scheme of things. The recent special allocation of $5.5 million over four years to increase the rate of digitisation, welcome as it is, hardly changes the bigger picture. Rebuilding won’t happen overnight, but it is the board’s responsibility to advocate for it. Otherwise the closures and retreats of the last decade cannot be reversed.

Paradoxically, the most immediately essential part of the resource equation has little financial cost, but requires time and attention by the board and management. Television, film and game producers; radio stations; podcasters; musicians; new-media pioneers; writers and academics; advocacy groups; donors; the NFSA’s various publics; those who need the institution for their creative and research output — all of these stakeholders need to be brought back formally into the NFSA’s orbit via workshops, advisory committees, surveys, interviews and mentoring. They deserve a voice in policymaking, collection development and service provision: their knowledge and wisdom needs to be taken seriously and the institution will be the stronger for it.

And this brings us to connecting today’s NFSA custodians with the fund of curatorial knowledge held by the NFSA’s wider community. Collectively, all are part of a remarkable institution of which the nation can be justly proud. Nothing is more important to an audiovisual archive than the depth of the relationships and knowledge that sustain it.

With every acknowledgement of Country and honouring of Indigenous elders, the NFSA should be reminded of the efforts of its own elders to volunteer their services in a structured way, working alongside the current knowledge- and memory-makers in the audiovisual field, and its emerging leaders. And we need to remember why the NFSA is as essential now as it was in that visionary moment of creation in 1935. •

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“This story is about me… and no one else can do the life story of me,” he announces towards the end of My Name Is Gulpilil. This is no mere egotistic statement. He may be famous for his film work, but there was a good deal more to his life and, as the chief voice in the film, he can be admired for his unsparing approach to his own story.

Director/co-producer Molly Reynolds, with whom he had a very productive working relationship during the years of the film’s shooting, has interspersed glimpses of Gulpilil’s past with his elderly and cancer-stricken present. Flashbacks take us to his youth, his voice-overs recalling his time at the Mission School, his English teacher, and the aptitude he revealed for hunting and dancing. As he says, he “was a non-drinker, non-smoker. Then.”

Reynolds’s gripping film is framed by scenes of Gulpilil receiving medical treatment for his longstanding illness. While the film is undeniably a celebration of his amazing life and career as actor, singer and dancer, it never flinches from its darker aspects, including his alcoholism. The observations about these episodes by the elderly, suffering Gulpilil are all the more moving for being utterly devoid of self-pity. At this late stage of his life, he appears to be trying to come to terms with the jail sentence he served, the failed marriages, and his dealings with “the white man’s disease.”

He now relies a great deal on his carer Mary Reefed, who is in fact the only other “character” in the documentary. There is something unsentimentally touching about the relationship they have developed: she tends to his physical needs and he relies on her for medical treatment, help with exercising — and sometimes as the audience for his pronouncements about the state of his life and its limited future.

“I’m not scared, but I’m sorry,” he says of his approaching death. He wants to see his past again “before I go.” He emerges as a many-sided man who, whatever fame he has found, still reflects on what it was like to hunt for food, or when he was sent to jail for a year for assaulting his wife, or how white men have made fortunes from exploiting the land he came from.

He is fluent about his achievements and his misgivings. Filming Storm Boy (1976), in which his character bonded with a young white boy, he recalls feeling “I’m there with the Western world.” Acting, he felt like “two people living in one world” — himself and the part he plays. But he also can’t refrain from wondering, “Why did I leave my country?”

My Name Is Gulpilil focuses chiefly on Gulpilil’s life in film. As he says, “I like making films. It’s natural… like I am.” He often uses the word “natural” in talking about his film roles, as though he found in film a way to be and present himself.

In his last film role, in the 2019 remake of Storm Boy, he plays the father of Fingerbone Bill, the Aboriginal boy who befriended the eponym in the original film. Between Walkabout and the Storm Boy remake, he was a compelling presence in about three dozen films, including some of the most significant Australian-made over several decades, as well as the odd overseas–Australian co-production.

In the 1980s, he appeared in the key role of Benelong in the miniseries version of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, and in the wildly popular Crocodile Dundee (1986), in which he dealt out some memorable ripostes. Thirty years after his debut film, he played the title role in Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), one of those new-century Australian westerns in which the representation of the Indigenous character reflects a cultural shift.

Gulpilil’s tracker, though always walking while the others of the party ride, maintains a knowing composure as he listens to racist talk, and there is a moment of genuine rapport when the new leader of the search party releases him from his chains. Reynolds’s film astutely focuses on this telling shot.

A decade later he worked for de Heer again in Charlie’s Country (2013), in which, as the titular Charlie, the now sixty-year-old Gulpilil is depicted as an Aboriginal man who is fed up with white domination and ventures back to the homeland and culture he knew. As such, there may well be a biographical element alongside de Heer’s ongoing engagement with issues relating to Indigenous lives.

Gulpilil’s reputation in Australian film over fifty years has no doubt facilitated the increasing presence of other Indigenous figures and films in our cinemas. Think of such notable examples as director/cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) or actor/director Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires (2012), starring Deborah Mailman, who now has more than forty films to her credit, as does actor Aaron Pedersen, imposing star of Goldstone (2016) and High Ground (2020). Not only are more Indigenous personnel engaged in film, but the many ways in which they are involved are testimony to an industry moving with the times.

Gulpilil’s life may be nearing its end, but his legacy — both his own achievement as actor and his contribution to a changing cultural context — will persist. •

The post Being David Gulpilil appeared first on Inside Story.

This is not to say that dementia is new to the cinema. Among the films dealing with the condition and its effects over the past couple of decades have been Iris (2001), which recorded the writer Iris Murdoch’s decline; Away from Her (2006), the Canadian-set drama of relationships tangled by the advance of dementia; and Still Alice (2014), a touching study of a linguistics professor’s experience of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Perhaps to ensure healthy box office returns for a problematic subject, each had A-level stars: respectively Judi Dench, Julie Christie and Julianne Moore.

The makers of the latest films all took the same precaution — if that is the apt word. I mentioned that these films are challenging, and it may well have been the acting challenge that attracted such notable performers. But the makers of The Father, Supernova and June Again have adopted notably different narrative procedures in their dramatisation of the condition’s progress and its influence on the lives of those who have to deal with the protagonist’s painful symptoms.

First, the award-winning British/French co-production, The Father, the first feature for director Florian Zeller, who is also co-author. His screenplay, adapted from his own stage play, moves with remarkable fluidity in a film that eschews linear narrative. The viewer is not always any more certain of location than is the film’s protagonist, the eighty-odd-year-old Anthony (Anthony Hopkins). The essential location of the film’s drama is really his mind, which varies wildly in its grip on reality.

Though the film is adapted from a stage play and most of the action is confined to an apartment, with a brief sortie into a hospital, Zeller’s direction ensures that it is never “stagey.” Along with the direction, the cinematography and the editing create a wholly persuasive fluidity between the here and the there, the real and the imagined.

The film opens on a shot of Anne (Olivia Colman) rushing in to visit her father (Hopkins), who greets her with “What are you doing here?” She’s anxious and he’s fractious, and the film quickly develops a powerful sense of the tension between father and daughter. She’s devoted to him and concerned about his welfare, but with marital difficulties of her own to deal with she’s planning to go to Paris with a new partner. Anthony’s most recent carer (awful word!) has left, claiming he’d unjustly called her “a little bitch,” a charge he denies, insisting that she stole his watch, which of course she didn’t.

Anne tries patiently to deal with his vagaries, including his repeated objection to France because “they don’t speak English there,” and his anxious query, “What’s to become of me?” He knows just enough to realise that, if Anne goes to Paris, he will be on his own. The film offers a wonderful sense of Anthony’s utter confusion and does so without resort to melodrama or sentimentality.

Viewers may also be confused (whose flat are we now in?), but we are encouraged, indeed required to enter the father’s mind, as the film creates his real world and the other he imagines he is in from time to time. This uncertainty does not detract from viewers’ involvement in the action from moment to moment — this moment, for example, eliciting sympathy for Anne in her attempts to help her father, that moment requiring empathy with a mind losing its grip.

Supernova is also essentially concerned with the relationship between a dementia sufferer and the person responsible for his wellbeing. Here, it is a study of two elderly men — one losing control over himself, and the other, his long-time partner, having his patience sorely tested by often-irrational demands but never losing the affection that has governed their decades together.

Unlike The Father, in which the narrative enacts the eponym’s disordered state of mind, Supernova, written and directed by Harry Macqueen, opts for more linear storytelling. It records the journey round northern England of these two men: Sam (Colin Firth) is a pianist whose next performance the film is leading up to; his partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a novelist trying to write his last book in the knowledge that he is unlikely to finish it.

Tusker’s dementia is the more moving because he has moments of lucidity. Sam, for the most part bearing patiently with his partner’s fluctuating state of mind, has organised their campervan trip as a sort of last journey, but the film is never sentimental about this. In fact, Sam can sometimes be irritated with Tusker’s messing about and forgetting things.

Supernova may sound like a road movie, but in this journey the glorious northern England scenery, in veteran Dick Pope’s luminous cinematography, is more an observer than something to observe. The relationship between the men may be changing, but these hills and valleys are oblivious.

And whereas in most road movies the protagonists have idiosyncratic encounters along the way, the encounter here is limited to a party at Sam’s sister’s house. She and Tusker have arranged it as a surprise gesture, partly as thanks for Sam’s longstanding love and care. Tusker has prepared a speech for the occasion but finds he’s not up to reading it and asks Sam to do it for him; the fact that much of it is about Sam gives it a special poignancy.

As director, Macqueen never loses sight of the experience at the heart of the film. As screenwriter, he was wise to conceive of the film as essentially a two-hander, with the one lively stopover accentuating the quiet restraint of the rest. And of course he has the benefit of possibly career-best performances from Firth and Tucci, who constitute a wholly credible pair. As co-stars, they achieve a sense of interconnectedness not often equalled in film.

Like the other two recent films, the Sydney-set June Again has a strong central performance. This is the feature debut of its director, New Zealander J.J. Winlove, who is also, like the directors of The Father and Supernova, the author of the screenplay. I’m not sure what this dual role means, but perhaps it suggests a serious commitment to exploring these disrupted lives.

In the role of June, now in a “home” for those similarly afflicted, is Noni Hazlehurst. While perhaps not an international name on a par with the stars of the other two films, she is one of the surviving stalwarts of the Australian cinema revival of the 1970s and over four decades has never faltered on screens large and small. In June Again she has one of her most challenging roles, and though the film occasionally strains credibility, she never does.

The film opens and closes on a large close-up of June, which perhaps suggests a clearer, more formal structure than is borne out by the rest of the film. We see her wandering the corridors, trying to open doors, and a sympathetic doctor explaining her condition; but she is somewhat improbably able to exit the institution and take a taxi to what she thinks is her own house, where she steals some clothes. From then on her memory comes and goes: she finds that her son Devon (Stephen Curry) and daughter Ginny (Claudia Karvan) have fallen out; she discovers she’s no longer part of the firm she once managed; she leaps into a car and drives off to the country, where she weeps at the pain of memory.

And so on: the film develops a straggling narrative, but unlike The Father doesn’t use it to persuasive effect. In fact the story is overcrowded with events, some of which tell us about the family but shift the focus from June’s decline. There are touches of wit in the screenplay (as when two sullen grandchildren are dispossessed of their iPads), and Curry and Karvan offer astute support.

June Again is not unenjoyable but it lacks the powerful dramatic fluidity of The Father and the persuasive interaction of the two men in the more straightforward Supernova. But it is good to see, in all three, so serious a matter being given such careful attention. •

The post Holding on appeared first on Inside Story.

Set in 1930s Hollywood, Mank has not so much a starry cast as a cast full of starry characters. Names like Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg may not mean much to younger viewers who aren’t dedicated movie buffs, but these “names” undoubtedly help to create a convincing sense of the world in which Mank — that is, screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz — was active in the decade leading up to producing the screenplay for Orson Welles’s triumphant cinematic debut, Citizen Kane. That they received co-credit for the finished script has been the subject of ongoing controversy, most notably in Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane. Mank touches on this matter when Welles brings his critical notes to Mank, but the film is essentially on the side of its often difficult eponym.

Introductory titles providing information about Welles give way to a long shot, in black-and-white, of a car speeding through a sprawling Californian landscape and arriving at the Victorville Guest Ranch in the Mojave Desert. Emerging from the car on crutches is Mank (Gary Oldman), and the rest of the film is structured around his current (1939) situation: that is, his relative immobility and his working away at the Kane screenplay. He finds his own way of coping with the Guest Ranch’s no-alcohol policy.

The twenty-four-year-old Welles (Tom Burke) makes a brief visit, and there is talk of the wildly wealthy and powerful newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst, who was the real-life basis of Charles Foster Kane, a parallel that didn’t help Citizen Kane at the box office. We don’t see Welles again until near the end, but his off-screen presence is felt, often in phone calls to Mank.

In a narrative mode that recalls that of Kane, Fincher’s Mank reveals itself through a series of flashbacks showing the screenwriter’s struggles throughout the 1930s as he came to acquire high regard, often alongside fractious dealings with the major studios of the era. His writing receives praise for its “shifting point of view” from John Houseman (British actor Sam Troughton), co-founder with Welles of the Mercury Theatre, New York, who appears to have been appointed a sort of watchdog keeping an eye on Mank’s less reliable qualities.

Fincher, working from his late father Jack Fincher’s screenplay, situates Mank’s personal conflicts with Hollywood studios and their moguls in the wider conflicts of the American political scene. Mank fervidly supports Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair in the 1934 election for the governor of California, for instance. When Sinclair loses, Mank, accompanied by his wife Sara (Tuppence Middleton), quits the election-night party without a word. He is not, either professionally or personally, a man with a talent for easy discourse.

But it is the Hollywood politics that matter more to Mank’s career in the 1930s. One of the “names” introduced at this point is that of screenwriter Charles Lederer (Joseph Cross), nephew of Hearst’s mistress, the glittering star Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). And so it goes on: the film invokes name after name from the era, including the one with whom Mank will have most lethal conflict, Louis B. Mayer, who is described as “very despotic and full of self.” In Arliss Howard’s eye-catching performance, Mayer becomes the dominant oppositional figure, beside whom the likes of David O. Selznick (Toby Leonard Moore) and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley) seem almost benign.

Hovering over the Hollywood scene, professionally and politically, is the plutocratic presence of Hearst, played with subtle charisma by Charles Dance. A British actor chosen for an archetypal American tycoon might seem unusual, but Dance compels attention without recourse to clichés of dominance. Hearst’s “castle,” San Simeon — scene of some extravagant gatherings in the film, including a birthday party for Mayer — is the obvious prototype of Welles’s Xanadu in Kane. Mank’s younger brother Joe (Tom Pelphrey) tries to warn Mank about writing a script that gets at Hearst, and Davies tries to persuade him not to “kick Willie when he’s down.” As for the script in contention, the film shows images of screwed-up paper and piles of manuscript pages as Mank lies in bed, relying on Houseman’s urging him to get on with it.

What the film offers, then, is an insight into the tangle of motivations at work in Mank, some personal, some professional, and Fincher has been fortunate in securing Oldman (another British actor) to bring his protagonist to such vivid life at various stages of his career. Oldman, now an established character star in the wake of such roles as Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), maintains a sure grasp on our interest and, up to a point, our sympathy for a not especially likeable man with clear viewpoints and talents.

While most of the film’s action involves men competing to have their views prevail, Amanda Seyfried catches the aura of stardom as Marion Davies, and Tuppence Middleton exudes a touching forbearance as Mank’s wife. As for Welles, Tom Burke reappears near the end to assert his pre-eminence in what will be the credits for Citizen Kane, with Mank insisting, “I want credit.” In real life, the much-nominated Kane won only one Oscar: that for the screenplay, shared by Mank’s two protagonists. Mank itself is up for ten Oscars and has also been nominated for Golden Globes and BAFTAs, among others.

The names of Oldman and Fincher appear frequently in awards lists, and it is good to find Fincher back at the directorial helm of a feature film for the first time since his memorable 2014 version of Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl. Mank’s running time may seem slightly excessive, but Fincher’s firm grip on the fluidity of the present–past interplay wards off longueurs — and leaves one hoping there won’t be such a time gap before his next feature appears. •

The post Raising Kane appeared first on Inside Story.

“When I walked out into the foyer, there was Bruce Lee,” Gulpilil recalled decades later, still shaking his head in astonishment. “He was watching my movie and I was watching his. It was a shock to meet each other, but we got a good photograph.”

Brushes with fame became almost commonplace in the early years after Walkabout told the story of the Australian landscape’s ancient mysteries and the collision of black and white cultures. The world opened up for the teenage actor and dancer from Arnhem Land whose haunting performance made the film an instant classic.

In America he rubbed shoulders with Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and “that singer bloke” Bob Dylan. In Frankfurt he met Marlon Brando. And in London, dressed in a twenty-four-hour Hong Kong suit, he dined with and danced for the Queen. “That was great. The Queen of England was there. I was proud. Wow! I was among the stars. I was in all the newspapers.”

Walkabout was soon joined by a string of other memorable films that secured Gulpilil’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest actors. Storm Boy, for which he won an Australian Film Institute best actor nomination, was followed by The Last Wave and the Crocodile Dundee blockbusters. (He says he was paid a derisory $10,000 for the latter, while the white stars pocketed millions.) Then, almost as suddenly as it had flowered, his brilliant career stalled.

By the late 1990s David Gulpilil was back where he had begun: broke, frustrated and living on the fringe. Largely forgotten by the world that had feted him, he was unsettled and struggling in the land of his people.

“I am sad and ashamed,” he said when we met in 1998 in the remote settlement of Ramingining, 500 kilometres east of Darwin, where he shared a makeshift camp with his large extended family. “Once I was famous, everybody knew my name. Now I’m just a simple man living down here in a humpy. It’s a hopeless life. Why do other people have apples and I have none? I don’t want my children to grow up like this.”

Gulpilil had travelled a path sadly familiar to many of Australia’s greatest Aboriginal artists and athletes: moments of triumph and acclaim overshadowed by bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse, broken relationships, and alienation from both the worlds they sought to straddle. He was jailed for a month in 1987 for drink-driving, and he blamed alcohol for the break-up of his first two marriages. And more trouble lay ahead, including domestic violence and offensive weapons incidents fuelled by alcohol, and more time in prison.

“Sometimes I feel like two people,” he lamented. “It would have been a different life if I had stayed here with my people, but I have grown up in the Western world because the film Walkabout took me away from here. Now I have come back, it is different.”

The frustrations were sharpened in the long months when he was forced to stay in the camp at Ramingining, cut off by wet-season flooding from his homelands just thirty kilometres away. It was the place where he found peace, hunting and fishing and teaching the young men the ceremonies and dances.

“My homeland is paradise. Here, I am trapped, but in my land I am free. I am not a foreigner there. In the land of my forefathers, in my mother’s land, I can sleep under the cool shadow of trees. Back there, all I have is my spear and my woomera. It’s all I need.”

But those years in Ramingining proved to be no more than an interval in a career that had yet to reach its peak. Soon he was back in demand and being celebrated for a contribution that transcended his screen roles. Rolf de Heer, who directed him in three of his best movies, credits Gulpilil with beginning “the process of white Australia looking at Indigenous people in a different way. When he did Storm Boy, the white people fell in love with him and Indigenous people could feel proud.”

He won a clutch of accolades in 2002, including the AFI best actor award for his performance in de Heer’s The Tracker and an AFI nomination for best supporting actor for Rabbit-Proof Fence. His collaboration with de Heer in Charlie’s Country was recognised in 2014 with a second best actor award from AACTA (successor to the AFI)  and the same prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Now David Gulpilil is dying. Diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema in 2017, the doctors gave him six months to live. The treatments that helped him defy the odds are exhausted, and soon, he concedes, he will be “going back to country on a one-way ticket.”

As the end approaches, he remains a man torn between the celebrity of his life in the world of movies and the power of his tribal heritage.

Back in 1998 I asked what he would do differently if he had his time again. He reached out and touched my arm. “You have to help me with this,” he said, searching for words. “If I had another chance, I’d still do it all again, but this time maybe I could take my children to see and learn.

“I want to teach my children about the world and to bring a better life for them. My people don’t know about the world, how the world spins. They need to learn. We have to live in the bigger world. I want my children to know how to use the woomera and the spear and the knife and fork.”

In Molly Reynolds’s new documentary on his life, My Name Is Gulpilil, the actor, now living in Murray Bridge with his carer Mary, laments the fact that he is no longer well enough to travel back to Arnhem Land. “I will miss my children. I think of them and I love them… I’m only waiting. I’m walking like across the desert of country — long, long way — until the time comes for me.”

Soon enough he will be back there, a spirit that delighted and enlightened the world reunited with those of his ancestors. •

The post How the world spins appeared first on Inside Story.

There is a long history of films based on reunions of families and friends that become fraught with tensions, unforeseen or not, and several recent releases have offered new evidence for its sturdiness as a plot device and structure. Two that come to mind are the Australian Palm Beach (2019) and the superb Chinese-American co-production, The Farewell (2019). The former has the compelling presence of Sam Neill in common with Blackbird, while the latter foreshadows Blackbird by also involving an imminent death.

Enough about context for the moment. Michell’s film, with a screenplay by Christian Torpe (who also wrote Silent Heart), opens on a beautiful but somewhat gloomy vista of uncertain sky. Paul (played by Neill) emerges from a handsome house by a Connecticut beach (actually filmed in Wessex) to pick tomatoes; back inside his wife Lily (Susan Sarandon) is having difficulty dressing. Once downstairs, though, she responds to dance music and engages Paul to join her in what seems a moment of carefree pleasure. She is suffering from a degenerative disease and, with Paul’s cooperation (he is a doctor), she is planning to suicide after a last weekend visit from her daughters, their partners, a grandson and her oldest friend.

Daughter Jennifer (Kate Winslet) arrives first, with her husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) and teenage son Jonathan (Anson Boon), and there is initially some tension between her and Lily, as there is between Jennifer and her sister Anna (Mia Wasikowska), who has come with her off-and-on partner Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus). The weekend party and, indeed, the whole cast is completed by the arrival of Lily’s best friend since college days, Liz (Lindsay Duncan), who is, as far as we know, on her own, and has a sharp tongue. (She refers to Jennifer’s husband as Mr Dull, and he confirms her aptness by insisting on talking about the crossword clues he’s having trouble with.)

With the cast coming and going, Blackbird feels a bit like a stage play. Each character has his or her moments, usually with Lily; all have come together at Lily’s request for a family meal and a faux-Christmas celebration, complete with tree, decorations and a massive dinner. There are some moments of harmonious enjoyment — post-dinner charades, or during breakfast when Lily calls “Bacon!” from the top of the table — but the serious element must persist. Paul spends much time trying to explain to the visitors the moral issues involved in the still-illegal practice of euthanasia, which he and Lily have in mind for Monday.

This is a demanding scenario for the viewer, as well as for Lily’s family, especially as fraught elements from the past make themselves felt. The relationship between the two daughters, and theirs with Lily — who has perhaps not been the easiest mother — are an example. Firm-minded Jennifer (Winslet in a superbly nuanced performance of middle-aged compliance with family and life in general) cautions the less-together Anna to “make more of an effort for the family.” And Jonathan, Jennifer’s son, has just the right sense of awkwardness that diminishes as Lily asks him, with real interest, about his plans for the future. To his parents’ surprise, he says he wants to be an actor.

There is a lot of talk about dying, about what is legal and what is not, about how far Lily has a right to her own decision, with the daughters announcing to the family that they can’t go along with her plan, despite Jennifer having previously insisted that “this is Mum’s decision.” Much of the film’s dialectic makes for compelling viewing — and listening — and much of the credit for this goes, under Michell’s direction, to Mike Eley’s eloquent cinematography. Eley captures much of the drama in close-ups that subtly reveal the state of mind of the various family members, contrasting these with wide shots that create the sense of the family as a whole, sometimes in the harmony of the meal table, sometimes in dissonance.

Michell has often displayed rigour and sensitivity in dealing with unexpected and/or troubled relationships, whether for comedy as in Notting Hill (1999) or to more sombre effect in Enduring Love (2004) and Le-Weekend (2013). In his latest film, working from Trope’s perceptive screenplay, he has a uniformly adept cast to bring this to life. Susan Sarandon’s Lily is a potent study in courage, ego, joy and pain, and everyone else has — and makes the most of — moments that reveal what matters most beneath whatever the surface requirements of those moments.

Above all, I want to draw attention to Sam Neill’s performance as Paul. He may have less to say than the others, but in a curious way it is he who provides the film’s framework. Observing and listening when not actually organising events, he becomes the presence through whose eyes we often view and assess what is going on.

Neill, a New Zealander, was one of those actors who came to prominence in the Australian film revival of the 1970s, along with Bryan Brown, Mel Gibson and Jack Thompson, all of whom went on to international successes. Arguably, though, his filmography has covered a wider range that shows no signs of abating. Consider what his four latest Australian roles have offered: as the kind-hearted preacher Fred Smith in the “western” Sweet Country (2017), as jockey Michelle Payne’s patient father in Ride Like a Girl (2019), as the courteous Leo with his own secrets in Palm Beach (2019) and as Colin, the decent brother, in Rams (2021).

In all of these, and many others, Neill is an imposing presence, conveying a good deal without seeming to be doing much. Now well into his seventies, may he continue to do so, and his work in Blackbird suggests that he will.

Blackbird, as its starting-point might suggest, is an occasionally harrowing experience, but one that is well worth having. •

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Not all readers will necessarily go along with the strictures laid down in the biographer’s introduction, but there is no denying that this book has been massively researched, starting with the days when young Graham was often bullied at school because his contemporaries suspected him of dobbing them in to his father, the headmaster. Russian Roulette recounts how this conflicted childhood gave way to an adulthood constantly torn this way and that by beliefs, relationships, and medical and financial challenges.

From this account, often drawing on the writer’s own correspondence as a key — if not always wholly reliable — source of information, it becomes clear that Greene was never a man who saw clear-cut answers to demanding problems, whether personal or political. He flirted with communism in his early days at Oxford University, mainly in the interest of his own travel plans, but the pull would recur intermittently through the rest of his life, as would his somewhat precarious hold on Catholicism.

The book is not called Russian Roulette for nothing. So much of Greene’s life involved chancy decisions, their precursor perhaps to be found when he “played a reckless game” with a revolver he discovered in the cupboard of the bedroom he shared with his brother Raymond. According to his own account, he “loaded a bullet into the gun and spun the chambers around.” His survival after missing “by one” — the next click would have been fatal — thrilled him, and he felt he had “passed the test of manhood… It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex.”

Sex and risk would account for a good deal of his ensuing life, and recurring references to Russian roulette remind us of the dangers to which he subjected himself. As Richard Greene sums up one of his subject’s intrepid (or rash) ventures into unreliable territory: “He would have to spend a week in Algiers doing research, and that would be playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded.”

After the conflicts of his early life, Greene seems to have felt lured into dangerous places, or places at dangerous times in their histories. As his biographer records, his visit to Israel “put his life at risk, and over the years his travels to the dangerous places of the world caused enormous worry to his family and friends.” To visit Israel in the fourth month of the six-day war in 1967, the violence continuing long after the official ceasefire, looked like asking for trouble, but the possible outcomes of such a venture (he was writing about the aftermath of the war for a newspaper) never came between him and accepting the challenges.

Greene seemed specially drawn to the fractious politics of countries once under the firm grip of European or American imperial power. Although the grip had been unwillingly loosened in Haiti, Sierra Leone, Cuba, Panama and many other places, it had not led to peace and harmony among the local populations. There, he made numerous contacts, some of them leading to long friendships, others to decidedly tricky relationships.

Richard Greene’s research into political, religious and sometimes military manoeuvres in these diverse locations is extraordinarily thorough, involving innumerable brief character studies as well as a detailed recording of shifts in power. Impressive though these historical investigations are, at times we seem to lose sight of Graham Greene; times, for instance, when we appear to be given more than we actually need to know about the history of Catholicism in Vietnam or working with double agents in Portugal. It’s not that such material is uninteresting; it’s just that it seems to push Greene to one side for longer than is good for biographical material.

Of course, several of Greene’s most highly regarded novels undoubtedly drew on his experiences in these trouble spots. We couldn’t have had The Quiet American — at least as we know it — without his difficult time in Vietnam, or The Comedians if he hadn’t had some experience of the regime of “Papa Doc” in Haiti, or The Honorary Consul without the inspiration of a rebel priest during his time in Paraguay.

This list could go on, but what matters in Russian Roulette is how this courting of volatile territories — and his ongoing fascination with those responsible for the volatility — influenced his writing and his far from orderly personal life. His own political views, as insecurely leftist as his Catholicism was uncertainly committed, do emerge from the biographer’s research, though sometimes the exposition feels like too much of a good thing.

Greene’s longstanding but rickety marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, born in Rhodesia, withstood a number of tangled affairs on his part, affairs that, in a curious way, also acquired their own idiosyncratic versions of fidelity and longevity. Even after break-ups, he seemed unwilling to relinquish the ties that had bound, and he maintained contact with his children by Vivien though he was often distantly apart from them.

Difficult as he often was, Greene acquired plenty of friends along the way, including film director Carol Reed and Evelyn Waugh, whom he’d met at Oxford, where they’d moved in different circles, and with whom he shared literary celebrity in the postwar years. In the later 1940s, Reed and Greene had a widely admired cinematic collaboration on The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, two of the key titles in British cinema’s “finest hour.”

As Richard Greene writes, “No place in Greeneland is truly safe or content.” This comment might equally be applied to the real-life zones of conflict he was so strongly drawn to, and to the emotional, religious and political areas he inhabited in his long and often troubled life. He did, however, achieve a great deal, and the other Greene, Richard, does it more than justice. •

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Very often there seems to be an expectation that the “remake” will be inferior to its antecedent, and sometimes — think of the disastrous telemovie remake of Brief Encounter — this is the case, but on the whole it’s as well to keep an open mind. Sims’s film freely acknowledges its debt to its Icelandic predecessor, which is quite daring considering the high regard in which that film is held. Seeing Rams without any echoes except the title, I was utterly absorbed by this story of two sheep-farming brothers who live on adjacent Western Australian properties but haven’t spoken for years. I’d go so far as to call it the best Australian film in recent memory.

The relationship between the two brothers — who communicate only via messages conveyed by an intelligent sheepdog — is the narrative core of the film. Colin (Sam Neill) lives in a weatherboard house, where he maintains a solitary but orderly lifestyle, preparing adequate meals, talking affectionately to his sheep, and expressing much admiration for his prize ram. Les (Michael Caton), a scruffy alcoholic, lives in the old stone family house, which is now pretty squalid as a result of his slovenly ways. They each have predictably contrasting shearing sheds, which in Clayton Jauncey’s production design tell us still more about their longstanding differences.

Their two properties are separated by a barbed wire fence, but that’s only a visual reminder of their divisions. The real basis for the contention between them is that their parents willed the property to Colin, who has allowed Les to live on the other side of the fence and keep his sheep there.

Then an event occurs that upends their lives. A ram-judging show — obviously an annual event that brings out the townsfolk in friendly competition — is held in the nearby Western Australian town of Mount Barker (where much of the film was actually shot). Les’s ram wins, but the longstanding conflict between the brothers takes a new turn when Colin, without undue malice, tells the judge that Les’s ram is suffering from OJD, a serious bowel infection in sheep. If proved, this will have a massive effect, not just on Les’s sheep but on sheep throughout this pastoral district, all of which will have to be destroyed to avoid widespread infection.

What we now see is not just the intensification of the brothers’ feuding but also a grave threat to the livelihood of the surrounding community. Sims, working from Jules Duncan’s screenplay, deals skilfully with this interaction. Two outsiders now make their presence felt in the brothers’ lives. One is Kat, “the Pommy vet” as she is described (perhaps to account for her being played by British actress Miranda Richardson), who is sympathetic to a community suffering from what she calls a “cruel blow.” The other is De Vries (Leon Ford), a representative of the agriculture department, who strides around in suit and tie, making smart-alec comments about decontamination processes, peppering his instruction with what he takes to be witty sallies, showing no apparent concern for what the disease means to the brothers or the community, and patronising people he clearly regards as his inferiors.

While there are some grim moments to do with getting rid of the sheep (well, not quite all of them, but to say more would be to risk spoilers), this is not a film that relishes that kind of violence, and there is real poignancy in the scenes that follow. It is indeed a humane film, told with warmth (but not sentimentality) and revealing real humour as it deals with this crisis in the brothers’ lives.

Jeremy Sims maintains an impressive tonal control as events unfold in a landscape at first greenly beautiful in spring, then potently arid and fire-threatened in summer. Steve Arnold’s superb cinematography endows these vistas not only with great visual appeal but also with a dramatic sense of how they constrain the lives of those living there.

As Colin, Sam Neill achieves a persuasive performance both by his quiet observation of what is happening, either between him and Les, for instance, or as he sits with other members of the community in the local pub, and in his dealings with Kat and De Vries. Neill, as well as having considerable overseas success, has been a stalwart presence in Australian films for more than forty years, emerging as one of those stars who seems to inhabit a role without any hint of artificiality.

As for Kat and De Vries, they make a telling impression as outsiders who go about doing serious jobs with very different attitudes. Perhaps Richardson was cast as Kat to help the film at the British box office — as well she might, having been a presence to reckon with in British films since playing Ruth Ellis, the last English woman to be hanged, in 1985’s Dance with a Stranger. Leon Ford, as De Vries, has perhaps his best role to date, imbuing the representative bureaucrat with a persuasive sense of his self-importance.

The last word about the cast must be for Michael Caton’s Les. Caton, forever associated with “dreamin” in The Castle, worked to great effect with director Sims in Last Cab to Darwin. Here he repeats that success, making Les both convincingly annoying and, after decades of self-indulgent bad temper, capable of finding more to himself — or in himself — when the challenge arises. Between them, he and Neill embody a significant slice of Australian film history.

How Rams compares with its Icelandic forebear, Hrútar, I of course cannot tell, but it stands impressively on its own resources, before and behind the camera. •

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On the evidence of a long career writing about films, David Thomson is unconstrained by such beauty of character — or cowardice — and is prepared to make unconstrained judgements about directors and writers, living or dead. But perhaps I am a little prejudiced: he described my cinematic heroine, Merle Oberon, as “a dull actress” in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975 when she was still alive.

Thomson’s views are as idiosyncratic as ever in his latest book. Although his subtitle includes the words “a history,” I suspect most historians would quibble with its use here. There is not a single footnote or endnote, for example, but simply a list at the end of biographies and other studies of the fourteen directors who rate a chapter each. A paragraph describing the early life of each director is the nearest approach to conventional history, and there are other short bursts of information, but in terms of style the book is evocative rather than factual or seriously critical. This is a highly personal reminiscence of a lifetime’s film-going, written with a frequent liveliness that made me want to renew acquaintance with long-unseen films such as Greed or The Magnificent Ambersons.

After a prologue titled “Darkness Visible” that briefly plays with the idea of directors as heroes who “lit up the dark night,” and an introductory chapter titled “Waiting for the Monolith,” Thomson expands on the notion that “We were strangers in there in the dark, but fellow pilgrims, and the cinema was a palace for our wondering,” though there is also a “sense of being alone, exposed to the searchlight of the projector.” His reflections include some attempts to consider how it might feel to be a film director, and some pondering (not always kind) of the intersection of lives and films.

The directors chosen for this “history” range from Fritz Lang to Quentin Tarantino, with a brief final flourish of Martin Scorsese. Each is allocated a chapter, the title of which gives an elliptical indication of the author’s approach. Jean Renoir is billed as “Everyone’s Friend” while Howard Hawks, less flatteringly, is “A Natural Liar” and Tarantino “The Kid from the Video Store.” These chapter headings shouldn’t be taken too seriously; they are the key that opens the door on careers examined under the flickering glare of Thomson’s searchlight. And that feeble metaphor of mine is as nothing compared with some of his linguistic forays.

So what do we actually learn about these directors? According to Thomson, the unlikeable Lang expected to be obeyed but never really got control of his American films, never found a congenial studio, and “had so little feeling for love, and no respect for America’s faith in it. He was — if I can say this — too close to being a fascist.” In his lively accounts of such films as Fury and The Big Heat I would have welcomed more about the fruits of Lang’s skills and less about how “actors did not like him” or, of his affair with Joan Bennett, who starred memorably in four of his films: “They had a bitter chemistry together, but no warmth.”

When he comes to “The Man Who Watched Too Much,” Thomson is probably right to assert that, “close to forty years after his death,” Alfred Hitchcock is “still the best-known film director there ever was. Or will be?” He goes on to suggest that Hitchcock “may come to stand for Movies in the way Attila the Hun bestrides the Dark Ages or Cleopatra signifies Ancient Egypt.” That is worth quoting only to give a sense of the often bizarre comparisons Thomson comes up with. It would have been enlightening to have more of the astute perception he brings to bear on Rear Window, which he concludes is “one of the supreme studies in the compulsion of looking and the attendant temptation to see and understand.”

Most of the individual directors Thomson discusses in A Light in the Dark are Hollywood-based, but several European masters, such as Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard, also feature, as do Lang and Renoir, who went on to have American careers. He is interested in how their lives are reflected in the films they made. About Buñuel, he argues that, despite the Spanish director’s reputation as a radical and a leftist, his films provide evidence that he retained some of the conservative attitudes that were part of his family background. Godard also came from a rich middle-class family and Thomson, who claims that “all his life [Godard] had the clashing instincts of a bourgeois and a radical,” investigates how these conflicting impulses made themselves felt in his films. Breathless, he writes, is “off-the-cuff yet relentlessly self-conscious.” He is also interested in how the directors’ love lives bear on their films. In Godard’s case, he and Anna Karina “were in what movies called love,” and Godard was, in any case, “pledged to a female presence on film.”

The only British filmmaker who is given a chapter is Stephen Frears. He is described, with a touch of patronage, as “an easy-going British institution,” and his output summarised thus: “It is not easy to look at his work and identify a vision or a preoccupation — beyond wanting to make entertaining pictures.” Though The Queen was a huge box office success, “I don’t think it’s actually very good,” says Thomson, without giving much in the way of supporting argument.

It is often hard to know how the author has come by some of his information about the lives of the directors, and there is a preponderance of phrases like “I felt” or “I think” or “I’m sure” (not always clear on what basis) and a general sense of unrestrained and barely supported opinion. But there is also liveliness and the odd touch of wit.

The most tersely titled chapter is devoted to Orson Welles and titled “God?” With Citizen Kane, Thomson asserts that Welles, “by twenty-six… had made the best American movie ever, the most beautiful and profound.” Many critical polls would accede to such a view, but in a book that claims to be a history, a little more justification would not have gone amiss. A Light in the Dark, engaging as it sometimes is, does seem to take on too much, at the same time not quite giving us enough of anything, whether of lives, careers or films. •

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It was a striking demonstration of the themes examined by Amanda Laugesen, director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, in her new book, Rooted. The barrister’s language was too formal for his client’s comfort; the man was expressing his anxiety about his son with all the intensity that taboo language can provide; and I was a respectable matron who must be shielded from these words no matter how intrusive my interest. Class, education, ethnicity and gender were all in the mix. Yet it also seemed that bad language was essential to the urgency and emotion of the situation.

Rooted takes on the challenging task of speculating about the spoken language of the past. Using the written evidence, it traces the history of bad language in Australia from the beginning of European settlement, when the profanities used by the convicts shocked many early observers of the new colony. As the free settlement grew, so did the desire for respectability and concern about public language. But in the pastoral districts, bullockies were becoming notorious for the blasphemy they claimed was necessary to control their animals.

Laugesen’s narrative follows the broad changes that came with the growth of urban populations after 1880 and the development of larrikin language in the cities. When the first world war sent thousands of Australian soldiers to Europe, middle-class officers and English people they encountered were horrified by their easy use of “bloody, bugger and bastard.” The diggers’ magazines exploited the comic potential of these words, although they were also, as Laugesen notes, an expression of the fears of those facing death or injury.

Laugesen goes on to consider the attempts to control bad language from the 1920s onwards, particularly in print, and the restrictive censorship of literary writing in Australia right up to the 1980s when, as she puts it, bad language was “liberated.” She then looks at how new digital technologies have disseminated slang and obscenity in recent decades, encouraging a loosening of restrictions on dialogue in film and television.

Drawing on journalism, court reports and literary writing, Rooted provides a concise history of how certain offensive words and phrases have been used over time. Laugesen expertly synthesises a wide range of research into the place of bad language in Australian social history, tracing progress from a restrictive and snobbish puritanism to the “liberation” of offensive language.

Several of the historians cited by Laugesen argue that Australian bad language has been used to challenge authority, whether of British masters (in the case of the convicts), white bosses (Aboriginal people) or the patriarchy (women since the 1960s). In the nineteenth century this transgression was principally expressed in blasphemy, a cursing against the sacred in an age when religious belief was widespread. Even euphemisms that now seem innocuous — “bloody,” “gosh,” “gee whiz,” “crikey,” “hell” — carried a frisson of defiance of God. Nowadays, even children use them with little awareness of their origin. But they may still be used to indicate some sense of group solidarity and a resistance to respectability, as when senator Jacqui Lambie recently expressed concern for “the poor bloody students” facing increased university fees.

Blasphemy is one thing; sex and other basic physical acts are another. Over the past seventy years, censorship has focused on sexual words in publishing or broadcasting, and particularly the use of “fuck” and “cunt,” though the language of bodily excretion also has popular currency. As Laugesen explains, the literary censorship of the past was as much about the depiction of sexual acts as it was about the words that describe them in vulgar speech. To my mind, this makes the fiction writers more interesting than nineteenth-century court reports of specific word usage. Laugesen mentions Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life but not that his name became a euphemism for sodomy. She refers briefly to Joseph Furphy’s inventive substitutions in Such Is Life without appreciating his ingenious attempts to say the unprintable as a challenge to the limits of the novel form.

Rooted surveys the most notorious literary censorship cases from the second world war to the 1970s, from Lawson Glassop’s We Were the Rats, Robert Close’s Love Me Sailor and Sumner Locke Elliot’s Rusty Bugles to Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed and the Oz magazine trials. It considers the role of They’re a Weird Mob and the Bazza Mackenzie films in promoting the idea that bad language is an Australian tradition. In this way, Laugesen argues that the use of blasphemy and obscenity are essential Australian freedoms of expression, almost always used in the service of transgression rather than of power, though this view of bad language may conflict with many people’s experience of its use by powerful groups to exclude and intimidate.

Laugesen is at her most original and insightful in the final section of the book, which examines the present proliferation of public obscenity. Here she uses evidence from television and the informal world of social media to measure the shifts in what constitutes offence. She cites the infamous moment on the sixth series of the reality TV show Married at First Sight when Bronson referred to his assigned wife, Ines, as a “cunt.” With scholarly detachment, she summarises responses to the incident, including the journalist James Weir’s playful account of the episode using “cantaloupe” as a substitute. Yet, even here, the context was more interesting than the word. It was clear that Bronson used it habitually, with little sense that it would cause offence. At this moment, the series reached its lowest point, with the “experts” revealed as hypocrites pretending to be superior to the vulgarities of the show they presented.

The masses of spoken-language evidence now available through social media and reality TV may well overwhelm the dictionary-makers of the future, but Laugesen responds with liveliness to this proliferation of evidence. Though she remains cautious about racial terms, she does acknowledge that there may be a link between verbal and physical abuse.

While I was writing this review, Van Badham posted her observation that “fugly slut” was a term of abuse that every woman who makes a public statement online would find among the comments of trolls. For relief from this nastiness, I hope that researchers at the Australian National Dictionary Centre allow themselves some episodes of Gogglebox, in which earthy jokes and innuendo are supplemented by many cries of “Oh my God!” and convivial, beeped “fucks” as families demonstrate that it’s not so much the words themselves that matter but their comic potential and the speaker’s awareness of who is listening. •

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Variety, reviewing the original Rebecca in March 1940, had been doubtful of its appeal to the public. It was an artistic success, they conceded, but its “b.o. [box office] lure” would be limited. They were wrong: Rebecca became one of the great box office successes of all time; and Judith Anderson’s Mrs Danvers became an iconic figure, the subject of numerous scholarly analyses and a popular culture heroine.

The 1940 Rebecca had everything going for it. Du Maurier’s novel, published in 1938, was a runaway bestseller. Producer David O. Selznick, fresh from the spectacular success of Gone with the Wind, winner of ten Academy Awards and still the highest-grossing film in history, snapped up Rebecca soon after publication on the recommendation of his New York agent, Kay Brown. He and Brown had been courting British director Alfred Hitchcock for some time. Selznick quickly signed him up and they began the long process of casting the movie.

As with Gone with the Wind, the search for the perfect lead actress was played out in public. Selznick originally wanted Carole Lombard to play the shy young Mrs de Winter, and later considered Olivia de Havilland, Margaret Sullavan, Loretta Young, Vivien Leigh, Anita Louise, Jean Muir and Anne Baxter. He finally took a gamble on the untried Joan Fontaine, who proved to be ideal in the role. As one critic put it, she did “mousy” very well.

The search for the actor to play Maxim de Winter was no less arduous. Selznick’s original choice had been the heart-throb Ronald Colman, but Colman didn’t want to play in what he considered a woman’s starring vehicle. His second choice was William Powell; but Laurence Olivier, who was playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, was cheaper and, in late June 1939, was finally given the part.

Selznick and Hitchcock recognised the importance of the role of Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper whose loyalty and devotion to the first Mrs de Winter creates much of the mood of the story. They immediately agreed to try to get the British actress Flora Robson, who was about to play the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, for the part; but she had other commitments and her availability was uncertain.

This was when Kay Brown raised the possibility of Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers. Anderson wrote in her memoirs, “I made the screen test. I got the job.” But it was more complicated than that. There were other major contenders — including Nazimova, the eminent Russian-born actress, who was “crazy to play Mrs Danvers,” and Eily Malyon, a well-established character actress in Hollywood who had spent her early career in Australia — and Selznick and Hitchcock still preferred Robson. But when Robson decided she was not available, Kay Brown urged them to move quickly to secure Anderson.

Anderson arrived in Hollywood at the end of June 1939 to take a screen test for Rebecca. On 18 July she was told that she had the role. As the press release from Selznick International Pictures emphasised, she was one of the leading actresses on the American stage and had recently been selected as the best actress of the year by the New York Drama Critics. She had only appeared on film twice before: once, in 1929, in a short called Madam of the Jury, and more substantially in Blood Money, filmed in 1933, which was mostly disregarded at the time but is now considered a classic of the period.

As soon as Anderson’s casting as Mrs Danvers was decided, David Selznick peppered his staff with instructions about makeup, hairdo and costumes. “Get hold of Anderson immediately about letting her eyebrows grow,” he ordered his makeup chief. When it was finally announced, in early September, that Joan Fontaine would have the coveted role of the second Mrs de Winter, shooting started.

The story of Rebecca is well known. The young insecure second wife, who is never named, is subtly terrorised by the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who is obsessed with the memory of her former mistress, Rebecca. There are strong sexual overtones to this obsession (the caressing of Rebecca’s fur, the stroking of her undergarments kept lovingly in their original drawers), which Anderson manages to convey convincingly despite the censor’s admonition to Selznick that there must be no suggestion that the first Mrs de Winter was “a sex pervert.”

Rebecca has become one of the favourite movies of all time, with Anderson’s performance as the chilly Mrs Danvers considered as one of the most memorable. “I felt secure in that character,” she told reporters. “Sometimes there are little hurdles in character… and you have to get over those lines as best you can. But Danvers never deviated — just one clear drive from the beginning.” Hitchcock, she went on, “is a very tolerant director and a very kindly man. In the scene where Danvers suggests the girl jump out the window, he said to me, ‘Go to the window, open it, look at her, look away and say, quite matter-of-factly, “You need a little air, madam.”’ Very quiet, very gentle, very terrifying.”

“Ominous and ever present”: Judith Anderson (right) as Mrs Danvers, with Joan Fontaine as Mrs de Winter, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

Hollywood Magazine noted how Anderson’s principal gifts as a stage actress — her “smooth voice and fluid body” — “give the part of Danny [Mrs Danvers] the quality of living danger and waiting disaster so essential if the story is to be believed at all.” As Ed Sullivan put it, “It was the first time a performer has achieved a quality of menace by simply folding her hands. That’s what Miss Anderson accomplished, but if those folded hands had concealed a hooded cobra the alarm could not have been more intense or the fear more emphatic.”

Variety devoted a two-page spread to the New York opening at Radio City Music Hall in March 1940, showing the street jammed with people hoping to get tickets. “In the first five days,” its headline noted, “Radio City Music Hall played to more than 150,000 admissions and turned away close to 75,000 additional ticket-buyers.” By the time it finished its six-week run at the “Showplace of the Nation,” it had been seen by an estimated 900,000 people. Named on the Film Daily and National Board of Review of Motion Pictures “ten best list” for 1940, along with The Grapes of Wrath (first), The Great Dictator, Our Town, Fantasia, The Long Voyage Home, Foreign Correspondent, The Biscuit Eater and Gone with the Wind, it grossed US$6 million that year, ranking fourth behind the Disney animations and MGM’s Boom Town.

In February 1941 Rebecca was nominated for eleven Academy Awards: best picture, best actor, best actress, best supporting actress, best director, best cinematography, best screenplay, best black-and-white art direction, best film editing, best musical score and best special effects. Edward Schallert, in the Los Angeles Times, predicted a “hot” race for best supporting actress among Judith Anderson in Rebecca, Jane Darwell in The Grapes of Wrath and Ida Lupino in They Drive by Night. On the awards night, 27 February, at the Biltmore Bowl, Rebecca was voted the best picture of the year — a triumph for Selznick — and George Barnes won for best cinematography; but Hitchcock, Fontaine, Olivier and Anderson were disappointed when John Ford was named best director for The Grapes of Wrath, Ginger Rogers best actress for Kitty Foyle, James Stewart best actor for Philadelphia Story and Jane Darwell best supporting actress for The Grapes of Wrath.

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers have remained among the greatest heroes and villains respectively in movie history. Although initial publicity for Rebecca featured the romantic couple, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, gradually scenes of Judith Anderson menacing the timorous young Fontaine took their place.

The Chicago Sunday Tribune, always a fan of Anderson, featured on the front of their movie section what has become a classic image of Anderson standing behind Fontaine urging her to “Jump, jump.” “Ominous and ever present stands the still, bitter housekeeper Mrs Danvers, at the elbow of the gentle, timorous second Mrs de Winter,” the caption read. “Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson portray the role of wife and housekeeper in the screen version of Daphne du Maurier’s novel.” This image has gradually overtaken the romantic one, and invariably accompanies discussion of the movie in recent years.

In the face of all this, how brave is Ben Wheatley to pit himself against Alfred Hitchcock — and Kristin Scott Thomas against Judith Anderson? Let alone Armie Hammer against Laurence Olivier and Lily James against Joan Fontaine?

To give him his due, Wheatley has not tried to follow Hitchcock. In the original Rebecca the love story is between Mrs Danvers and Rebecca — a love affair conveyed by waves, shadows, gestures and glances. In the remake, Wheatley focuses on the love affair between Maxim de Winter and his new wife, an affair that is tepid at best and ultimately chilling, although it proceeds in rom-com fashion and ignores the fact that Maxim has murdered his first wife. Even Laurence Olivier’s greatest admirers must admit that he is boring as Maxim, not because he is lacking as an actor, but because Maxim is uninteresting. The only reason we continue to watch the movie is the interaction between the fragile new wife, Mrs Danvers and the dead Rebecca. Once they disappear in the second half of the movie, it loses its interest.

Wheatley’s focus on this uninteresting love affair gives the kiss of death, in my opinion, to the remake. Young viewers apparently admire the tall, muscular, conventionally handsome Armie Hammer, but he seems to me totally miscast as the grieving widower and controlling new husband. Whereas Olivier managed to enliven Maxim with a few black looks and outbreaks of temper, Hammer seems incapable of expressing emotion.

Lily James (who played one of those annoying young women who came into Downton Abbey towards its end) is far too attractive and well dressed to play the dowdy mouse who captivates the lonely Maxim, and Wheatley (or the scriptwriters) turn her into a spirited feminist heroine far too quickly — a feminist, I must add, who is quite happy to go off with her murderer husband at the end of the movie. (I am actually grateful that Hollywood’s notorious censorship code saved us from that ending in the original.)

Kristin Scott Thomas is the only one who wins in this new Rebecca. Hers is not a win against the great Judith Anderson, but a personal win, with a new interpretation of the redoubtable Mrs Danvers that doesn’t attempt to replicate Anderson’s subtle eroticism. Her Mrs Danvers is a possessive mother who has lost her darling Rebecca. Her vindictiveness is aimed at humiliating this cuckoo in the nest, not killing her. In the end she is sad, not mad, her jump to her death registering nothing of the horror of Anderson’s death in the fire that destroys Manderley.

Let’s face it, the new Rebecca is a mess. A brave mess perhaps, but a mess. It is, as Rachel Syme points out in her New Yorker review, a typical Netflix paint-by-numbers movie:

Streaming executives, who have admitted that they use data to calibrate the films and shows they produce, seem to believe that films like the Rebecca remake give viewers exactly what they want. “Here,” they seem to say. “Here is some maximalist fare with actors you have heard of — press Play for serotonin”… They really do think we’ll watch anything. And perhaps, in the end, they are right. We are stuck at home; it is spooky season. But du Maurier’s story deserves better… The new Rebecca offers up gif-ready fantasy on a platter, but it never gives us a chance to dream of Manderley again.

But those streaming executives know what they are doing. Members of a younger generation who have never seen the original, and probably haven’t heard of Judith Anderson, Laurence Olivier or Joan Fontaine, let alone Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick, are enjoying this current version. “netflix did a film adaptation of my favorite book, rebecca by daphne du maurier, and im crying so hard because it’s so perfect,” one tweeter wrote. “Fab cast! Yay!” wrote another. A third was clear-eyed and accepted its “gif-ready” quality: “Now I get why critics r so angry with Rebecca. They see Lily, Armie, KST, Wheatley & they thought oof they must be vying for awards. By any stretch of the imagination, it’s not competing for any awards. It’s a 2 hr trashy Netflix fun to enjoy in ur free time.”

We can be sure that this version of Rebecca will not be remembered in eighty years’ time. But for the moment it is trending #1 on Netflix in many countries. We can only hope that some of these viewers will be motivated to go back to the original, even if it is in black and white, the clothes are not so flashy and, as one tweeter put it, it’s not so “kissy, kissy.” •

The post There’s no going back appeared first on Inside Story.

Born one hundred years ago to parents who were Bengali Brahmin, and given the name Robindra, shortened to Robu or Robi, Shankar was raised by his mother in Benares (Varanasi). He didn’t meet his estranged father until he was eight years old. Because of the estrangement, the family was poor. At around this time the boy began to suffer sustained sexual abuse from “a family member.” Shortly before his ninth birthday, his favourite brother, Bhupendra, died of the plague. Like Ray’s Apu, he lost both parents while still in his mid teens.

Another aspect of Shankar’s early life also has a bearing on his work as a film composer. From childhood he was a storyteller, not through music — that came later — but through dance. Joining his eldest brother Uday’s international dance troupe, the boy became a performer on the world stage, touring Europe and the United States. In his diary of April 1933, the nineteen-year-old Benjamin Britten singled out the thirteen-year-old “Robindra” as a highlight of the performance he had witnessed in London.

Late in life, Ravi Shankar would complain that he had missed out on a childhood, but at the time he enjoyed meeting the celebrities of the day, including Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. At a party in Hollywood, the actor Marie Dressler asked Uday, in all seriousness, if she could adopt the boy.

“Robi” is the Bengali word for sun. In Sanskrit, the word is “Ravi,” the name he took around the age of twenty. Craske’s book, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, is the first biography of the musician, with the exception of Shankar’s own memoirs, the last of which, Raga Mala, was a collaboration with Craske. But in spite of its writer’s closeness to his subject this new book is no exercise in hagiography. Shankar himself encouraged the author to wait until after his death and tell the whole story, and Craske seems to have done just that.

Better yet, Indian Sun is that rare thing, a biography of a famous musician in which the music is kept in the foreground and knowledgeably discussed. The book’s preliminary pages include a detailed diagram of a sitar, an explanation of the steps in an Indian octave, and lists of the ragas Shankar created and the talas (rhythmic patterns) he commonly employed.

Shankar didn’t take up the sitar until his late teens — very late indeed for someone who would become the most celebrated sitar player in history — but he worked hard and learnt fast. His guru was Allauddin Khan, not himself a sitar player but a master of the sarod. In short order, Ravi was allowed to play jugalbandi with Khan’s son, Ali Akbar Khan, another sarod player. The pairing of sitar and sarod on equal footing (which is what the term jugalbandi implies) was rare, even experimental. It was a sign not only of the faith Khan had in Shankar (who also married Khan’s daughter, Annapurna) but also of things to come. From early in Shankar’s musical career, his playing received praise and criticism in equal measure, the criticism nearly always for a want of purity.

Shankar had a Zelig-like tendency to be present at great historical moments. As part of Uday’s dance troupe, for example, he witnessed the rise of Hitler. Until 1933, Germany had been the country in which the Indian dancers felt most appreciated. In New York he heard Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club. He sang for Gandhi and received a blessing from Rabindranath Tagore. All this before he turned eighteen. As Craske underlines, though, the greatest example of Shankar being in the right place at the right time — twenty years before he moved to California, just before the Summer of Love — was his emergence as a charismatic cultural figure in India at the moment of that country’s independence. Before he taught the world about Indian classical music, he demonstrated its value to a nation emerging from the shadow of colonialism.

By the mid 1960s, Ravi Shankar had become not only a famous musician but a global celebrity, his influence felt everywhere — certainly in musical circles. After lessons with Shankar, John Coltrane felt he was “just beginning again,” and went on to name his son Ravi. Yehudi Menuhin regarded himself as Shankar’s disciple and recorded albums of music for violin and sitar. And in 1965, Shankar changed the lives of two young musicians: one was among the most famous musicians on the planet, the other a recent music graduate from Juilliard.

George Harrison’s debt to Shankar is well known (Shankar greatly appreciated the Beatle’s seriousness and modesty), Philip Glass’s less so. In Paris, pursuing his studies with Nadia Boulanger, Glass found himself engaged to assist Shankar with scoring Conrad Rooks’s film Chappaqua. Shankar would sing lines to Glass (who was impressed that he had all the music in his head) and Glass would write them down in Western notation. But such notation required bar lines, and when the music was played there were unwanted stresses on the down beats. The barlines were moved and the stresses moved with them. “All the notes are equal,” explained Alla Rakha, Shankar’s tabla player. Finally, the barlines were eradicated and the music worked. Whether or not he realised it at the time, Glass had probably just received the most important composition lesson of his life.

Craske’s book leaves little out. Shankar’s international touring is described in such detail we begin to glaze over, but perhaps that’s the point. How, we wonder, did he fit so much in? And how did he manage his 180 affairs with women? (And who was counting? Did he have his own, personal Leporello?) And there are copious nuggets of trivia. Among my favourites is the fact that Peter Sellers went to Shankar for guidance about how to look like a sitar player in Blake Edwards’s film The Party. In the film, Sellers, in “brownface,” plays a hapless Indian actor mistakenly invited to a Hollywood party at which he proceeds to wreak havoc. Satyajit Ray, for one, found Sellers’s performance repellent. But Shankar and Sellers were quite close for a time, even working up a double act for friends, in which they impersonated each other.

To the end of this mighty book, Craske rightly prioritises the music. The penultimate chapter, “Late Style,” discusses Shankar’s final compositions. By his eighties, although he occasionally performed alongside his daughter, Anoushka, using a modified sitar with a short neck, he was mostly a composer. He wrote an opera, Sukanya, named after a woman in the Mhabharata who marries a much older man. It was a name shared by Shankar’s second wife, and the opera is both an extended love letter to her (there’s a musical motto based on her name) and a hymn to Krishna. But it is also a grand summing up of Shankar’s musical life, reworking ragas that had been important to him — Piloo, for instance, which he had recorded with Menuhin — and other earlier compositions.

The music to Sukanya was written first — is there another opera for which the music was composed ahead of its libretto? — and words fitted only after Shankar’s death in 2012. The premiere was in England in 2017. The same year, at the London Proms, Passages, Shankar’s album-length collaboration with Philip Glass, had its first live performance, with Anoushka Shankar playing sitar. The event was televised live by the BBC. As Craske writes in the title of his final chapter, this sun “won’t set.” •

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The white masks glimmering in the darkened auditorium were a spooky echo of what was occurring onscreen, which begins with a near-total white-out. In a tense, protracted sequence that sets the mood for the film, a car is driving along a winding road through a dense, disorienting fog. In a fog — vision reduced, sounds muffed — one never entirely knows what is happening, or could happen.

Iceland has all sorts of weathers and all of them are extreme. Winds constantly sweep changes across the island. A fog can softly envelop a settlement and quickly hide the most familiar landmarks. In winter, service stations sell slip-on ice spikes to pull over your boots, because you may need them to get to your front door. Having become lost in a blizzard on the main street of Rekjavik, I can attest to the disorientation.

Isolation in long winters nurtures creativity, but also hides secrets. It engenders feuds, mutual support and a tough humour, all of which have featured in recent Icelandic films.

A White, White Day is the second feature from Hlynur Palmason. Like his first, it is about obsession. “Do you know who you are?” asks a man on a screen. Is this some kind of telehealth consultation, or a psychological assessment? Facing him is grizzled, sixtyish Ingimundur (played by seasoned Icelandic actor Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson), who answers, confidently, “I am a father, and a grandfather.”

“And what do you want to do?”

“I want to finish building my house.”

Just what trauma has led to this encounter — prison? accident? mental breakdown? — is never entirely clear. Things are not spelt out in this film, they just emerge, like people looming out of the fog.

Ingimundur, it emerges, is a widower. And a retired police officer. His beloved wife has died in a car accident. Clearing out her things, a suspicion surfaces. Was she having an affair? He determines to find out.

There are some moments of broad comedy in this Icelandic noir — if one can call it that. One or two of them happen in Ingimundur’s old cop shop. But there are also stunning moments of revelation, and increasingly more of them in the second half. Palmason likes to lay out his cards first and let us study every character. We get to know these people. Or we think we do. We study their ties to each other.

Particularly good is Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir as Ingimundur’s granddaughter, Salka. A newly graduated actress playing a girl much younger than herself, she brings captivating life to the family and the film. In a sense, A White, White Day is a study of the affection between grandfather and granddaughter. And Ingvar, grizzled, tenacious, is everybody’s idea of the cop you want to solve a cold case.

It’s not a cheerful film, this. But I found it completely engrossing. It also has timely things to say about isolation and the social ties we need to endure it.

The Asia Pacific Screen Academy, which runs the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, is having a rethink and looking for new backers.

Based in Surfers Paradise to begin with and then, for the past seven years, in Brisbane, the APSAs were created with Queensland government funding. UNESCO is among their stakeholders. With the pandemic, though, their major backer, the Brisbane City Council, is withdrawing funding and the academy has decided to shelve this year’s awards.

But there may be life yet. Jaclyn Mclendon is leaving what was Brisbane Marketing to become chief executive of the academy, a registered company. A distinctly slimmed-down industry-focused program will be delivered online this year, and the APSA–MPA (Motion Pictures Association of America) film fund will continue to operate.

I’ve been attending these awards for most of their thirteen years. For the past three years I’ve helped select films for screening, and I once served on APSA’s key body, the nominations council — an invigorating experience. I’ve done all this because the awards are an unrivalled opportunity to see films and meet filmmakers from a huge sweep of the world.

The academy uses the UNESCO definition of Asia and the Pacific — from the Pacific shores of Russia down through the Stans, the Middle East, India and South Asia, then across the Pacific to Southeast Asia, Taiwan and China. It’s as diplomatically tricky as anything faced by the European Academy or by its American counterpart, which awards the Oscars.

The APSAs were envisaged as a key international cultural event — way less parochial than the local awards given out by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts. And the academy has invested in the development of some notable films, including Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. But the academy now has 2000 members across the globe and the awards are far better known across the region than they are in Australia.

Brisbane’s cuts create an opportunity for another sponsor, maybe even another state — or indeed another country in the region — to pick up these awards and give the academy a base.  The APSAs have had many lives and maybe there will be another one.

Awards aside, the experience of actual film festivals going online is still to be properly assessed. It remains to be seen, for instance, how Melbourne International Film Festival audiences respond to next month’s digital program, 68½.

MIFF has long boasted the longest and largest program of all Australian film festivals: 68½ starts on 6 August and runs for seventeen days. It’s a gutsy program from festival director Al Cossar: maybe, during Melbourne’s fraught miserable lockdown, MIFF will find its audiences once again. There are certainly some films to inspire cinephiles’ curiosity, including the opening night film, First Cow, Kelly Reichardt’s second American frontier tale. (Me, I’m hoping, if not for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, then maybe the first vegan western? Cattle were dying just outside every frame in the cinema of the American frontier.)

It might be that the true, film festival experience — the intense socialisation, casual encounters, discoveries and friendships formed in queues, the arguments afterwards on the footpaths outside — just can’t be replicated virtually. Social media is a different, way more hysterical, mono-dimensional and polarising space for discussion.

There’s also some early suggestion that a dozen films is a maximum people under lockdown can manage at a virtual festival. One goes to a film festival for immersion and escape. And for the social bonds forged.

But we are in very strange times indeed. To reinvent the social, we may need to make what the writer Grace Paley famously called Enormous Changes at The Last Minute. Maybe, as we take a few shaky steps out of lockdown, small film clubs will be one way forward. Community Sport is a long way ahead of the arts in this respect. •

The post Cold case appeared first on Inside Story.

Nevertheless, I was startled on hearing that Armando Iannucci was tackling Dickens. What could the creator of that lethally witty exposé of political machination, In the Loop (2009), and the brilliant satirical account of The Death of Stalin (2017) possibly have in common with the beloved Victorian novelist? Now, on viewing The Personal History of David Copperfield, I find that the answer is “everything” — well, almost. Both are capable of excess, of being outrageous in a good cause, and Iannucci seems to have found a visual and narrative style that can work with comparable vividness and fluency.

One of the innovative aspects of this version of the 1850 classic is the diverse casting, with rising actor Dev Patel as the adult David and several other key participants of African or Asian origin. This may well be Iannucci’s gesture to the changing ethnic demography of contemporary Britain, and it works spectacularly in setting up David Copperfield as a protagonist often at odds with a difficult world. In the wake of his 2008 feature debut in the much-Oscared Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Patel has become a major figure in such successful recent films as Lion (2017).

Here, Patel literally commands the stage when, in the opening sequence set in a large, noisy theatre, he appears to introduce his life story to the audience, echoing Dickens’s opening sentences with “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…” and “To begin my life with the beginning of my life…” He then joins his mother at the scene of his birth, which is followed by the arrival of Aunt Betsey Trotwood (Tilda Swinton), who loses interest and leaves when the baby proves to be a boy, and by a montage of his early life.

After this daring opening, the film never looks back, penetrating the heart of the novel while persistently offering its own take. At the same time, it seems in one sense utterly Dickensian in its procedures: Patel’s telling the story of his life is an incarnation of the novel’s first-person narrator who can’t have been expected to know everything he recalls. What matters is how his recollections and imaginative recreations have informed the story he is telling the theatre audience via an audiovisual style as wildly evocative as Dickens’s prose.

Adapting an 877-page novel with a huge list of characters to a two-hour movie obviously poses challenges. But though I hadn’t read the book for decades the film conjured up most of the key phases I recalled of David’s life and most of the often-bizarre characters. Iannucci, as both director and co-screenwriter, relies on his collaborators behind the camera as well as his cast to ensure we register David’s changing environments.

The happiness of his earliest years with widowed mother Clara (Morfydd Clark) and loyal housekeeper Peggotty (Daisy May Cooper), not to forget the holiday with Peggotty’s family in their home made of an upturned boat, is brutally interrupted when his mother marries the tyrannical Murdstone (Darren Boyd), who sends David off to a harsh boarding school and then to work in the squalor of his — Murdstone’s — bottle factory.

All this, and a great deal more, is rendered vividly by Cristina Casali’s superb production design and Zac Nicholson’s evocative cinematography. Clearly differentiated interiors suggest David’s changing circumstances, and the exterior vistas of panoramic beauty offer not mere pictorialism but suggestions of David’s response to what the world may offer. Glorious long shots of the Yarmouth coast, for example, contrast with its cluttered wharves, and the Houses of Parliament, shown from Westminster Bridge, contrast with the city’s crowded and often sleazy streets.

Perhaps a little more might have been made of David’s schooldays, but essentially the film keeps its mind on how he is interpreting what he sees as he moves towards adulthood. The use of what seem to be his handwritten titles (“If I am a gentleman” and so on) and of Patel’s intermittent voiceover means that we never lose the sense that we are indeed witnessing a “personal history.” And when, following news of his mother’s death, he runs away from London seeking out his only living relative, Betsey Trotwood, and his life takes new turns in new places, the film registers this not so much with realism as with the reality of what it all means to David’s growing awareness of the world’s challenges.

If you are going to film David Copperfield, or perhaps any novel of Dickens, you need a bevy of character actors to register the vivid eccentricities of its personnel without divesting them of a degree of credibility. In this matter Iannucci has been very fortunate. The Miss Murdstone imagined by Dickens and recalled by the narrating David is an awesome presence in Gwendoline Christie’s grim-visaged frigidity; Tilda Swinton is a surprisingly more complex Betsey Trotwood than expected; Hugh Laurie makes Mr Dick’s kite-flying and obsession with King Charles’s severed head both comic and oddly touching; Ben Whishaw breathes Uriah Heep to hypocritical life; and Iannucci’s star from In the Loop, Peter Capaldi, is a matchless incarnation of Mr Micawber’s wild optimism.

Among the younger players, Rosalind Eleazar is a feisty, compelling Agnes Wickfield, contrasting with Morfydd Clark’s gently touching Clara Copperfield, who finds an echo in her later role of Dora Spenlow. The fact that she plays both leads one to reflect on what each may have had in common in their influences on David’s life.

Seeing the film has led me to embark on rereading the novel (surely a positive response to a film adaptation?), and again and again I am struck by how this or that sentence resonates with its audiovisual counterpart in Iannucci’s film. Having admired David Lean’s Great Expectations and Oliver Twist for decades, I can’t but feel that Dickens might have responded more enthusiastically to Iannucci’s Personal History of David Copperfield, his cinematic zest striking bells of recognition. •

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In the early 1980s, the Jobs for Women group took on industrial giant BHP (now Bluescope Steel), whose subsidiary Australian Iron and Steel methodically discriminated against women workers. The group won twice over, and along the way prevailed in the first class action in Australian law.

Robynne Murphy was one of the first intake of students at the Australian Film and Television School in Sydney in the 1970s. She was also one of a group of socialists who moved to Wollongong in 1980 and applied for jobs in the steelworks. The socialist men were taken on within months; the women joined a list of over 2000 the company kept waiting for “women’s jobs.” Any job for women attracted huge queues, so some resorted to getting up at 4am and taking a bus — a rickety, leaky bus — to Sydney to work in the rag trade or on a chicken-processing line.

Under the recent NSW anti-discrimination legislation, women were entitled to equal consideration for jobs. Inspired by the Aboriginal tent embassy, Jobs for Women set up a tent and distributed leaflets pointing out that BHP was breaking the law. They got union backing; they called a meeting; they received an enthusiastic response. Migrant women wanted these jobs. Some came from countries where women where already doing jobs like these.

In those days, Port Kembla was poor. When Slobodanka Joncevska came there from Macedonia in 1972 the place “was looking more poor than my poor country. Like a wooden house, built-up fibro house, no modern life for the young generation.” She was young and, she recalls, wore a short skirt and had great legs. She had broken hearts in her own country but came to join her brother for a different life. She was among those who joined Jobs for Women.

Aided by the forced discovery of a trove of company documents detailing ridiculous arguments against hiring women, and having brought in its own health and safety experts to counter the company’s views, Jobs for Women won its case before the state’s anti-discrimination tribunal.

For me, the startling thing about the language in the company’s documents was its similarity to memos unearthed at around the same time by an ABC board–authorised inquiry — never made public — into sex-segregated jobs at Aunty. With no federal sex discrimination legislation until 1984, the managers were able to get away with it.

After Jobs for Women won its case before the NSW board, Robynne was one of those to apply for work and be employed at the steelworks. (She wound up working for the steelworks for thirty years, and became a union organiser.) But the victory was short-lived. When Australian Iron and Steel began restructuring after a worldwide plunge in steel prices (provoked, among other things, by the OPEC oil crisis), the women were laid off in line with “last hired, first fired” practice.

Was this just? Well this, as they say, is where the story really gets going. The women argued that their firing was a legacy of years of systemic discrimination. They contended that they had a case for lost wages.

And so began what would become Australia’s first great class action. In industrial law, it’s been compared to the Harvester judgement, which established a basic wage (for men) in 1907. And it opened the door for many women otherwise denied justice.

Some of the background to this campaign is barely touched in Women of Steel. The late seventies were a time in which the women’s movement began agitating for equality within powerful organisations, including the trade unions. The first Women and Labour Conference, held in Sydney in 1978, was a landmark in this push to change the culture within the union movement.

Women of Steel presents an optimistic picture of how the Jobs for Women campaign made early alliances with the male-dominated union movement, in particular the Federated Ironworkers, led locally by the formidable Nando Lelli. I would have liked to know more about this aspect of the group’s work.

Some things stand out from that period. One is the sheer doggedness of the campaigners. Patience and persistence are often underestimated qualities in any campaign. The strength to persist comes both from a strong sense of justice and from the emotional support of a group. How did Jobs for Women hold together and keep going for so long? Its members persisted because their cause was more than theoretical — it came from their own experiences and desire for justice.

The second thing, unremarked in this documentary, is the significance of the early decision to limit the group to those actually seeking work. Also unexplored are the difficulties of finding the translators needed to enable decisions to be made across the language groups involved.

The third thing is the sheer daring of the campaigners. At different times, the women used every imaginable tactic — from conventional marches and leaflets to street theatre, chaining themselves to the steelworks fences, breaking down the doors of parliament, and ambushing state premier Neville Wran to demand access to legal aid. Along the way, there was endless fundraising, and the support of many outside the group.

The Jobs for Women campaign is well worth celebrating, and this fine documentary does that very well indeed. Nothing inspires like success. But the lessons for those trying to achieve justice may need rethinking before the age of “iso” turns us all into outworkers. •

Women of Steel is available on demand at the Sydney Film Festival.

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In Sydney, a city not blessed with a cinematheque like Melbourne’s ACMI, Adelaide’s Mercury or the screens at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, the Event multiplex cinema on lower George Street is gone, to be replaced by a high-rise apartment and retail development. Although the approvals for the project envisaged a number of cinema screens, rather fewer seem to be on the cards now that Gladys Berejiklian is rushing to get construction activity moving again. However many screens it has, it won’t be operating anytime soon.

The Palace cinema empire, heavily invested in new cinemas in Sydney, was among the first to close its doors. Its business model relies heavily on festivals of national cinema, which puts it in competition with city-based film festivals. With streaming already threatening its profits, the cancellation of the Alliance Française French Film Festival hit its biggest revenue-earner.

Hoyts, which has its own multiplex way up the other end of Broadway, is owned these days by China’s Wanda Group, whose parent company has been acquiring cinemas and related real estate worldwide. Village Roadshow is also part of a global empire: owned by the publicly listed Kirby family company, it diversified into theme parks and film studios in the eighties and nineties to fend off the home video revolution, and retains a distribution deal with Warner Brothers.

So the future of some important Australian cinemas is in the hands of real estate agents and developers. At least the pandemic may have settled the argument about how to premiere movies: we’ll be seeing many more of them online in our lounge rooms, rather than together in the dark.

Off the commercial circuit, film festivals, Sydney and Melbourne included, have gone online for now, in various limited editions. Internationally, Cannes held out and then, sadly, aborted its 2020 program entirely. We will see what happens come September, when first Venice and then Toronto are due. Dendy’s decision to close its Circular Quay cinemas in late February will make life complicated for the Sydney Film Festival when it resumes next year.

With all this happening, I was lucky to escape hospital for a few hours at the cinema before the complete lockdown began, and luckier still that the nearest cinema was the Randwick Ritz, one of just two art deco picture palaces still operating in Sydney. The Ritz is owned these days by Eddie Tamir, a cinephile whose Melbourne cinemas — the Classic, the Lido and the Cameo — mix repertory, art-house and festival screenings.

The film I went to see there was apt indeed — an urban thriller about cities, corruption and planning. Motherless Brooklyn it’s called, and it’s a twenty-year passion project for actor Edward Norton, who wrote, directed and stars in it. Alec Baldwin features as a thinly disguised Robert Moses, the New York planning tsar who invented urban planning commissions, those bodies of unelected officials who determine the shape of cities and the fate of neighbourhoods.

I’ll return to Motherless Brooklyn below, but first to Hearts and Bones, one of the essential Australian films of this year, and one of the first local films to premiere online during the pandemic. In cinemas from 1 July, it stars Hugo Weaving, with newcomers Andrew Luri, Bolude Watson and Hayley McElhinney.

For me, Weaving is still one of the best male actors we have, a man who commands the stage and brings insight and sensitivity in the cinema. He also has a lovely range, taking in the gravity of Elrond in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, his delirious turn as Tick Belrose/Mitzi Del Bra in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, his heroin-addicted gay footballer Lionel Dawson in Little Fish, and Johnno, the hardened yet ambiguous senior detective in the first, 2013, iteration of Mystery Road.

In the latter film he held the drama in his hand: it was his laconic turn that gave Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan a tension against which to pit himself. The scene between the pair in the country cafe, each fencing, probing and holding back, elevated the film to the level of classic western. It made the final shootout spellbinding: until the last we did not know which way Johnno would jump. It was all the more compelling because it echoed the taciturn, secretive authority of cops who wield secret power.

Weaving is a generous actor: others grow in stature working with him. In the barren decades from the mid nineties till recently, few screenwriters wrote portraits of Australian men that transcended the larrikin. Weaving was the actor who could bring something more to those roles. At sixty, he is consummate: the young pretender, Ewen Leslie, will have a long wait to dislodge him.

Hearts and Bones is a film about judgement. And about trauma. The judgements we make of others: their pasts, their actions, their reputations; the judgements we make across the distance of a comfortable life. One of the grand achievements of this film is to present the way refugees see other Australians.

Weaving plays a photographer, Dan Fisher, who travels to wars and calamities capturing images of human suffering to prod consciences back home. A human rights organisation is proposing an exhibition of his work, but Fisher is reluctant to do interviews. “It’s your life’s work,” protests his partner. “It hasn’t made a difference, has it?” he responds.

Fisher has paid a price for documenting scenes of horror. He is withdrawn; he has memory lapses, night terrors, flashbacks, dizzy spells — classic post-traumatic distress. He persists because he is driven.

Sebastian (Andrew Luri), originally from Sudan, hears Dan on the radio and seeks him out. Sebastian works two jobs: heaving laundry and driving a cab. His partner Anishka, with whom he has a daughter, also works long hours and complains she never sees him. Sebastian’s other solace is a men’s choir made up refugees from right across the African subcontinent. He thinks the choir will help Dan. He wants Dan to photograph the choir.

But he has another motive. He recognised his former village in one of Dan’s best-known photographs. He doesn’t want it exhibited; he doesn’t want to be reminded of the past. He has never talked to Anishka about it.

Hearts and Bones is a first feature from Ben Lawrence, who has previously made a short fictional film and long-form documentaries. It is strong drama, set in a wintry Melbourne, and much of the time avoids cliché.

This is essentially a four-hander, and the women in this film — Bolude Watson as Anishka and Hayley McElhinney as Dan’s partner Josie — are as critical to the drama as the men. Trauma and loss hang in the silences and avoidances of both couples. There are many forms of loss, and the film challenges the instant wisdom available to the middle class: the talking cure. Some experiences may be out of reach of counselling, when all that is left, all that is possible, is work, music and art.

One of the film’s most powerful scenes comes after Josie, righteous in her assumptions, contacts Anishka to talk about Sebastian’s past. Each is pregnant, each has loss to confront. But it is Josie who has presumed to judge.

In resolving this drama, Hearts and Bones walks very close to a dramatic edge. Rare among films, moral judgements are at its heart, and Lawrence unfolds these with such emotional intelligence that I can forgive the resolution’s straining to pluck every emotional sinew. What will stay with me is the memory of two women confronting each other across a kitchen table.

In Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton has a lot he wants to tell us. One thing he wants us to know is that people with Tourette syndrome struggle constantly with an ungovernable tongue, or rather a set of linguistic neurocircuits that can jam and leave them blurting. Behind these tics are often very shrewd minds whose calculations don’t always translate immediately to speech.

Norton plays Lionel Essrog, a private investigator who is one of a small group of ex–orphan boys who dig around, not always legally, in the Brooklyn of the late 1950s. Norton’s Lionel is a triumph of acting — and directing.

Communication may sometimes be a struggle, but agency boss Frank Minna (Bruce Willis, also fabulous) values Lionel’s smarts. Frank is another orphan boy and has Lionel watching his back. So when he is killed, Lionel wants to know who ordered the hit. The rest of the group is directionless; it’s Lionel who persists while the others scramble for bread-and-butter jobs around the neighbourhood.

Lionel is the terrific creation of Jonathan Lethem in his 1999 noir, also Motherless Brooklyn, on which this film is based. Norton optioned the book soon after it appeared.

But Norton wants to tell us more. Because he wants us to know how large-scale corruption works in city planning, he has moved the story back to 1957, when postwar reconstruction brought a building boom to New York’s boroughs. Bestriding the period was Robert Moses, lauded as the planner who shaped New York over four decades. Moses not only had a huge vision and a labyrinth of connections; he also had very good spin doctors. Politicians ate from his hand. He built miles of freeways, and was celebrated as endowing New York with its parks. He wielded enormous power through his innocuously named planning commissions, some of which had their own police forces and levied their own taxes.

Moses’s reputation took a massive hit in 1974 with the publication of Robert Moses: The Power Broker by Robert Caro, the journalist turned political biographer. Caro’s forensic exhumation showed how the planning commissions became autocracies. It was published at a time when resident and community action groups had begun to resist the demolition of whole neighbourhoods. It showed how Moses’s commissions privileged the car over public transport, and how systemic racism perpetuated segregation and ensured the Long Island enclaves of the rich weren’t disturbed by the buses that carried the poor.

Caro’s book took seven years to write and won him a National Book Critics Circle Award. Among other people, it inspired a young Barack Obama — and Edward Norton, who still wants people to understand how power shapes our cities.

It’s a lot to put in a movie. Or even sketch in. Alec Baldwin’s Moses Randolph sits on top of a huge pyramid of power: when he finally appears on the screen he is the architect as imagined by Ayn Rand. More interesting is Moses’s fictional brother, Paul (Willem Dafoe), an engineer with an obsession Moses is able to manipulate.

Dramatically, the weak thread is Lionel’s relationship with Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a young intern helping seasoned campaigner Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) in her fight against projects that will displace the poor. The relationship has too much weight to carry, and when the otherwise skilful Norton directs himself in a love scene the chemistry just isn’t there. Just a few minutes earlier, he handles a scene in a Harlem jazz club magnificently. The music for once speaks for him.

After twenty years of development hell, Norton decided that the rise of another deal-driven autocracy meant the film needed to be made, and needed to tell us many things. The dialogue badly needed thinning, to let the emotional tide rise and swell and crash unencumbered. But for all that, it’s a film worth seeking out, because it requires us to think. And if it persuades even a few of us to read Caro’s investigation of the rise of the powerful, unelected planner, then so much the better. •

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Television’s arrival in 1956 brought a fierce new competitor. Movie theatres closed around the country, further damaging the prospects for a local industry. But the new medium also laid the foundations of the 1970s revival of Australian filmmaking by training cinematographers, producers, directors, writers and actors and enabling them to develop professional careers at home. It also taught audiences to enjoy dramas about people like themselves, helping create an appetite for Australian feature films and the kind of theatre that emerged in the 1970s.

As they became aware of the opportunities likely to open up in television, many Australian writers headed to Britain to learn about the new medium first-hand. Some of Australia’s leading dramatists spent most of their careers in Britain or America: Sumner Locke Elliott, whose Rusty Bugles of 1948 foreshadowed the postwar theatre revival, spent the 1950s as a television writer in New York; and the authors of two other suburban-realist plays, Richard Beynon (The Shifting Heart, 1957) and Alan Seymour (The One Day of the Year, 1960), soon followed Ray Lawler to British television. Ralph Peterson was writing for stage and television in Britain in the early 1950s and Peter Yeldham headed there in 1956, convinced that prospects for television writers would be limited in Australia.

Writers who stayed home, meanwhile, struggled to teach themselves how to write in the new medium. Hugh Stuckey had been writing radio sketch material for years when he was asked to write comedy material for the television variety show Sydney Tonight in 1957. His training consisted of a visit to the studios and an explanation of the set and positioning of the cameras. Then he was sent home to write. Like other writers in early television, he watched how the American and British writers tackled the task — though they, too, were transferring skills learnt from radio.

Cliff Green was working as a schoolteacher in a Victorian country town when he wrote his first television script, Christmas at Boggy Creek (1963), based on a Christmas play he had written for his students to perform. He had sent it to the ABC as a potential radio play but they suggested he adapt it for television. At the time he had no access to a television — country Victoria had no television reception — so he relied on a BBC how-to-write-for-television book. “I did an adaptation of it and I sent that off and they made it,” he told me. “So here I was — first script produced!”

After writing the children’s series Riverboat Bill for the ABC and lots of educational scripts for the state education department, Green was snapped up by Crawford Productions, which was desperate for writers. In 1969, he made the big decision to give up the security of schoolteaching for the life of a television writer. With Yeldham and Eleanor Witcombe, he was to become one of the leading adapters of classic Australian novels for television.

Tony Morphett had more conventional literary ambitions, publishing three novels and writing plays while he did interviews for the ABC’s Talks Department and made documentaries for radio and television. On the strength of his published novels, he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund grant to write another novel. But then he met the Welshman Glyn Davies, a veteran of British television, who went on to pitch a series based on Morphett’s novel Dynasty (1970) to the ABC. The series was a success and Morphett became a television writer.

“What I found, at the age of thirty-four, years ago, when I went out into the wide world from the ABC and stumbled into being a television drama writer, I found I loved it,” he said in an interview for the Australian Writers Foundation/Foxtel Oral History Project. “I loved the collaborative process. I didn’t at first; I was a monster! I wouldn’t let them change a comma. I would go to a read-through and give an actor line readings. I mean, I was a beast!”

Advertising was so closely allied to commercial radio and television that the shift from one industry to the other seemed logical. Ted Roberts, for example, was working as an advertising manager for Johnson’s Wax in 1968 when he was asked through friends to write the words for the theme music of the children’s series Skippy. He took the results to Lee Robinson at Fauna Productions, who suggested he try writing a script for the show and gave him a sample script to take home. When he turned up on Monday morning with his own script, Robinson was surprised but gave him a cheque on the spot. It was more than a month’s salary at Johnson’s Wax, so he quit his job to write for television. “I got into it by sheer accident,” he told me. “Sheer accident! And I loved it. I had no experience; I had no training; I had nothing. But I just sort of took to it somehow.”

Though the evolution of television drama is often discussed separately from developments in film and stage drama, the small screen played an important role in reinvigorating both art forms. By the end of the 1960s, with a new generation of actors and playwrights emerging from the universities and drama schools, stage drama had begun a resurgence. In Sydney, the conglomerate of drama interests around the University of New South Wales (the National Institute of Dramatic Art, the School of Drama and the Old Tote Theatre Company) set up a theatre in a disused church in Jane Street, Randwick, to produce new Australian plays. Its success was mixed until 1970, when Michael Boddy and Bob Ellis’s The Legend of King O’Malley energised its audiences with a mix of satire, music, vaudeville and some serious political comment on Australia’s rowdy history and its current involvement in the Vietnam war.

Histories of Australian drama refer to these developments in Australian theatre as the “New Wave,” marking its Sydney emergence with King O’Malley and the growing number of actors and producers studying at NIDA. Simultaneously in Melbourne, the Australian Performing Group grew out of small-scale experimental productions by university graduates at La Mama cafe and later the Pram Factory. This group of writers, actors and producers, influenced by the political crisis brought on by the Vietnam war, were determined to make theatre that was radical in its style and its politics.

This group, which included David Williamson, John Romeril and Jack Hibberd, participated in every aspect of production, sometimes acting in their own or each other’s plays and collaborating with other young creative people. They were aware of the history of Australian theatre and the importance of vaudeville and musical traditions in popular theatre, and some of their productions were agitprop or influenced by the plays of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.

Plays like Jack Hibberd’s Dimboola (1969) and John Romeril’s The Floating World (1974) mined some of the same traditions that Boddy and Ellis employed in King O’Malley. Indeed, Dimboola and King O’Malley have remained popular, making them two of the most performed Australian plays in amateur theatre.

Much has been written about the New Wave drama of the 1970s and its revitalisation of Australian theatre. It seems important to emphasise that this drama was written by people who had encountered Australian television and participated in its production, and that the producers of stage drama and television drama were not separate groups of people.

What would the history of Australian drama look like if its list of the significant productions of the 1960s was broadened to include Charmian Clift’s television adaptation of My Brother Jack (1965) and Richard Lane’s of You Can’t See Round Corners (1967)? Looking at drama history that way would certainly extend the range and depth in the criticism of national attitudes evident in stage productions of the time. It might lead to a more sophisticated account of the development of realism as a dramatic style, rather than its simplistic dismissal as an outdated and conservative form.

The excitement of working in a new or revitalised industry in the 1970s was shared across stage, television and film. The writers, actors and producers of television drama were likely to see all the new local films and stage dramas. Some of them were also writing, acting in or producing these films and stage dramas.

When he became the ABC’s senior television drama producer in Melbourne in 1970, Oscar Whitbread went to every production of the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Australian Performing Group, keeping a look out for talent, particularly acting talent. As a result, APG actors appeared in many of the ABC’s televised playhouse productions in the 1970s, becoming familiar to much bigger audiences than they reached in the theatre.

One example of the interchange between television drama, film and the theatre was Whitbread’s casting of APG actors including Graeme Blundell and Kerry Dwyer in Cliff Green’s four-part drama Marion in 1973. When Peter Weir was seeking a screen adaptation for Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) he approached an overcommitted David Williamson, who recommended Green on the strength of the scripts his APG colleagues had shown him. In this way, Green, the scriptwriter for children’s shows, Crawford’s Homicide and ABC miniseries adaptations, came to write the film generally regarded as the turning point for the New Wave of Australian filmmaking in the 1970s.

Tony Morphett, now known mainly as a television writer, co-wrote the screenplay for Weir’s second success, The Last Wave (1977). Weir hired him because he had seen Morphett’s television series Certain Women (1973) and wanted the writer to give the film a grounding in contemporary reality to support its more fantastic elements. Morphett commented that his television work effectively subsidised his writing for the film. In a similar way, Australia’s pre-eminent playwright, David Williamson, became better known to many Australians as the writer of Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) than for his stage plays.

These three writers, Green, Morphett and Williamson, were integral to the success of Weir’s early films, just as they were important to the development of quality Australian television drama. Weir himself had begun his screen career as a television production assistant on The Mavis Bramston Show.

Other television writers wrote the screenplays for the landmark Australian films Sunday Too Far Away (1975, John Dingwall) and My Brilliant Career (1979, Eleanor Witcombe). The training they received writing for television was an essential background to the revival of Australian film, and for most of them television provided the financial support that stage and film could not.

The development of the “New Waves” of Australian stage drama and Australian film occurred in tandem, pushed along by a range of social and political changes. Australian television was the third part of that New Wave — except that, of course, it was not a revival of a previously existing phenomenon but a new and rapidly changing technology. •

This is an edited extract from Susan Lever’s new book, Creating Australian Television Drama: A Screenwriting History, published this month by Australian Scholarly Publishing

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Gillett’s concern is with what films can tell us about public tastes and mores at the time of their production. He is not generally speaking of art-house fare — he examines an extraordinary range of British films, across decades and genres — and indeed it becomes clear that films don’t even need to be good to be useful in this way.

Film and the Historian eschews the theory-infested methods of much scholarly writing about film in recent decades. Gillett’s earlier book, The British Working Class in Postwar Film, established him as a film scholar more concerned with representation than criticism. Not since Raymond Durgnat’s 1970 study, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence, do I recall a book that so examines film as a source of social information, whether wide-ranging or in up-close detail.

This book’s seventeen chapters explore what we can learn of life in the decades following the second world war from British films produced over the second half of the twentieth century. Its socially oriented themes are suggested by chapter titles that include “In the Aftermath of War,” “The Changing Face of Crime,” “Having a Flutter,” “Science and the Cinema” and “Crimes of Passion.”

Few may remember the superior B-movie Private Information (1952), in which a widow (Jill Esmond) takes on the local council over poor standards of construction in a newly built council estate. The shortage of good-quality housing was a crucial matter after the war but — as Gillett points out in a chapter titled “Intimations of a Changing Society” — “criticism of housing standards is unusual in feature films, lacking obvious dramatic potential,” which probably meant that a modest-budget “supporting film” of this kind was more likely to venture into it.

Better known was the car-rally comedy Genevieve (1953), in which the comfortably off couple (John Gregson, a barrister, and Dinah Sheridan) live in a London mews cottage, “a prized location in postwar days and one that appeared regularly in films.” Further details of their financial situation include the fact that Sheridan’s character comes home with a bulging shopping bag, signifying that food rationing was no longer a problem, a notion confirmed when she fails to become upset when the eggs are broken. They have a telephone, numbers of which had rocketed since the war, at least in middle-class homes.

Class is of course a matter of ongoing concern in British film, and in “Play Up and Play the Game” Gillett notes how it makes itself felt in sports-related films. In films ranging from Quartet (1948) to Match Point (2005), tennis is generally “for the upper classes.” In The Final Test (1953), the story of a professional cricketer, Gillett shows how a game aimed at “unifying the classes” also revealed a class distinction in the matter of who has television to follow it and who has only “a radio on the sideboard.” The cinematic problem with cricket, Gillett claims, is its leisurely pace, while “football and rugby come closer to concentrated drama” — though class distinctions are maintained even there between players and management.

Another sort of division charted by films was that between town and country. Gillett points to the importance in wartime film of presenting rural life as a means of enshrining British values. Tawny Pipit (1944) shows a village unified in its attempts to preserve a rare bird species. In Poet’s Pub (1949) there is a sense of a village trying to uphold unchanging views about the countryside; and in Conflict of Wings (1954) the villagers are again up in arms on behalf of birds that may be threatened by RAF activity in the district. Cities of course were more likely to be associated with crime and with changing attitudes to sexuality, as in, say, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947).

Even “Escape to Fantasy” (chapter four) can nudge our understanding of what films with elements of fantasy “reveal about the concerns of the time, providing a means by which hidden worries could be articulated.” Though The Halfway House (1944) never mentions the war explicitly, war is central to its theme of “looking forward to a better world,” as guests seek refuge in an isolated Welsh inn that was bombed out of existence a year before.

Released the following year, A Place of One’s Own, again with a strand of fantasy, offers a different reflection on its time of production. As Gillett writes, “By setting the story in the past [1906], any issues it raises could be seen as resolved long ago. One factor that cannot be set aside so easily is the place of the upper-middle-class woman, who in this era was confined not only in her corset, but in her home.” How would such a perception have been received in 1944?

It is difficult in a short space to do justice to this book’s rich dealings with what films can tell us about lives lived in a given period. My only quibble is with some minor errors an editor should have noted (for example, Terry-Thomas’s name requires a hyphen!), but overall this stylistically unpretentious book makes the fruits of exhaustive research appetising to a large readership. It offers a different and valuable approach to a popular art form. •

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Until that point Australia had been reaping the benefits of a worldwide boom in screen content production. Increasing demand from consumers combined with significant investment by international producers, broadcasters and streaming services had resulted in a dramatic rise in worldwide production. According to data published by the Motion Picture Association, which represents the major Hollywood studios and Netflix, global consumer spending on theatrical and home entertainment rose 31 per cent between 2014 and 2019.

Major US producers of content — from traditional broadcasters to new streaming services such as Apple+ and Disney+ — are estimated to have spent US$81 billion on new screen content, excluding sport, in 2019. Demand for studio space and experienced crew was rising in production centres in the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia.

In Australia, the production value of domestic and foreign drama increased by over 50 per cent between 2017–18 and 2018–19, according to Screen Australia, making 2018–19 a record year for Australian drama production. Like its counterparts in many countries, the Australian government provides incentives for both domestic and foreign drama production, supplementing incentives offered by the states.

The 2018 federal budget allocated $140 million over four years to the Location Incentive Program, which effectively provided an increase to the Tax Act’s location offset from 16.5 per cent to 30 per cent for eligible large-budget international productions that film in Australia from 1 July 2018. The change has so far generated $900 million in inward investment in the screen services sector across Australia.

Covid-19 has temporarily closed that pipeline. In addition to the Marvel feature Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, shooting in Sydney, Netflix’s Clickbait, shooting in Melbourne and Paramount’s Shantaram, shooting in Melbourne, large-budget Australian features by Baz Luhrmann and George Miller have also shut down. Ausfilm estimates that more than $700 million worth of production is on hold, with no clear idea when it might resume. And many of the thousands of cast and crew who have been stood down aren’t eligible for the JobKeeper payments because of the nature of their employment.

While large-budget international productions in Australia employ thousands of people directly, they also buy goods and services — including equipment rentals, hire cars, accommodation and travel — from a range of businesses, many of which have been hit hard by the loss of revenue. Companies have generally been able to access JobKeeper, although the use of casual staff has meant that here, too, some staff have not been eligible.

For companies providing post-production and digital visual effects, or VFX, the full effects of the pandemic aren’t yet apparent. In 2018–19 this sector generated $261 million from work on Australian and foreign drama. Internationally, the demand for VFX services has also expanded in recent years, fuelled by consumer demand for engaging, high-definition visual effects and realistic animation. This work is both labour intensive and technically complex, requiring ingenuity, artistry and innovation to produce the world-class output that Australia’s leading companies are known for. They also need sufficient bandwidth and stringent security to safeguard the intellectual property of the major US studios they do business with.

Having adapted to remote working, the post-production and VFX sector may see a further downturn in activity over the next two to six months and potentially longer, given that no physical production is taking place globally.  At the moment, these companies are generally working on projects that had completed their physical production prior to the shutdowns. They face a significant lag effect even after normal film and television production activity resumes.

The VFX sector also relies on a steady stream of international artists working in Australia on temporary visas. Despite an investment in training, Australia still doesn’t have enough skilled VFX artists to meet demand. Ideally the companies can retain these workers during the downturn to ensure they are available when work picks up again. But these temporary employees are not eligible for JobKeeper or JobSeeker. Although the companies are looking to share workers where possible during this time, the process of transferring visa holders between employers is complex.

Production will start again, of course, but things won’t be the same as they were before the virus. The American film industry was barely two decades old when the 1918–20 influenza pandemic struck. Small production companies disappeared, many individually owned cinemas went out of business, and out of the chaos emerged a relatively small number of vertically integrated studio businesses that controlled most production, distribution and exhibition in the United States and expanded to fill the gap in Europe left by the first world war.

It is still too early to judge the current pandemic’s longer-term impact on the screen industry. The demand for content is clearly still there and may indeed have increased significantly during the lockdown, with streaming services reporting increases in subscriptions and usage. The closure of cinemas and the drop in box office in the first quarter — ranging from a fall of 25 per cent in North America to a fall of 97 per cent in China — has hit the profitability of theatrical exhibition.

Can the theatrical window, which keeps films away from home entertainment for ninety days from their first release, survive in the long term? While some big tentpole releases, such as the next James Bond film, have been moved to later in the year, some scheduled theatrical releases have gone straight to premium video-on-demand while cinemas are closed. Not surprisingly, theatre owners are anxious about the future of exhibition.

The first big question is how and when production will resume. With Neighbours resuming production in Melbourne and a US feature film, Children of the Corn, having continued shooting in Sydney through the lockdown, the industry is paying attention to Australia. Netflix reports it is shooting in Iceland and Korea, and a US feature film finished shooting in Latvia during that nation’s lockdown.

The two health-and-safety preconditions to resume filming are a manageable or preferably zero rate of infection in the community and safety protocols that change the way physical production is undertaken. On set, these practices will naturally include social distancing, masks, disinfecting of equipment, limited numbers of cast and crew, some quarantining and the creation of a new senior staff position to manage all aspects of health and safety. The process of filmmaking will change significantly and will undoubtedly be more expensive. What isn’t clear, yet, is how complex action shots or more intimate scenes can be photographed in a way that doesn’t expose cast members to unnecessary risk.

The lifting of international travel restrictions will play an important role in restarting domestic and foreign production in Australia. The federal government has made clear that international travel, particularly for tourism, will be the last industry to be freed up. In the short term, though, the Border Force Commissioner is now able to grant exceptions for key personnel to enter the country safely while observing the appropriate quarantine controls, which means production could well resume sooner than expected.

The screen sector is in a unique position to help with the national economic recovery. Productions can employ a lot of people quickly, generating income and stimulating consumption. International production is a critical part of the Australian screen industry — it drives significant international investment and creates thousands of Australian jobs. Between 2014–15 and 2018–19 foreign production generated nearly $2 billion in foreign investment in physical production, post-production and VFX. When the projects that went into hiatus or were committed over the next 18 months get going, around 12,000 jobs will be on offer.

This offers a pathway to recovery and also an opportunity for Australia to consolidate its position as an international production hub. Just as Tom Hanks’ announcement of his illness marked the beginning of the impact of the virus on the screen sector, so too will his return to work in Australia mark a return to a version of normality. But, as Hanks said recently to a graduation class at Wright State University “part of your lives will forever be identified as ‘before.’” Indeed, what we did in the screen sector before the virus will not be the same as what we do after, but it could well be better and more exciting. •

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In late February, I visited Japan for the first time. Covid-19 was on the move, but it still seemed feasible to make this short, long-planned trip. Planes were flying normal schedules; lockdowns hadn’t yet begun. But all that would change with frightening speed, and Japan would soon offer an unlikely link between two scenarios of Australia in momentous conditions, one of them an imagined nuclear war, the other the pandemic we are experiencing now.

No sooner had I arrived than Japan started to close its museums and galleries. Unexpectedly, and disappointingly, I couldn’t visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, one of the country’s most historically significant places. But I was free to walk around the nearby A-Bomb Dome, the ruins of a building 600 metres beneath where America detonated the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare.

Dropped from the Enola Gay on 6 August 1945, the bomb killed an estimated 200,000 people with its blast or from burns and radiation poisoning, and obliterated the city of Hiroshima. America dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki three days later, bringing an end to the Pacific war that Japan had started four years earlier when it attacked Pearl Harbor with conventional bombs.

Hiroshima became a symbol for the anti-nuclear movement that emerged during the ensuing cold war. By the time Nevil Shute wrote his novel On the Beach in 1957, there was a sense that the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union could become a hot war at any minute.

Shute was a British-born aeronautical engineer and novelist who had worked for the British Admiralty during the second world war. He flew his own plane to Australia in 1948, returning two years later to settle at Langwarrin, near Melbourne. His novels about Australia, including A Town Like Alice, brought him great success, but none matched On the Beach. Capturing the fears hanging over the world of that era, it became an instant global bestseller.

On the Beach is set in 1963, in and around Melbourne, after radioactive fallout from a nuclear war between the two superpowers has obliterated life elsewhere on Earth. An estimated five months remain before the radiation will engulf Australia, too. Stanley Kramer, a Hollywood producer and director, snapped up the rights to Shute’s novel, and filmed it on location in Melbourne in 1959 with some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the day: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins.

When we think of global threats to humanity, nuclear war and pandemics usually top the list. Their impacts, of course, would be different, though no one is sure exactly how different. I had happened to visit Hiroshima in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of the atomic bombing. When I returned to Australia in early March, I was struck by a similar sense of the doom that pervades Shute’s novel and Kramer’s movie, the latter enhanced by the brilliant black-and-white imagery of the Italian cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno.

Shute’s story is one of despair at how humans have managed the world, and especially their incapacity to heed warnings. “Newspapers,” one of his characters says, suggesting how serious warnings about nuclear war could have gone out. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about cases of indecent assault.”

Social media may well play an even worse role in today’s silliness. Serious warnings about a global pandemic were equally overlooked. “If anything kills ten million people over the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” the tech billionaire Bill Gates warned five years ago. “We’ve invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents, but we have actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic… We need to do simulations. Germ games, not war games.”

Shute would not have imagined it in 1957, but his picture of a world closing down under a nuclear catastrophe uncannily mirrors many of the social curbs and human emotions evoked six decades later by a virus that seemingly has the power to destabilise populations and devastate economies.

Melbourne’s normally bustling landmarks, such as Flinders Street Station and the forecourt at the State Library of Victoria, are almost as devoid of people today as they were at the end of Shute’s story. Australians stranded around the world have been rushing to fly back to the security of their home soil, even if it has suddenly become very insecure. Americans in On the Beach wanted to do the same thing.

In Kramer’s film, one of the most chilling yet poignant scenes involves a reconnaissance trip from Melbourne by the nuclear-powered submarine the USS Scorpion, the last surviving vessel in the American navy, to investigate a strange radar signal from the American west coast. When it reaches San Francisco Bay one of its American crew, Ralph Swain (played with a masterly American accent by the Australian actor John Meillon), jumps ship and swims to the shore of his home city, where life has ceased to exist. Ignoring a loudhailer order to return from the sub’s commander, Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck), he calls back, “I have a date on Market Street, Captain. I’m going home.”

Then, as now, the fear of a force that can change lives forever, or end them, prevails. “I’m afraid,” Moira Davidson, Ava Gardner’s character in Shute’s story, tells her old flame, the scientist Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire). “I have nobody.” On 2 April Anthony Albanese, the Labor leader, told ABC radio in Melbourne that he had walked along a queue stretching about 200 metres from the Centrelink office in his Sydney electorate, talking to people who had lost livelihoods. “Everyone is polite,” he said. “That is the nature of our community. But many of them are distraught, they’re distressed.”

In his account of Australia’s political functioning in a cold war cataclysm, Shute also presaged what is happening now. “With no aircraft flying on the airlines,” he wrote, “federal government from Canberra was growing difficult, and parliamentary sessions there were growing shorter and less frequent.”

In fact, they have now stopped. Parliament has been suspended until August, although Scott Morrison suggests it might come back for a “trial week sometime in May.” For the first time in its history, Canberra airport was closed for two days in April in the absence of scheduled flights. On 21 April, just three arrivals and three departures were scheduled.

Japan, too, portends how Australia will be isolated from the wider world. During my visit, the country had seemed to prepare for Covid-19 more seriously than Australia had. Everyone, everywhere, wore face masks, trains and buses bore special electronic signs warning against infection, hotels and restaurants insisted on visitors using hand sanitiser before entering. Japanese norms of complying with official directions had helped to keep infection rates relatively low.

By late March, even with five times Australia’s population, it had fewer cases of Covid-19 than Australia. More than 10,000 cases later, it has one-and-a-half times Australia’s number, according to the World Health Organization. Under criticism for not imposing stronger social restrictions earlier, prime minister Shinzo Abe finally declared a national state of emergency on 16 April.

Japan’s popularity as a destination for Australians had been growing, with 600,000 Australians visiting last year. Four airlines had direct flights from Japan to six Australian cities. By early April, flights had diminished to just three a week, all of them to Sydney by one airline, ANA. Richard Court, Australia’s ambassador to Japan, wrote to Australians in Japan recently warning of uncertainty about whether any flights at all to Australia would continue after 24 April.

Despite how it may have seemed, Australians are not facing the end of the world, as they were in Nevil Shute’s novel. Nevertheless, as governments splurge money, increase controls over the lives of people and businesses, and watch gingerly how global power will shape up after the emergency, many realise that the world will never be quite the same again.

There is one other difference between the Australia of Shute’s catastrophe and the current one. Far from observing social isolation back then, Australians coped with the fear of impending annihilation by partying hard.

In the Melbourne of On the Beach, “restaurants and cafes were all full, doing a roaring trade; the bars were shut, but the streets were full of drunks. The general effect was one of boisterous and uninhibited lightheartedness… There was no traffic in the wide streets but for the trams, and people swarmed all over the road. As they passed the Regal Cinema a man, staggering along in front of them, fell down, paused for a moment upon hands and knees, and rolled dead drunk into the gutter. Nobody paid much attention to him.”

It will be a while before Melbourne sees such scenes again. •

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Any film must stand on its own merits, however, and the phenomenon of the remake, like any other mode of adaptation, is merely one element of a new film’s intertextuality. Whether it is a remake such as Downhill or an adaptation such as Emma, my chief criterion is whether the new film has something new to say about its precursor. As Orson Welles once told a director (Peter Bogdanovich, as I recall), if a filmmaker has nothing new to say about a literary work he should leave it alone.

Remakes have a vast history, some of them, of course, also qualifying as further adaptations of novels, but no set of rules exists to ensure that the later version is more or less effective than its predecessors. For every disastrous Father of the Bride (1991 and 1950, with Steve Martin and Spencer Tracy as the respective eponyms) there is probably a new Star Is Born (2018) that doesn’t obliterate memories of Garland and Streisand while allowing Lady Gaga to command the screen. Hitchcock even remade his own very attractive British version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) with a potently different American version in 1956.

Downhill, unlike most remakes, acknowledges its source in a final title that tells us that it is “inspired” by 2014’s Force Majeure. That multinational (but essentially Scandinavian) film is often referred to as a comedy-drama, but my recollection would stress the “drama.” It deals with a potentially very serious breakdown in a family after a natural disaster during a skiing holiday in the French Alps (where the outdoor sequences were filmed). When an avalanche interrupts their outdoor breakfasting, the father races off fearfully, leaving wife and children at the table; it takes some time and effort to begin to repair the rift.

In Faxon and Rash’s hands, the remake is a wholly American production, though it is filmed entirely in Austria. It had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which perhaps suggests that it was never expected to be a multiplex crowd-pleaser. To date, it has made only a modest box office impression, though that may not be unusual among films at this troubled time. More significantly, Faxon and Rash have extensive acting experience but only minimal experience as directors, and perhaps this accounts for a certain tonal uncertainty in their version of a film that never lost its grip on its core narrative.

In terms of narrative, the new film pretty much follows the 2014 feature, with the avalanche at mealtime again providing the impetus. We are acquainted with the family — father Pete (Will Ferrell), mother Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and their two sons Finn and Emerson (Julian Grey and Ammon Jacob Ford) — before the crucial incident. Billie, very forthright, urges the kids to get off their phones; and there are images of adults lolling on beds with food and drink. A gushy chalet employee, Charlotte (Miranda Otto), kisses guests as part of her job description, and we see long shots of mountain vistas at sunrise…

In other words, the scene has been set for a major narrative disruption, and this is what occurs during lunch outdoors. Pete runs away from what he perceives as imminent danger, leaving Billie and the children in the likely path of the snowy explosion as the screen goes white. When he returns, more or less contrite, he finds himself ostracised over what is seen as an act of cowardice.

“Screw you. I’m an attorney” is Billie’s blunt reply to one of his attempts to smooth over the troubled waters tossing between them, and the children eye him with a resentment that seeps through their willed blankness of expression. Into this situation of family tensions arrives a pair of friends, Zach and Rosie (Zach Woods and Zoe Chao), whose presence, as they talk of their travels and the recent avalanche, does nothing to mitigate Billie’s simmering rage.

I don’t want to trace in detail the events and images that make for some tensely rewarding viewing, but I do want to suggest that the film has been rather more harshly dealt with than seems quite justified. Enough interest is generated by the drama of family tensions against a background of dangerous nature both to hold our attention and to make one regret the softening of its ultimate outcome. Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus give nuanced performances, and some superbly shot Alpine panoramas suggest both beauty and danger.

All right, the script settles for some would-be aphoristic statements (“Everything is all we have” and “You have to think above yourself”) and the production is not in the same class as Force Majeure. But neither is it fair to say, as one critic did, that “the movie turns ice into slush.” This is to ignore the interaction of people, ideas and events that means, for much of its modest running time, Downhill is more than just another dud remake. •

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To start with what may seem a trivial matter. Some decades ago, when I was writing about the silent film version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a female colleague took issue with the underclothes the heroine was wearing, claiming women never wore pants in the period of the film’s setting. In the latest version of Emma, Austen’s protagonist (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) is seen standing in front of a fire and lifting her skirts to warm her bare bottom. A little earlier there had been a naked rear view of Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn) as he was being dressed in every detail by a manservant.

The point I am making about Autumn de Wilde’s film, directed from Eleanor Catton’s screenplay, is that it is concerned to establish a sense of historical period through such seemingly small details: the absence of Emma’s item of lingerie clearly signifies a now-distant past, and the fact that Knightley requires such sartorial attention immediately illuminates the class lacunae at the heart of Austen’s world.

In such details, and in the titles that announce the changing seasons, the filmmakers have set out to make something new from the classic novel. The most interesting adaptations are those that shun a reverential approach to the text by offering a different slant on something we already knew. In this new film, other matters, such as an intermittently choral-sounding musical score or the crocodile line of red-cloaked schoolgirls making their way about the village and its surrounds, also subtly enrich the texture of this small world.

Having failed so far to answer my opening question, perhaps what I really mean is this: what is it about Austen’s novels that so persistently attracts filmmakers’ attention? Well, they are undeniably witty in tracing their characters’ path to marriage, and along the way they are perceptive about what makes people behave as they do and how matters such as wealth and class help to account for this.

Austen is very rigorous in her dealings with such matters; there is not an atom of sentimentality in her novels, and Emma may well be the most demanding of them. Some readers even find it the least likeable, with its heroine so sure she is always right in her interference in the lives of those around her. Only very near the end is she brought to realise that there is more to life than merely getting her own way.

How does de Wilde, whose previous career was largely in video shorts, deal with the fact that Austen’s original five-volume novel ran to nearly 500 pages? The film begins with the novel’s opening sentence — “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich…” — quoted over images of its heroine sleeping and then, choosing roses in the garden, imperiously directing the servant, “Not that one. The next.” Her way of dealing with her inferiors (and their name is legion, in her view) is quickly established, but it’s not all there is to her: the flowers are intended as a present to her governess, to whom she is devoted and who is about to make what Emma’s hypochondriac father names “an entirely unnecessary marriage.”

Having set Emma in place, physically and socially, the film preserves for the most part the novel’s central narrative trajectory, which is to bring her to a larger awareness of life. Along the way, de Wilde brings a necessary tough-mindedness to bear on Emma’s meddling, and she has been fortunate in Taylor-Joy’s subtle performance.

As is often the case with Austen, it is the arrival of newcomers that propels the plot. Emma takes under her wing Harriet Smith (very engagingly played by Mia Goth), “natural” daughter of someone unknown, which provides her with scope for her managerial talent — well, inclination anyway. Then there are the much talked-about Frank Churchill, who interests Emma, and Jane Fairfax, towards whom she has less than amiable feelings, and Reverend Elton’s new and absurdly uppity wife. There are also relationships with her dim and ageing father, the as-yet-unmarried vicar, and the incessantly gossiping Miss Bates.

The film has some difficulty in coping with the pairings and other connections that constitute this network of lives jostling for a place in the scene. Though both Callum Turner as Churchill and Amber Anderson as the musically gifted Jane Fairfax do attractively what is asked of them, there is really not enough for them to work with. The film might have been tightened if it had dispensed with them — their function in the plot is not made persuasive — and spent more time on the situation of Harriet and the young farmer Emma believes to be unworthy of her protégée.

But this is not a major quibble about a film that knows what it is up to in presenting a central figure who will be brought to more mature awareness. The camera adroitly picks out Emma’s response to a kind gesture on Knightley’s part when he invites the neglected Harriet to dance at a ball. And the Box Hill picnic at which Knightley makes Emma realise how much she has hurt Miss Bates is another step towards her emergence from her heedless girlhood.

If Taylor-Joy and Goth are the most interesting Emma and Harriet I can remember, there are at least two other wonderfully comic treats — from Bill Nighy as old Mr Woodhouse, repeatedly requiring screens to protect his knees from drafts, and from the towering Miranda Hart, whose Miss Bates also registers touchingly a brief moment of hurt. As well as the actors, other collaborators who make significant contributions to this latest foray into Austen are costume designer Alexandra Byrne and production designer Kave Quinn, both evoking time, place and character. As indeed does the film as a whole. •

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Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), also not a musical, contained several songs. That film was constructed from the interweaving of short stories by Raymond Carver, but with the addition of a single character, unique to the film. Tess Trainer is a nightclub singer, her career all but washed up. She’s played by the jazz singer Annie Ross and the film affords her set pieces in which she sings songs by Doc Pomus and Mac Rebennack (Dr John) and a specially written song, “Conversation on a Barstool,” by Bono and the Edge.

Ross’s function in the film is that of Greek chorus, and she sings because her character is a singer. But more commonly when movie characters break into song it is to reveal or underline something about themselves. In Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987), Albert Brooks’s character Aaron, a news reporter snubbed by his network in favour of the dim but rugged-looking William Hurt, mixes himself a drink and rattles off some of the French lyrics to Francis Cabrel’s “L’Édition spéciale” to confirm to himself his superiority.

In The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007), Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing a Brecht scholar with a failing love life, distant sister and father with dementia, listens in his car to Lotte Lenya singing Brecht and Weill’s “Salomon-Song” from The Threepenny Opera. It’s a song about disappointment and at first Hoffman hums along, before joining in the chorus (“How great and wise was Solomon”), in which Brecht points out that wisdom only gets you so far in life.

In Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), Bill Murray’s character gets up in a Tokyo karaoke bar to sing Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” the song underscoring his fish-out-of-water status in a group of much younger and mostly Japanese people who, nevertheless, cheer him on.

All these films find reasons in the plot for their characters to sing, but in Magnolia (1999), the director Paul Thomas Anderson creates magic by having his actors sing with no pretext at all. Again, the film is not a musical, but the director was apparently inspired by Aimee Mann’s songs, and several of these feature in the film, along with songs by others (including Harry Nilsson’s “One,” sung by Mann). Mann’s “Wise Up” is the song that creates the aforementioned magic, as the film’s characters take up the song, one by one, each in his or her own situation — snorting cocaine, say, or nursing a dying man. It’s the sonic equivalent of the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film changes from black and white to bright primary colours. Not only are we “not in Kansas anymore,” we’re in a different sort of movie.

Something similar happens in Marriage Story. Baumbach provides his characters with reasons to sing — Johansson’s Nicole (an actor) is at a party, Driver’s Charlie (a theatre director), recalling Lost in Translation, is singing karaoke — but the nature and provenance of the songs are what is significant here. They are not only both by Sondheim, but both are from his 1970 musical Company. Moreover, they are sung in Company by characters in situations similar to those in which Johansson and Driver’s characters find themselves.

In Company, Robert — Bobby — is a typical young man of the late 1960s, a mixture of self-pity and self-justification when it comes to relationships with women. He thinks he’d like to commit, but until the right woman comes along feels obliged to play the field. Three of his exes confront him with “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.” In Marriage Story, the song, performed at a Hollywood party to celebrate Nicole’s divorce from Charlie, remains a trio — Johansson’s Nicole is joined in her performance by her mother (Julie Hagerty) and sister (Merritt Wever). It’s so much in the style of the original that you imagine Johansson studying Donna McKechnie’s version. In the film, the performance ends — as it does in Company — with the tagline: “Bobby is my hobby and I’m giving it up.”

From Nicole’s high spirits, we jump to a New York bar, where Driver’s Charlie is surrounded by sympathetic friends. When Robert sings “Being Alive” in Sondheim’s musical, his performance is punctuated by a running commentary from his own friends. Baumbach might have had Driver similarly interrupted, but it would have been a step into archness (some will feel the whole Sondheim trope is that, in any case). Instead, Charlie’s karaoke performance includes his own interruptions, as he gives himself Robert’s advice: “Is that all you think there is to it?”; “Don’t stop now! Keep going!” Driver not only sounds like Dean Jones, the original Robert, but seems also to have studied the voices of Robert’s friends from the soundtrack album. The whole scene is theatrically alienating and at the same time emotionally wrenching.

Marriage Story has received plenty of critical plaudits — rightly so, in my view — but the full effect of the musical scenes can surely only be felt by someone who knows Company and the original context of the songs. If you do, you will also feel the characters in Baumbach’s film slide suddenly, if not completely, into the characters from Sondheim’s show, then back again. I can’t think of another film that has a similar moment. •

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Twenty-five years ago, a young filmmaker with a merry face and disorganised hair came into the Sydney studios of ABC Radio National. Bong Joon-ho was in town because a short film he’d made was screening in an Asia-Pacific Film festival here.

I didn’t broadcast the interview: it was tough going. I knew little, back then, about Korean cinema, and the festival organisers, and perhaps Bong, had vastly overestimated his ability to speak English. There is a huge difference between conversational English and the capacity to express more complex ideas in a language not your own.

But I admired his chutzpah, and his persistence. And perhaps we both learned from the attempt. Thereafter, I tried never to put filmmakers from other cultures at such a disadvantage, and became rather obsessed about finding good interpreters who were also good broadcasters and understood cinema. It’s harder than you may think. Perhaps Bong also learned from the experience: even now, he has a film-literate interpreter at his side for key public appearances.

Some years later, I saw his first feature, a satire called Barking Dogs Never Bite, at a European film festival. Afterwards, I strolled along the foreshore trailing two colleagues, both very distinguished European critics. “And what,” one enquired of the other, “are we to make of this silly little film?”

A few months later, at a different film festival in Asia, this silly little film won a critics’ award. And one of those colleagues, I was startled to see, was on the jury. Context, I think, helps a lot.

Many qualities make Bong Joon-ho a fine filmmaker. He is a perceptive observer of large-scale and small-scale human interaction. He has a belief in social justice — a moral sense, if you like. He doesn’t do cardboard cut-out heroes and villains: his characters have foibles, vanities and weaknesses; they may do bad things but they are not bad people.

Parasite’s Kim family, infiltrating the household of the wealthy Parks, are doing what they can to get by. It’s impossible to distrust the broad, dependable face of the father, Kim Ki-taek, played by the wonderful Song Kang-ho, who has enriched Bong Joon-ho’s films since he first played the self-deluding detective in Memories of Murder. The director may have his fun with the naive mother’s pride in the wealthy Park family, and with how her six-year-old plays off his parents, but these are all people we recognise, and each has their moment.

Bong’s pungent sense of humour has been evident since his short-film days. It’s based partly on his observations of human failings but also on his fondness for certain cinema traditions. He has a weakness for slapstick, and almost every film he makes features a chase sequence. Often a comic one.

In his third film — the wildly funny monster movie The Host, based on newspaper accounts that chemical waste in Seoul’s Han River had produced deformed fish — a monster fish makes off with a little girl. Bong’s protagonists are a hapless family operating a snack bar on the riverbank, but his satire neatly skewers the bureaucratic and military response to the crisis.

Those slapstick chase sequences have been there from the get-go. In an early short, Incoherence, we see an affluent jogger, pristine in a white tracksuit, stealing milk from doorsteps to refresh himself en route. A newspaper deliveryman gives chase, and it doesn’t end well. Even in the much tenser Memories of Murder, about a serial killer and two not very wily cops, there’s a moment when the pair hear a particular song on the radio and suddenly start running.

Among cinema’s hugely important elements is the arrangement — and movement — of bodies in space. Bong Joon-ho gets this. We see it early in Parasite, in a tableau of the impoverished Kim family in their scungy basement flat, scrambling into some kind of human pyramid to free ride on nearby wi-fi. When the same family manages to insert itself into the Parks’ luxurious house we see them spread out drunk while their employers are away. This scene is pretty well shot at floor level, in the style of Japanese directors like Yasujirō Ozu, but Ozu never imagined a family so louche.

Bong knows how to move his actors and can confidently choreograph complex scenes like the mayhem of the child’s birthday in Parasite. Just as importantly, he knows how to create on-screen spaces. The luxurious modern house in Parasite is such a great piece of contemporary architecture — it was receiving plaudits in architecture journals before some twigged it was a set — that I wanted to move into it myself.

It is a very particular set, built to convey both openness and secrets. An eavesdropper can hide on the stairs or behind a sliding door, and secrets can hide in the basement. There are two picture windows in Parasite: the one in the Parks’ luxurious mansion that frames a carefully manicured garden, and the one in the Kims’ grungy basement flat that looks out on an alley and a dumpster against which drunks regularly piss. There’s metaphor here of class difference and its prospects.

So far, Bong has leapt from genre to genre: social comedy (Barking Dogs), dystopia (Snowpiercer, Okje), policier (Memories of Murder) and monster movie (The Host). At his best, he can twist from comedy to drama in a blink.

I was not a complete fan of the director’s two American-backed movies, in each of which he was experimenting, I think, with budget and scale opportunities not afforded in Korea. Snowpiercer, adapted from a French graphic novel, had much to say about class, but the film was overwhelmed by its production design. And Okje, about capitalist exploitation of animals for profit, was let down by the giant pig. Its digital creators didn’t provide body language expressive enough to endear us to this member of a very intelligent species.

After last week’s award, Bong Joon-ho reflected on the fact that a film set very specifically in his own culture had proved more universally popular than those designed for a global audience. It’s salutary. A good story, convincingly set in a place and a time, can cross national boundaries to speak to us all. •

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The film’s other protagonist is Lloyd Vogel, based on the real-life figure of Tom Junod, an Esquire journalist sent to interview Fred at his studio in Pittsburgh. The pair developed a life-long friendship, the result of an essential interest in humanity that could lead Rogers to reverse the roles of interviewer and interviewee, with no motive other than an innate goodness — and if you think “goodness” isn’t interesting or complex enough to make absorbing entertainment, forget it.

The two key roles have been perfectly cast. Tom Hanks, possibly drawing on aspects of his own personality and difficult early life, plays Rogers. In the role, he shows how a man can work at goodness and in doing so perhaps bring some solace to those leading more fraught lives. The fraught life here is brilliantly incarnated in Matthew Rhys’s Lloyd Vogel, a subtle study in suppressed anger. The interaction of these two makes for a humane and engrossing film — humane not in the sense of feel-good but in treating virtue as a complex phenomenon. If you saw director Marielle Heller’s previous film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, none of the above will be surprising.

Heller’s new film opens on an image of a model neighbourhood that proves to be part of the set for Fred Rogers’s television series. He enters, sings the title song, then opens a series of small doors on a picture-board, the last of which reveals Lloyd’s damaged, unhappy face. Lloyd has had a tricky time forgiving the person who hit him, Fred tells us, but forgiveness can release us from feelings of anger. We gain a glimpse of Fred’s backstory, and the image of the model village — and thus of a real-life neighbourhood — is revealed to be part of a big city.

Lloyd’s win in the 1998 National Magazine Awards has not brought him much happiness. His mother died when he was young and his father, Jerry, had offered her no comfort nor felt any obligations to his children, Lloyd and Lorraine, whom he deserted. Lloyd and his understanding wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) have a baby, and they are first seen when packing to go off overnight to his sister’s wedding. Lloyd’s reluctance is wittily expressed in his belief that the “purpose of babies is to let you out of unwanted social obligations.”

Things don’t get any better at the wedding. To Andrea, the bridegroom “looks terrified.” “So he should,” says Lloyd, “he’s marrying Lorraine.” What brings matters to a head is the unexpected, and soon drunken, presence of Jerry (Chris Cooper), who to Lloyd’s unhappy surprise has turned up to “give away” the daughter he long ago deserted. When Jerry dares to talk of his long-dead wife, Lloyd punches him, receiving in return the blow to the face that accounts for the picture-board image at the beginning of the film.

This is not to suggest that the film is preparing us for a conventional family drama; rather, it is setting up its essential narrative impetus — the relationship that will develop from Lloyd’s meeting with Fred. Lloyd’s editor, Ellen (played by Christine Lahti with an appropriate quiet authority), sends him off to write a profile of the much-loved Rogers. Lloyd’s interviewees usually hate the resulting articles, and even his wife urges him not to “spoil my childhood” by coming up with a cynical piece about Rogers.

The core of the film — and its heart — is the way Lloyd’s assignment will help him begin working through the traumas of his life. At an early point, following questions from Fred and talk of Lloyd’s marriage, Lloyd has to insist that it is he who is meant to be doing the interviewing. If the colourfully sweatered ordinariness of Fred’s persona is not all there is to him — and the film’s closing minute gives us our one conclusive insight into this — Lloyd’s uneasy dealings with his own inner life are what provide the essential narrative trajectory of the film.

Marielle Heller never lets A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood degenerate into the predictable. As she showed in Can You Forgive Me?, she is adept at steering a pair of protagonists through moments, sometimes small but always telling, in which they learn more about each other. Conversation reveals a great deal without either film lapsing into mere talkativeness.

Those others who make their presence felt in the film’s various contexts — the studio, Lloyd’s and Fred’s homes, the scene of Jerry’s final illness — contribute to our grasp of what has made the central friendship so rewarding and how it leads Lloyd to reappraise the demands of his life. Cooper’s Jerry makes us aware that even a wrong-headed approach to living may not be all that can be said of him, and Kelechi Watson as Lloyd’s patient, quietly loving wife is a model of understatement’s potency.

Above all, though, it is Rhys and Hanks who, under Heller’s guidance, ensure that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is also tonally perfect. •

The post A beautiful time at the cinema appeared first on Inside Story.

Above all, Anderson has become a lesbian icon, celebrated for the boudoir scene in Rebecca in which she mesmerises the timid second Mrs de Winter with a sensual display of her predecessor’s underclothes and transparent nightwear.

When Judith Anderson made Rebecca at the end of 1939 she was forty-two years old, already a Broadway star of thirteen years’ standing and acknowledged as a first lady of the American stage. After appearing on Broadway with the young John Gielgud in Hamlet and at the Old Vic, London, with the even younger Laurence Olivier in Macbeth, she retired from the stage following her marriage to Berkeley professor Ben Lehman. A year later, longing for a whiff of greasepaint, she returned to the stage — and single life — with an extraordinary portrayal of Mary, mother of Jesus, in Family Portrait.

David O. Selznick had just bought Daphne du Maurier’s bestselling novel Rebecca, and was looking for an actress to play the central role of Mrs Danvers. His talent scout in New York wrote to him excitedly about Anderson’s brilliant success: “You have long been interested in this magnificent actress. She would be marvellous.” As Anderson put it in her unpublished memoirs, “I made the screen test. I got the job.”

This was not Judith Anderson’s first movie. In 1933 she had played a sultry nightclub owner in Blood Money — now considered a classic, though at the time Anderson’s talent on the screen was recognised only by the London Times. Unlike Blood Money, though, Rebecca had to conform to America’s prudish new Motion Picture Production Code. Writing to Selznick in 1939, the censor emphasised that there must be no suggestion that the first Mrs de Winter was “a sex pervert.” Despite this admonition, Anderson managed, with the aid of director Alfred Hitchcock, to convey a subtext of lesbianism that was immediately clear to a knowing audience.

Boudoir scene: a duvet cover featuring artist Alejandro Mogollo’s image of Mrs Danvers. Redbubble

Rebecca was an enormous hit when it was released in 1940, and was nominated for eleven Academy Awards the following year. Anderson’s nomination for best supporting actress lost to Jane Darwell in Grapes of Wrath, but her portrayal of Mrs Danvers has remained among the greatest villains of movie history. Rebecca was originally promoted as a love story, with Laurence Olivier and newcomer Joan Fontaine as the central figures. But interest quickly turned to the spine-tingling Mrs Danvers. Publicity for the film soon featured what has become the classic image of Anderson standing behind Fontaine urging her to “Jump, jump.”

Although commentators recognised Mrs Danvers’s sexuality from the beginning, it did not become an object of widespread analysis until the 1970s, when popular and academic work influenced by the feminist and gay movements turned the spotlight onto Hitchcock’s ambiguous creation.

After Laura Mulvey published her path-breaking article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, applying feminist psychoanalytic theory to Hitchcock’s movies, an avalanche of articles and books made images of Anderson in Rebecca iconic of the Hollywood lesbian. At a more popular level, Gay Activists Alliance member Vito Russo — whose lectures throughout the United States from 1972 to 1982 included clips of Hollywood’s treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters — included Rebecca in his 1981 book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. The HBO documentary of the same name, narrated by Lily Tomlin and released in 1996, placed Rebecca and Mrs Danvers at centre stage and made the boudoir scene an important part of the general public’s image of the lesbian on film.

Rebecca itself was brought out in a deluxe edition DVD by Criterion in 2001, with Anderson menacing Fontaine on the cover. When Criterion issued a Blu-ray version in 2017 the cover featured Anderson alone, exhibiting the “sinister menace” that had seemed to act as a codeword for “lesbian” when the movie was made.

Since 1975, Judith Anderson (or Mrs Danvers) has become the poster girl for scholarly analyses of lesbian sexuality in film. As Patricia White points out, “Rebecca figures as insistently in feminist film theory as does Rebecca in the second Mrs de Winter’s psyche.” Two major academic books, The Women Who Knew Too Much (1988) and Uninvited (1999), have iconic images of Anderson and Fontaine on their covers — the scholarly counterpoint to the Garbo, Stanwyck and Deitrich trio on the covers or in the photographic pages of the more popular Sewing Circle: Sappho’s Leading Ladies (1995) by celebrity biographer, Axel Madsen, critic David Ehrenstein’s Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928–98 (1998) and journalist Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2001).

These popular books unquestioningly identify Anderson as a lesbian, usually without any attribution, following gossip columnist Boze Hadleigh’s dubious “outing” in Hollywood Lesbians (1994). Peter Conrad, reviewing Open Secret in the London Observer, described the boudoir scene in Rebecca as “the most candid account of a lesbian seduction ever filmed.” He accused the “bullish” Anderson of hypocrisy for denying knowledge that “such monstrous and unnatural females existed.” (Bullish is often used to describe Anderson, who was actually tiny and considered by her contemporaries the epitome of glamour.)

An article in the Glasgow Herald accompanying the screening of highlights of the 14th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2000 is typical in its equating of Mrs Danvers’s sexuality and that of Judith Anderson: “The archetypal Hollywood lesbian,” it read, “is arguably… Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca… Judith Anderson, who played her, is said to have belonged to the legendary Hollywood ‘sewing circle’ of actresses who were lesbian.”

Who was the real Judith Anderson? She began life in Adelaide in 1897 as Frances Margaret Anderson, the “unwanted child” of a failing marriage. She grew up in a close-knit family whose doughty mother, deserted by her husband, supported the four children by running a small grocery shop. Blessed with a rich, throaty voice and considerable talent and determination, she parlayed success in elocution competitions into a promising stage career as Francee Anderson in the company of Australia’s best-loved actor at the time, Julius Knight.

In 1918, disappointed with the opportunities available in Australia, the ambitious Francee followed other young Australians to Hollywood. Rejected as not pretty enough by Cecil B. De Mille, she went on to New York where, renamed Judith, her striking looks and obvious talent made her a star by 1925. After playing sophisticated modern roles for a decade, she starred in a series of Shakespearean roles until a landmark role in Medea, adapted for her by her friend, the California poet Robinson Jeffers, elevated her to international fame.

Despite her success in Rebecca, movies were always incidental to Anderson’s career, necessary to fund her “real” calling on the legitimate stage. Nevertheless, she played some memorable roles, as different as the elegant Ann Treadwell in Laura (1944), Ma Callum in Pursued (1947) and Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). In the early 1950s, she began a third career in television, then in its golden age, winning Emmys in 1955 and 1961 for two portrayals of Lady Macbeth.

Late in a long career, Anderson played the supporting role of the Nurse to fellow-Australian Zoe Caldwell in Medea in 1982, when she was eighty-five years old. In 1984 she had a cameo role as the Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock; and from 1984 to 1987 she appeared in the American soap Santa Barbara.

Judith Anderson remained a steadfast Australian despite her long residence in the United States. She returned to her homeland in 1927 for an unhappy tour during which she was condemned for the overly sexual character of her plays. She inaugurated the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1955 with a tour of Medea, and presented excerpts from Medea and Macbeth at the Adelaide Festival in 1966 — but her appearance there was eclipsed by the “rock star” Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, for whom she recited the English translation of his poems. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to the performing arts in 1960 and, just before her death in 1992, a Companion of the Order of Australia.

The question of Judith Anderson’s sexuality remains debatable. She had many flirtations and she married twice; but each marriage was, in her words, “short, but far too long.” She was clearly attractive to women. The diarist Leo Lerman observed the lesbian writer, Jane Bowles, “yearning at her” at the closing night party for Bowles’s In the Summer House, in which Anderson had starred.

But the “archetypical Hollywood lesbian” she was not. An ambitious career woman, she struggled against typecasting in her life and in her work. From the age of eight she had refused to settle for the ordinary existence of a dependent woman. In 1924, when she had her first taste of success, she told Theatre Magazine that she wanted to play all sorts of women on the stage — “A whimsical creature, a capricious one, a woman of many contradictory moods, a cruel one, a malevolent one, a tender one, a woman broken on the wheels of her own emotions. Feline creatures, subtle, tricky, clever, selfish. All of them.” And at the end of her life, when gossip writer Boze Hadleigh tried to pin her down to a sexual identity, she sent him packing with the defiant words, “I do not associate myself with anyone — group or individual… I won’t join up with anything. Ever.”

When, in early childhood, she had seen in Nellie Melba’s performance “that quite indescribable miracle that a great talent can produce,” she had vowed that she too “must try in my own way to do to people what she, standing by a piano, was doing to me and to everyone in that theatre.” From that time, despite her many warm friendships, love affairs and two marriages, her great love was for her art, and she remained faithful to that to the end of her life. •

Desley Deacon’s Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage has just been published by Kerr Publishing.

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Yet the chief executive of one of the world’s most successful creative enterprises is virtually a one-company man. Robert Iger joined ABC television in the United States as a studio supervisor in 1974. About a decade later, ABC was bought by Capital Cities Communications. Ten years after that, the Walt Disney Company acquired ABC/Cap Cities. One of Iger’s bosses and mentors at Cap Cities, Tom Murphy, told him, “Pal, if you play your cards right, one day you will run that company.” He was right. In 2005, the Disney board chose fifty-four-year-old Iger as just the sixth chief executive of the company founded by Walt Disney in 1923. He is still in charge, with a contract that will keep him there for another two years.

The first part of The Ride of a Lifetime, “Learning,” is about Iger’s path to the top of Disney. He rose via ABC’s Wide World of Sports and ABC Entertainment, where he commissioned shows like the original Twin Peaks and NYPD Blue that helped ABC to overtake NBC’s prime-time dominance with viewers aged between eighteen and forty-nine.

The second part, “Leading,” covers Iger’s remarkable period at the top of Disney. Four of these seven chapters are about the big acquisitions that transformed the company. Disney+, the streaming video service launched in the United States on 12 November and in Australia a week later, is a major threat to the first-mover Netflix thanks to Disney’s expanded archive, sequel and merchandising rights that came with takeovers of Pixar (2006), Marvel Entertainment (2009), Lucasfilm (2012) and 21st Century Fox (2019).

Each of these four companies was controlled by an idiosyncratic visionary who cared about more than the price. Steve Jobs started out with many more “cons” than “pros” about selling Pixar to Disney, but thought “a few solid pros are more powerful than dozens of cons.” Before he died, five years after the sale, Jobs thought they had “saved two companies.” Disney was re-energised and Pixar had flourished in ways it never would have without the older, larger studio.

Jobs joined the Disney board, and Marvel’s Ike Perlmutter said a call from the Apple co-founder was crucial in persuading him to do the deal with Iger and Disney: “He said you were true to your word.” Perlmutter “hated Hollywood and didn’t care about the films themselves,” says Iger, but he did love controlling Marvel’s wildly successful studio.

George Lucas was always going to struggle to let go of the Star Wars franchise he founded, and was disappointed with the first Disney-produced sequel. Iger had been immovable on this aspect of the deal. Where Pixar’s creative principals were brought inside and put in charge of Disney Animation, Lucas would have to surrender creative control of “perhaps the greatest mythology of our time.”

Murdoch had spent his life building an empire that many imagined would be passed on to his children. He realised even 21st Century Fox didn’t have the scale to compete with the emerging giants of digital, online video. He liked the strength of Disney’s stock price, and he thought it would get the necessary regulatory approvals faster and do a better job of merging the businesses. (He was apparently keen, as well, to find out if Democrat-supporting Iger would be running for president in 2020!)

One of the things Iger brought to these acquisitions was his own early experience with taken-over media companies. Employees at ABC, one of the Big Three US TV networks, were stunned to be acquired by the much smaller Cap Cities in the 1980s. The “homespun” Tom Murphy and Dan Burke turned out to be “no-nonsense businesspeople who focused on the work… had zero interest in the glitz… and sensed which way the winds were blowing” in the media business.

The sale of ABC/Cap Cities to Disney a decade later came as another huge shock to many, though not to Iger. Disney made clear it wanted him to stay and run its new media division once Murphy and Burke were gone. Paradoxically, Iger found the aggressive Hollywood studio “centralised and process-driven,” in contrast to the decentralised, accountable culture that Murphy and Burke fostered. As chief executive of Disney, Iger would later dismantle the central strategy team he thought was sucking too much responsibility from individual business units.

Eventually serving as second-in-command at Disney for several years before chief executive Michael Eisner was effectively forced out in 2005, Iger needed a “narrative” to convince the board he was the right person to lead the company out of the crisis. With a political spinner, he tested out the priorities he was thinking of pitching. Reaching the fifth or sixth one, he received a blunt response: “You only get three.”

Iger settled on high-quality content, technology and global scale. He has been selling those messages ever since. All the Big Four acquisitions offered content; Pixar especially had technological expertise; Fox brought scale. The highlight of it all, so far, is Shanghai Disney Resort — “authentically Disney and distinctively Chinese” — opened in 2016, which Iger has been involved in since selecting the site in 1998.

The neat-sounding ascent to the corporate stratosphere has had disruptions. Twice, it called for moves from New York to Los Angeles that didn’t suit Iger’s marriages to women with their own big East Coast media jobs. The first, to an executive producer of news at WNBC who never liked LA, broke down. She moved back to New York with their two children and Iger spent a “terrible year” visiting. The next promotion took him back to New York, where his engagement to Good Morning America’s weekend anchor, Willow Bay, happened around the time of the Disney/Cap Cities takeover. She was “unequivocally supportive” of Iger’s move back to Los Angeles to run Disney’s media division and “trusted that she and I could figure out whatever we needed to figure out.” They are still together: Bay later became a senior editor for Huffington Post and was appointed dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2017.

As the negotiations between Disney and News/Fox were beginning, another change “more profound than the mega-technology changes” was under way. This “transformative social change” came from serious allegations about sexually predatory behaviour, equal opportunity and equal pay for women in Hollywood and elsewhere. According to Iger, it “became the catalyst for long overdue action.” For Disney, this included one of Pixar’s legendary principals, John Lasseter, who took a six-month sabbatical in 2017 and did not have his contract renewed at the end of 2018. It was Iger’s “most difficult and complex personnel decision.” Disney’s board, chaired by Iger, now comprises five men and four women. Its fourteen-member executive leadership team has three women — the chief financial officer and the heads of communications and human resources.

Lessons are what the subtitle of the book promises, and Disney’s CEO offers many. Some are familiar — “Innovate or die” — and some are specific to the enterprise — “When animation soars, Disney roars.”

Most are a good deal less formulaic. Long shots aren’t usually as long as they seem. Value ability more than experience. Ask the questions you need to ask and do the work to learn what you need as quickly as you can. From Dan Burke: Avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil (small projects that don’t give much back). Communicate to your team that you share their stress, not that you need them to deliver to alleviate yours.

After fourteen years at the top of Disney, Bob Iger has some lessons for himself. “It’s not good to have power for too long. You don’t realise the way your voice seems to boom louder than every other voice in the room.” His predecessor Michael Eisner was untouchable for a decade after rescuing Disney from its post-Walt funk, but stumbled in the second decade of his long reign.

Iger wanted to walk away in June 2019, forty-five years after starting at ABC. The Murdoch deal required him to stay on. He has understood for a while that his teams are planning a future that will “happen without me” and is wary of “a kind of wistfulness creeping in.”

He has been a surprising superhero, a one-company adventurer, a guy from sports who rose to the top of a dream factory, a New York suit whose movies dominate the US box office, a merger king whose safe hands clasped the messy media legacies of ageing mavericks.

There is always a sequel. Disney+ is a massive investment in a highly competitive market. The rivals are giants from other sectors — Amazon Prime, Google/YouTube, Apple, AT&T — not just fellow imagineers in the Hollywood hills. Disney is a company that attracts a special level of scrutiny. Bob Iger needs the story to continue. •

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It’s a huge tale of corruption and betrayal, of power and mob influence penetrating American politics over decades and generations. Scorsese and De Niro explored the same theme brilliantly in Goodfellas (1990) and again in Casino (1995). Who can forget Joe Pesci’s hysterical, gyrating dance in Casino, spinning like a top at the news of Jack Ruby’s assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald?

The mob wanted Cuba and its luxurious casinos back. Certain interests felt really pissed off when the Bay of Pigs invasion was bungled, and more so when Bobby Kennedy, chief counsel for a Senate investigating committee, went after the Teamsters instead. The disappearance and presumed assassination of Jimmy Hoffa in 1975 is another part of the puzzle of gangster capitalism in action.

How to bring together these actors in their seventies for one last great outing together? De Niro was the driver. He wanted the story told because it comes from the communities he and Scorsese grew up in. He sees the tale as relevant now: he has made no secret of his view that Donald Trump is both corrupt and incompetent. He doesn’t use words like gangster capitalism. Others might.

The actor came across “I Heard You Paint Houses”, Charles Brandt’s book based on end-of-life interviews with Mafia hitman Sheeran, soon after it was published in 2004. Brandt’s version is contested, particularly by the stepson of Chuckie O’Brien, once an aide to Hoffa, who is shown in the film as the driver who took the Teamsters’ boss to his last appointment. Jack Goldsmith, a retired law professor, has long pursued a quest to clear his late stepfather’s name. He claims that Sheeran gave different accounts of Hoffa’s assassination to various investigators and, when he talked to Brandt during his last years, was in pursuit of a book deal.

The Irishman covers Sheeran’s career as a hitman and Teamster official, the deaths for which he claimed responsibility, and the conflicts in the Teamsters union when Hoffa, finally out of prison, wanted to take back control. The prize was the Teamsters Pension Fund, skimmed by Hoffa and his associates and used by the mob to launder money.

De Niro read the original story and persuaded Scorsese, who swung behind it as producer; Steven Zaillian (The Gangs of New York) wrote a script. With Hoffa’s body never found, the case is still open. Legal wrangles slowed things down, the actors kept ageing, and the script was put aside.

Then the director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto, a youngster in his fifties who had worked twice before with Scorsese, suggested that the digital animation techniques being developed at Industrial Light and Magic were progressing sufficiently to “de-age” the three leads — De Niro as Sheeran, Pacino as Hoffa, and Pesci as Sheeran’s first mob patron, Russell Bufalino — and enable them to play the key roles right down the decades.

Scorsese’s reference to “the eyes” is actually shorthand. The eye itself has no expression: in humans, its expression comes from the interaction of forty-three facial muscles surrounding it. That’s a lot of interaction for digital animators to conjure with. Finally in production in 2017, the film spent another year in post-production.

So how does it look on the screen?

Digital animators talk about something called the Valley, or “the uncanny valley.” That’s where digital animation gets so close to the original that it becomes disconcerting or ghostly or downright creepy. Tom Hanks in the children’s film The Polar Express was a good example.

To my eye, The Irishman avoids that effect. Just. It enables some great performances, and the closer we get to De Niro, Pacino and Pesci’s real ages, the more compelling they become. The last acts of betrayal are as Shakespearean as anything De Niro and Scorsese have done together. With all the other masters of craft working on the film — The Band’s Robbie Robertson as music director, providing Scorsese’s trademark rock music flourishes; Thelma Schoonmaker doing the editing — the film clips along.

But the youthful and middle-aged flashbacks are disconcerting. It is as though different portrait painters were all assigned to capture the same person across multiple sittings. Put this in a structure of insistent flashbacks and the kind of lighting and angles used to evoke memories, and there are times when I wasn’t sure whom I was watching.

An older actor moves differently from a young one. Prieto has described having added boxy clothing at times to conceal that fact. The result is sometimes disconcerting in a different way. While we’re not in an uncanny valley, the film sometimes appears to be switching between multiples performing in parallel universes. Have these younger versions acquired powers to replicate themselves, slightly off kilter, in different pasts?

In the end I concluded these flashbacks were not so much Scorsese as Scuola di Scorsese.

I hung in because it’s a fascinating story. Time and again, the actors bring it back. Hoffa’s tantrums — nobody does a tantrum like Al Pacino. Florid barely covers it. De Niro’s Sheeran, his face a mask of practised indifference, confronted by a daughter’s rejection, finally fraying as he attempts to reconcile the ageing Hoffa and his supplanters. The wiliness of Pesci’s Bufalino. The near-wordless accusations of Sheeran’s daughter Peggy, beautifully played by Anna Paquin.

The Irishman is a film to be seen, and seen in a cinema. It is one of a batch of auteur films commissioned or acquired by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney and is other streaming services (as well as Stan, which is now popping up in cinemas). They are there at the moment because we are in the Oscar nominations period, and films must have cinema releases to be nominated. Noteworthy among them are The King, David Michôd and Joel Edgerton’s take on Hal and Falstaff, reviewed here last week by my colleague Brian McFarlane; and Judy and Punch, Mirrah Foulkes’s comically bizarre reworking of Punch and Judy for the age of #MeToo. Commissioned by Vice, with Mia Wasikowska in the lead and Damon Herriman playing Mr Punch, Judy and Punch is an out-of-time fable made in Australia, and releases on 21 November.

Nonfiction can make for very good drama. In cinemas we have The Report, a political drama with good guys and bad guys, written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, who produced An Inconvenient Truth and went on to write a number of the Bourne thrillers. This one is chilling: it’s based on Daniel J. Jones’s book-length account of five years working for the US Senate committee investigation of the CIA’s program of torturing political prisoners after 9/11.

Adam Driver plays Jones, and Annette Bening plays the powerful, politically adroit Democrat committee chair Dianne Feinstein. The film’s real subject matter is the tussle between the politicians and the agencies, particularly the CIA, which attempted to derail, defuse and redact what the committee uncovered. Its report named and detailed the experiences of many more torture victims than journalists had identified, uncovering the fact that these torture sessions were not only more extensive than the “waterboarding” leaked to news media, and involved many more torture techniques, but also provided no useful information whatsoever.

The CIA’s suppression of these internal reports makes the real drama of the film. Ultimately, a 400-page summary was published in 2014, but only after Feinstein and one of the Republicans on the committee decided to read it into the Senate record just before the committee’s composition changed. Feinstein secured the support of just one Republican senator on the committee; a second, the late John McCain, abstained.

Mostly sober in tone, The Report is undeniably good drama, essentially because the events it dramatises — including the CIA’s hacking into the committee’s computers, a mini-Watergate of sorts — are so appalling. The early scenes of waterboarding are brief yet dramatically essential: a reminder of the necessity of maintaining the outrage. (I did find myself watching some of this through my fingers.) In the role written for Daniel Jones, there are no particular heroics, beyond persistence becoming obsession. Driver, immensely watchable, plays him straight.

Particularly intriguing is Annette Bening, now sixty-one, aged without technology or fuss to play Feinstein, now eighty-six. The long-serving senior senator from California, noted for her political skill and for playing her cards close to her chest, has been criticised more than once in the Washington intelligence wars. She has also drawn Republican ire for revealing, then retracting, pre–Edward Snowden, details of the National Security Agency’s surveilling of American citizens’ phone records. It took considerable political finesse to get the CIA’s torture activities documented, and out.

This, then, is The Report, not so much thrilling as chilling. It’s long — two hours’ worth — and it is thorough. It is a reminder of the worth of good, patient public service. In the age of redaction, it’s essential viewing. •

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When I mention Animal Kingdom, I’m essentially referring to the combination of director David Michôd and actor Joel Edgerton. In the new film Michôd is director and co-author of the screenplay, and Edgerton is the other co-author and plays a crucial on-screen role. The coincidence of their return becomes even more interesting when you recall the basic narrative of Animal Kingdom, in which a young man has to come to terms with warring criminal factions centred on his family. Very impressively taut it was, and it echoes through The King, though admittedly at a very different level of society.

When we turn to the influence of Shakespeare’s plays on Michôd’s new film, the inspiration is more obvious because the film is historically set — in the early fifteenth century to be exact. The three plays involved are Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, the last of which ends with the English victory against the French at the Battle of Agincourt. Among the names hovering in the film’s background is that of Laurence Olivier, who made a famously patriotic, even romanticised, version of Henry V in 1945, just when it was needed for morale-boosting. Part of that film’s response to contemporary circumstances was to do away with three English traitors and concentrate on the notion of all forces rallying to the defence of the realm against its cross-channel foes.

Forty-odd years later came Kenneth Branagh, whose first film as a director was an impressive Henry V that reflected a less celebratory approach but took on the mayhem of warfare with rigour. In this sense, the tone of Michôd’s new film has more in common with Branagh’s, as you might expect from the makers of Animal Kingdom. But perhaps the most resonant echo for some viewers will be Orson Welles’s sublime Chimes at Midnight (1965), which centres on Prince Hal and Falstaff, and like Michôd’s film draws on all three plays, though to very different ends, and with the two key figures somewhat redrawn from their Shakespearean forerunners.

What sort of run the new film can expect, in cinemas at any rate, probably depends on at least two factors. Some viewers will be inclined to wait for it to screen on Netflix (one of its key investors), but I strongly recommend trying to catch its widescreen action at a cinema. And though this is a film that engages in a good deal of action, it really does rely for maximum enjoyment on its roots in Shakespeare’s Henriad. Not that it is in the least slavish, and nor should it be, but without some knowledge of this heritage a viewer could find some of the conflicts of characters and medieval politics a bit demanding.

The King establishes this turbulent period with an opening long shot of a battlefield strewn with bodies, mostly dead, some still struggling, among which living soldiers walk. We see Hotspur (Tom Glynn-Carney) brutally stab a prone figure who is trying to survive. The scene is almost Breughel-like in its depiction of a vast but detailed setting, though without the painter’s clearly humane concern. With the rebel Scots having taken a battering, the notion of a divided kingdom is established.

There is trouble in Wales, too, so that King Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn) is by no means secure, a fact underscored by Hotspur’s daring rant to the monarch. Hotspur’s father apologises to the king, who has threatened to “hang you by your fucking neck,” but when Hotspur leaves, Henry laments, “If only he were my son.” Having built to this remark, the scene readies us for the introduction of the king’s actual son, Prince Hal (Timothée Chalamet), who is currently at odds with his father and lounging around in an Eastcheap tavern. The film will be primarily concerned with Hal’s reluctant emergence as his father’s successor and, ultimately, as some sort of warrior king.

One aspect of the film’s daring is to cast the boyish, very slender Chalamet as Hal, and it must be said that this decision pays off brilliantly. Instead of the usual indolent Hal, most often seen leading a far-from-royal life in company of his father figure/mentor Falstaff in the riotous circumstances of Eastcheap, Chalamet’s very stillness commands attention for what he makes of a boy trying to grow into an adult role. The adult role will be that of Henry V, and in this version he will not turn his back on Falstaff (Edgerton), who will instead accompany him into war against France.

Shakespearean purists may object to this diversion from the Henriad’s depiction of the Hal–Falstaff relationship, but Michôd doesn’t aim at a “faithful” adaptation of the plays any more than Shakespeare was ever tenaciously devoted to historical authenticity. What he does is offer an insight into the values his Hal may have inherited not from his royal father but from his earthy but not stupid drinking companion. Just as Chalamet offers an unusual but compelling Hal, Edgerton makes wholly believable a Falstaff who can shake off his preference for riotous living when the occasion demands.

Hal’s first major exploit proves to be a fight (“duel” sounds too elegant) with the rebellious Hotspur, superbly shot by Michôd’s Australian cinematographer, Adam Arkapaw. Hal’s brother Thomas accuses him of having “stolen the prize scalp” of the field. Although Hal may not want the crown, the king’s death leaves him with no choice: he has inherited his father’s designs on France, and the film is headed for Agincourt. Don’t expect a show of medieval battlefield chivalry, though. The warfare is brilliantly staged but, while not denying some of its brutalities, these scenes also highlight Hal’s responses to its ravages. He will not endanger his men in the besieging of a castle and insists, “I need men about me I can trust,” to which Falstaff replies with bitter insight, “A king has no friends, he only has followers.”

In other words, The King persists in paying attention to this central relationship, as well as providing a visually spectacular experience. Undoubtedly it has some of the qualities of the more straightforward period action piece, but this is underlain and strengthened by a reflective approach to its protagonists, and by incisive performances in lesser roles by the likes of Mendelsohn, whose king could have commanded more narrative space, Lily-Rose Depp as Hal’s sister Catherine in a touching encounter with her brother, and Tara Fitzgerald (grand-niece of the great Geraldine) in a cameo as the hostess of the Eastcheap pub.

It is a film that keeps surprising by offering more than its genre affiliations might suggest — and confirms Michôd as a major director. •

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No author was ever more preoccupied with families than Ivy Compton-Burnett. In her brilliant talkfests, family ties could never be relied on as a bulwark against mounting tensions, or worse. In fact, she once claimed that more harm is done in the name of the family than of any other institution. Well, this may be true; most of what she said was; but while The Farewell certainly has some tense moments, what emerges is essentially a benign concern for a family’s matriarch.

The film opens with a telephone call from New York–based Chinese student Billi (Awkwafina) to her grandmother in Changchun, Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao). The two of them seem to have a very warm relationship undiminished by intercontinental separation. But what sets the narrative in motion is the news received by Billi’s parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Lu Jian (Diana Lin), that Nai Nai — who is Haiyan’s mother — has been diagnosed with cancer and may have only a very short time to live.

To protect Nai Nai from this knowledge in what they believe to be her final month, the family plans a hasty wedding between her only grandson, Hao Hao (Han Chen), and his recently acquired girlfriend, Aiko (Aoi Mizuhara). Billi’s parents, fearful that Billi won’t be able to control her distress, try to persuade her not to accompany them to China for the wedding. But Billi, who is very Americanised, believes that she is perfectly able to tell the odd, more or less harmless, lie, and follows her parents to Changchun. In one of the film’s many engaging moments of gentle humour, a surprised Nai Nai asks her, “Did you fly?” “No, I swam,” comes her reply.

Soon the family gathers for a meal. A gathering like this — as in, say, the very different Palm Beach — seems to announce a unity, a harmony, that we feel is likely to become strained. Nai Nai, still unaware of how serious things are, blames her sister for telling the distant family members that she’s been unwell; the young soon-to-be-weds seem constrained by the circumstance that is pushing them towards marriage; Billi’s mother doesn’t quite join in the conviviality that Nai Nai exudes. But there’s nothing like the vicious outbreak that happens in Palm Beach.

What does emerge is the easy, affectionate rapport between Billi and her grandmother, including a scene in which the latter trains Billi in what I suspect are called “wellness” exercises, to be echoed in the film’s last moments. Director Wang has secured superb performances from Zhao Shuzhen and Awkwafina in roles that become central to the film’s texture and tone. This is not a film with a conventional cause-and-effect narrative structure, but one that depends on closely observing what goes on among members of a family. (I am reminded of the 2005 US drama of family tensions, Phil Morrison’s Junebug, a film of similar tonal astuteness.)

The Farewell may seem to be animated by the approaching wedding but its real purpose lies in observing how people react in shifting situations. Anna Franquesa Solano’s superb cinematography fluently locates their reactions, her framing of Billi’s affectless gaze at the daunting apartment blocks she passes, and fetches up at, on arrival at Changchun very effectively showing how much more at home she felt in the opening scenes in New York streets.

While the film is unerring in its revelation of its characters’ interactions, its texture is also enriched by an ongoing concern with ideas, though it avoids becoming merely didactic. The “lie” that sets the whole thing in motion — the wedding — becomes more than a mere plot device. Echoing the words of the film’s subtitle, “based on an actual lie,” contrasts are made between Nai Nai’s sister’s effortless, well-intended deceit, Billi’s desire to tell the truth, and the claim of one doctor that “it’s a good lie.” Through such reactions, the film canvasses the complex morality that this kind of untruth may involve, and its consequences

The Farewell is one of the richest films of the year, engaging our attention through its characters and how they react to each other and to the “lie” at its heart, and by touching on the accepted mores of East and West as understood by those who live on opposite sides of the Pacific. You don’t have to agree with what one character suggests, that the West is only interested in individuals while the East views family as part of a whole scene: it is simply an aspect of the thinking and lived experience of Wang’s people.

The no doubt eagerly anticipated film version of Downton Abbey offers another kind of family whose members are sometimes at odds with each other. Though I’m not a dedicated fan of the series, I should in fairness add that the film passes the time (two hours) easily enough, perhaps above all because of its great cast. Most of them are repeating the roles they played in the series, though a few are entering the sacred world of Downton Abbey for the first time.

When a royal visit is announced, the family is of course excited, as are the downstairs staff. But the servants find they are to be replaced by the royal entourage under the smugly superior Wilson (David Haig), and their services will not be required during the visit. This leads to some farcically contrived plotting, and indeed the film as a whole is overcrowded with incident and characters.

In the end, it’s really all about hierarchy, above and below stairs. Wilson makes it plain that his own underlings know their place, while upstairs there is never any question that Maggie Smith’s Countess of Grantham sits and sniffs at the top of the ladder, even more elevated than her lord-of-the-manor son, the earl (Hugh Bonneville), and certainly above his American wife (Elizabeth McGovern) and the Baroness Isobel (Penelope Wilton), while the earl’s Irish son-in-law is clearly the lowest-placed at the table.

If you want merely to pass two hours more or less painlessly, Downton Abbey may fit the bill. But an hour and a half spent in the company of The Farewell is time spent with what may just be a great film. •

The post The lie that binds appeared first on Inside Story.

Chakra (Sarm Heng) is a fourteen-year-old Cambodian boy from a large family who works in his uncle’s rice fields. He would like to earn money of his own. He would like to court a girl he knows from the village. He would like to know the world beyond this round of endless labour. Maybe work in a factory in the city? He’s heard of others who have done this. From the rice paddy he watches the buses speed by, and one day he is on one of them.

The way Chakra is taken across the border, tricked and trafficked, is predictable enough to be ominous, and he isn’t stupid. But after that first hopeful yet anxious bus ride, his choices diminish at every stage of the journey. He is among other slaves and there is no escape because there is nowhere to escape to.

Writer–director Rodd Rathjen is a VCA graduate whose 2013 short film, Tau Seru, made it to Cannes. It too told of a boy — this one herding in the Himalayas — who watches buses go by and wants to find his way to a wider world.

Along a journey that becomes ever more dislocating, Chakra bonds with an older man, Kea (Mony Ros), a fellow Khmer who has set out to earn money for his family. They catch only the barest glimpses of Bangkok, through their bus window. Not till they are at sea do they learn that this sea, this old fishing boat, is their destination.

Rathjen has shot the film with actors speaking both Khmer and Thai. Few of them were professionals. Sarm Heng was found through the Green Gecko project, which helps educate former street kids in Siem Reap in Cambodia. As Chakra, he has an attentive stillness; he will need to know every detail of the boat and the habits of its captain in order to survive.

Thai actor Thanawut Kasro, who has played a number of genre roles in Thai films, takes to his role as the captain, Rom Ran, with such ferocity I was startled. But the menace plays well against the silent wariness of Heng’s Chakra and the other shocked workers. Rom Ran’s task is to keep bringing in the cargo. He and his two henchmen must keep these frightened workers, many of whom don’t speak Thai, working as many as twenty hours a day before they crawl below for a few hours’ sleep. They haul load after load of small fish and scrapings — so-called trash fish — from the sea bottom, to be used in the pet food sold to us here.

The brutality is shown matter-of-factly, without relish. Rathjen’s gift is simplicity: there is such clarity in his storytelling that I was with Chakra almost every step of the way. There are also, thankfully, quiet passages, green, soft and soothing, when the boy can slip over the side into the water.

When Australian feature filmmakers look to Asia or the Pacific for their stories, they have often wanted films with “bankable” stars — American, Australian or British, and usually white.

This has made for a strange circle of imagining about Australians in Asia, and particularly in India. In 1999, in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, Kate Winslet went to India in search of enlightenment. In 2010, in Claire McCarthy’s The Waiting City, Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton went to India in search of a baby. By 2016, in Garth Davis’s Lion, an Indian man brought to Australia as an adopted child is returning to India in search of his mother.

At least Lion had Dev Patel in the lead, with Nicole Kidman as his Australian mother, in a wig seemingly from the wardrobe of Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell. Yes, Holy Smoke was a satire. And in The Waiting City the couple found an Indian orphanage and decided they wouldn’t adopt. But look, can’t we move on from this Westerner-encounters-the-exotic-East stuff?

Alongside these big films, more modest Australian features have tried to tell Asia-Pacific stories from within Asian or Pacific cultures. Benjamin Gilmour’s Son of a Lion (2007), for example, was set in one of the Pashtun administrative provinces of Pakistan, where guns are reverse-engineered by villagers to arm the warlords. Martin Butler and Bentley Dean’s Oscar-nominated Tanna (2015) laid a Romeo and Juliet story over the top of conflict between two tribal groups, one resisting the changes brought by encroaching Western culture, another embracing them.

Buoyancy takes another leap, laying bare the workings of a particular form of gangster capitalism serving a global industry. Rathjen doesn’t lecture, he simply shows a system in operation, and what one smart, mostly silent boy learns in order to survive.

Rathjen began researching this film in 2015 after journalists with Associated Press exposed the plight of slaves held in an Indonesian island village called Benjina. There were hundreds of them, some in cages and some who had escaped into the jungle. It had been many years since they had been home. Some were from Cambodia; others were Rohingya from Myanmar or rural Thailand. Rathjen was able to interview some of them, and their stories helped shape this film.

Benjina was not the only “slave” village so very close to Australia. Laws, regulations, inspections and tighter policing alone will not abolish this appalling trade. Australia last year passed modern slavery legislation that requires businesses with an annual turnover of a million dollars or more to specify their supply chains. But in international waters, beyond the scope of officialdom, a process called “transhipment” — transferring the catch into “clean” vessels to take to port while the slave ships stay out at sea — can help the slavers avoid scrutiny. Or else slaves may be dumped on remote atolls when word spreads about a crackdown. Anti-slavery campaigners are adamant that consumer action is needed too. They want us to ask persistent questions about the pet food and fish product companies we use.

What makes his film so oddly appealing are the memorable images, the clarity of story and the way all the elements — performance, image and sound — work together. The cinematographer is the inventive Michael Latham (Casting JonBenet, Island of the Hungry Ghosts), whose work is striking. Sound, too, is used very effectively, at times amplifying the claustrophobia the exhausted men feel as they crawl below to try to snatch some sleep. Sam Petty (Sherpa, Animal Kingdom, The Boys) is the seasoned sound designer, and I should declare an interest here: I’m his mum.

Buoyancy is Australia’s nominee for best international feature film at the 2020 Academy Awards.

The Colombian filmmakers Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego had a hit in 2015 with Embrace of the Serpent, a film examining the impact of two explorers, in different times, on the indigenous people of the Colombian Amazon. It was gorgeously shot in black and white and the tragedies it found upriver were evoked with forceful simplicity.

Birds of Passage (screening from 3 October) is a more ambitious film on a comparable theme. It tells the story of how the drug trade enriched, corrupted and eventually destroyed a clan from one indigenous group: the Wayuu, who live between the desert, the jungle and the sea on the Guajira Peninsula in Northern Columbia. In five chapters across the sixties and seventies, the film is shaped as an epic. It is also a fascinating portrait of a matriarchal society.

Carmiña Martínez plays Úrsula, the matriarch of one of the Wayuu clans, and Natalia Reyes her daughter Zaida. José Acosta is Rapayet, who comes seeking Zaida’s hand. When Úrsula, hoping to deter him, sets a bride price apparently beyond his reach, he and his lowland friend Moisés seize an opportunity to raise it, selling marijuana to American peace corps volunteers. They soon find themselves in a very profitable business. But Moisés, from the lowlands, is considered dangerous by the Wayuu, who call him Alijuna, the one who does damage.

The film draws heavily on Wayuu rituals: ways of upholding honour and of organising births, deaths and debts; ways of managing conflict between families. As Rathjen did with Buoyancy, Guerra and Gallego have consulted indigenous people and cast some in supporting roles or as extras. The lead actors are professional, though some have connections to the culture, and they speak both Wayuu and Spanish. The performances — especially those of Acosta and José Vicente Cote as Peregrino — are very strong.

With all this, I found it hard to sustain belief. One reason may be visual: Guerra and Gallego have built two of the three main sets — a traditional Wayuu dwelling and compound, and a dazzling white hacienda — standing alone on hard-baked desert soil. The abstraction is intentional, and maybe this decision also solved problems of location and permission. It’s certainly arresting.

But from the opening dance onwards, the theatricality of actors performing various Wayuu rituals and greetings in these settings was unsettling. At times the tragedy gripped — it’s an extremely powerful story — but by the time a pair of white bird legs began appearing in dreams, I stopped believing. It’s an image I’ve seen before, in Asian cinema, signifying ghosts.

This really did feel like cultural tourism, or ersatz anthropology with a dash of magic realism thrown in. Beware those all-white dream sequences, I say. They might have worked for Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but now, like galloping white horses and giant bird legs, they signal danger: magic realism ahead. •

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Were there many more resonant names in the late 1970s and early 80s than Bryan Brown and Sam Neill, both of whom went on to international careers? Think of Brown in the prison drama Stir (1980) or Neill nearly talking Judy Davis into marriage in My Brilliant Career (1979). And it’s surely no coincidence that Brown was in a modest 1980 feature also called Palm Beach. The two actors have appeared together in a number of films, most recently in the notable Australian western Sweet Country (2017), and on television in Old School (2014). The other male star of this new Palm Beach is the African-born British actor Richard E. Grant, most recently at his charismatic best in Can You Ever Forgive Me?

I’ve concentrated on the chaps first because they are responsible for the serious tensions that underpin the film’s reunion narrative. But the women create equally vivid impressions. Among these, Heather Mitchell (Proof, 1991), Jacqueline McKenzie (Romper Stomper, 1992), and Greta Scacchi (Country Life, 1994) all made their presences felt in films — Australian or not — in the 1980s and 90s, and well into the new century. In Palm Beach, they play the partners of, respectively, Grant, Neill and Brown.

Get this lot together, along with some of their offspring, and the scene is set for one hundred minutes of mostly enjoyable displays of affection, resentment, guilt and friction of many kinds. Ward and Joanna Murray-Smith’s screenplay weaves these lives together with real acuity — and Ward as director knows she’s got a stellar cast on her hands and she’s going to ensure they all have their share of the limelight.

The occasion for the reunion is Frank’s seventieth birthday. The celebration, set in his plushy Palm Beach pad, brings together the members of Swagger, a band he once managed featuring Neill’s Leo and Grant’s Billy, along with their partners and children of various parentage. Frank has done well financially but is at a loose end after the sale of his Swagger Gear sportswear company; Leo has been modestly successful as a journalist in New Zealand; Billy has been broke and has caused resentment by allowing the sale of their once-hit song, “Fearless,” to a firm called Pottie Pride.

The sources of potential conflict start to emerge with Frank and Leo’s reaction to the nappy ads. But these two will have to deal with a more crucial conflict arising from the question of the paternity of Frank’s son Dan (Charlie Vickers). Charlotte (Scacchi) urges Leo to maintain the secrecy of decades, but Leo has had a dangerous medical issue and wants the matter sorted. This conflict is sharply enacted, but it is perhaps somewhat too patly resolved in a scene that recalled for me that moment in Gone with the Wind when it transpires that Rhett Butler has been hiding on a sofa while Scarlett and Ashley are having a significant exchange.

Billy’s actor wife Eva (a very vivid Mitchell) is now sixty but troubled about whether her career will be over if she takes on a role as a grandmother. The film finds a smart way out of this conflict, and out of the ensuing near-death of her marriage to Billy. And Holly (Claire van der Boom), Frank’s daughter by another relationship, fears hers with her farmer boyfriend Doug (Aaron Jeffery), who prefers beer to Veuve Clicquot, won’t survive when she tells him, “I can’t have kids.”

Oh, there’s a lot going on in — and at — Palm Beach, but Ward manages to avoid a feeling of overcrowding. Her direction ensures that distinctions are always made clear, that some expectations are met and others not. Along the way, and crucially abetted by Bonnie Elliott’s luminous and evocative cinematography, images persistently mean. Most obviously important is the contrast between the serene waters of the Palm Beach setting and the relatively cramped interiors that are usually the scenes of conflict.

Individual moments, such as when the whole cast sits around the lavishly set dinner table, seem to announce a spirit of harmonious warmth that we already suspect, on the basis of small touches of evidence, won’t last. Charlotte climbs into a hammock with Leo, with whom she had an affair twenty years back, but promptly climbs out when it is clear they are at odds about the secret they have once promised to keep. And there are witty verbal sallies, such as when English-based Billy complains of being bitten by mosquitoes as they all sit outside: “Why do mozzies only love me?” “Someone has to,” is Frank’s kindly reply. Or when Dan, showing minimal zeal for higher education, claims he’s “working on a skating app.”

The film is full of sharp little touches like this, and continues to gather steam as it makes its way to what I suppose is the metaphoric equivalent of a group hug: in this case, a long shot of family and friends dancing happily by the pool. As a curmudgeon who greatly dislikes a feel-good ending, I must admit that the film convinces me that it has earnt this final image, through the astuteness of the writing and direction. The spectacle of so attractive a cast persuades me that these people may have conflicts ahead, but for the moment, and in the interests of friendship, they are prepared to hang together on this celebratory occasion. Not so different, maybe, from the way friendships work in real life too? •

The post Another Palm Beach appeared first on Inside Story.

Are we so transfixed by the murderous violence that begins the film that we entirely miss the poetry? I can’t find any review that notices it. Indeed, David Edelstein in the Vulture pronounces that “metaphor is absent from The Nightingale, unless you think Clare’s singing fits the bill.” Well, it does, actually. The song she sings — set to “The Bold Grenadier,” sometimes known as “The Nightingale” — has descended from one of the oldest myths of western Europe: the tale of Philomela.

As told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Philomela is raped and imprisoned by her brother-in-law, King Tereus, who cuts out her tongue so she may not speak of his crimes. She gets word to her sister, Procne, and together they take a terrible revenge. Then she — or they — turn into birds and fly away.

From that point on, the nightingale became a symbol of the revenge taken by an abused, forsaken and silenced woman. Musicians, artists and poets alike — from Wordsworth and Coleridge to T.S. Eliot and, yes, Margaret Atwood, the current high priestess of tales of gendered violence — have drawn on the story. In directing our attention to the fact that many Aboriginal creation stories are also about metamorphoses, Kent doesn’t seek to appropriate them. Indeed, though they are not explored here, there are many other tales of sisters who change form and fly away.

In putting the dynamics of rape and control up front, Kent does take risks. When Clare sings her song, in a borrowed dress, for a banquet in a rough mess hall in colonial Van Diemen’s Land, she is there at the behest of Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) to entertain his commanding officer. She does his bidding because she wants to be free. Her Irish convict husband, Aidan (Michael Sheasby), has served his time and is due his ticket of leave. When she dares ask Hawkins to sign the papers he takes it as insolence. His response is ugly, and what’s on screen neither glosses it nor eroticises it.

A second, much more brutal and punitive rape occurs after Aidan confronts Hawkins about his papers. There’s a murderous brawl, and a child is killed. Hawkins is eligible for promotion but cannot control his men, and the melee brings a reprimand from the visiting major. When a letter arrives notifying Hawkins that his promotion is refused, his fury is unleashed. He will ride across the island, through the war zone, to plead his case.

It’s a strong opening, to be felt more than feared. Aisling Franciosi, giving chase, alternately pursued by and pursuing Hawkins’s party, is magnificent in her grief and furious rage. The film becomes formidable, and problematic.

Kent is trying to do a lot here. She has made it clear, in interrogating the roots and dynamics of violence, that she is also trying to tell a tale of change. How does the anger, the desire for revenge, the thirst for violence give way to something different? It is the question of our times, because the violent abuse of women and children, usually by those known to them, is rising. That much is clear from current research, analysed in Jess Hill’s groundbreaking See What You Made Me Do.

Noticing parallels between the experience of a raped, colonised white woman and a black man whose people are being systematically murdered and dispossessed of their lands, Kent dares to imagine a kind of détente. Both hate the English. Both have lost their families, have been taken from their land, and must speak others’ languages. (Clare’s original language is Gaelic; Billy’s is Palawa Kani, a language once recorded in Tasmania and resurrected for this film.)

In imagining this relationship Kent runs a big risk. She skirts dangerously close to evoking the “faithful Jacky Jacky” myth, the old colonial fantasy of the Aboriginal tracker who guides a white hero across the frontier. But she is not showing us a friendship; rather, she is imagining an alliance, a temporary one, in an epic journey.

The nightmares Clare has along the way are among the film’s most striking images: she is a lactating woman, maddened and mourning. The claustrophobia of the closely timbered Tasmanian wilderness is beautifully evoked by the cinematography. But though her distrust of Billy gives way in the face of his reluctant compassion, I could not always believe in the relationship.

Despite the work the filmmakers have put into this — the research into language and costume, the advice from Aboriginal elders of Tasmania — the way Clare and Billy coexist in these scenes does not always ring true. Though I did enjoy the way Billy appears and disappears, quite suddenly.

In many traditional communities Aboriginal people don’t look directly at strangers; they wait, they are silent, they watch sideways and make their judgements. In the screen format, Academy ratio, that Kent and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk have chosen, there appears to be no space for this. The choreography seems oddly cramped, and it’s not helped by the dingy grey digital masking used in today’s multiplexes to screen films shot in this ratio.

But The Nightingale raises big questions. Reviewing the film in the Guardian, Larissa Behrendt argues that in comparing the colonial experiences of women and Aboriginal people, Kent has strayed into a minefield she is unable to navigate convincingly:

Every societal group that is co-opted in the colonial process suffers in a different way, but it is dangerous to link those marginalised within the colonial state to those being colonised. The sliding scale of suffering among those within the colony makes little difference to the Aboriginal group whose land they stole.

Aboriginal women, meanwhile, are left in the usual trope. We see only one. Lowanna (brought to life by the luminous Magnolia Maymuru) is raped and then murdered, with no characterisation. All we know is that she is even more disposable than both white women and black men.

All that is true. Our experiences are not the same, because our histories are not the same. But there are parallels, if you think of what Cromwell inflicted on the Irish, or the dreadful experiences of highland Scots during the “clearances.”

What Kent is suggesting, I believe, is that an empathetic imagination is needed to overcome racism. This is the leap Clare makes when she sees a black woman raped before her eyes. Kent is not suggesting that the experiences are equal. But if we are to undertake this work of reconciliation we will need to use our imaginations. If not now, when?

And finally: I wish this had been a television series. The space the story required, the additional characterisation needed, the at-times cramped choreography and curious flatness at the end — all this would have worked very differently given the space a streamed series allows. Was it ever considered, I wonder? •

The post Metamorphoses appeared first on Inside Story.

That was a forerunner of Maradona’s great goal against England in the World Cup quarter final in 1986. It’s a goal that had a veteran Argentine football commentator down on his knees weeping and thanking God, and it’s caught in all its glory in the new documentary Diego Maradona, along with the notorious “hand of God” goal that preceded it. Only years later did Maradona admit his hand touched that ball. At the time he attributed it to the almighty.

Football is tribal. Football is warfare by other means. And so, naturally enough, the crowd plays a big role in this documentary, now in cinemas, and another new football documentary, Ian Darling’s The Final Quarter, streaming on Ten, which documents the racist persecution of Adam Goodes. Commentators appear, often post hoc, and fan the flames of opinion, but the crowd is there. It is always there, whether it’s silent, murmuring, singing, shouting, hissing, booing. When does it become a mob?

Asif Kapadia’s film gives us Maradona as both angel and devil. The kid from the Buenos Aires slum who supported his family from the age of fifteen and married his childhood sweetheart. The kid who used his remarkable skill to give grief to the powerful. The kid who cheated, lied, used cocaine and women supplied by the Camorra, and denied paternity of a son born to a girlfriend in Naples just before he married his Argentine fiancée.

Kapadia is an excellent dramatist. As with his previous documentaries — about the Formula One driver Ayrton Senna and the British singer Amy Winehouse — he uses mostly found footage. His tragic trilogy, he calls the three films. This time he has a living subject, and there are a few passages of material gleaned from interviews.

By focusing on Maradona’s six years in Naples, Kapadia cranks up the drama. Maradona and Naples seemed made for each other. When it bought Maradona, in 1984, SSC Napoli was barely clinging to a slot in Serie A, which was dominated by Juventus and Milan from the wealthy north. In Italy, as in Argentina, class and race prejudice are intertwined. The north spurns the south. Northern fans regularly denigrate Napoli players and supporters as unwashed, cholera-carrying peasants.

The small, wily Maradona, who had copped a few racist slurs in Argentina and Barcelona — “the shitty little black kid from the slums” was one, from an admirer — was given a hero’s welcome in the San Paolo stadium in Naples by 75,000 fans. From the start, it is the ebullience, the surging emotions of the crowd, that lifts this film.

Kapadia’s focus is the divided persona of the tragic hero. The seesaw between Maradona the angel and Maradona the devil serves his narrative well. But there is a third actor in the drama.

The turning point was the 1990 World Cup match between Argentina and Italy, in which Maradona played for his home country. Italy was hosting the cup, and most games were played in Rome. Trainer Fernando Signorini points to FIFA’s stupidity in placing this match in Naples. Asked whom the local fans should support, Maradona prevaricated, then said that Neapolitans “weren’t really Italians.”

The reaction was sullen, but when Argentina beat Italy on a penalty shootout goal taken by Maradona, the mob turned. That night, someone heaved a brick through the window of his house.

For six years, Maradona had been a kind of luxury status symbol for a Camorra clan, the Giulianos, who controlled the Naples district of Forcella. Now he became an embarrassment. Without their protection the law moved in. He was wire-tapped, arrested, disgraced.

His bloated decline is well known. Kapadia shows us sad footage of him coaching children. He may still be admired and supported in Argentina, but he was never able to rebuild his career.

Like Kapadia’s much more substantial film, The Final Quarter is a compilation of existing footage. It drew repeat screenings and became a talking point in June at the Sydney Film Festival. (Stan Grant has drawn on the same footage and coupled it with an interview with Goodes and Grant’s own “Australian Dream” speech for a documentary that opened the Melbourne International Film Festival last week.)

Darling’s seventy-five-minute film doesn’t have quite the dramatic sweep of the Maradona movie, but the unbridled racism in some of the footage makes one want to rise from one’s seat and retch.

It is worth seeing, and thinking about, particularly for those who aren’t regular viewers of Sky News or The Footy Show. We may have read about the persecution of Goodes, but newspaper reports really don’t have the emotional force of footage of a gormless Eddie McGuire letting himself be bullied into endorsing an egregious set of remarks about Goodes and King Kong. Or puce-faced commentator Sam Newman proclaiming himself a proud white heterosexual male.

Goodes himself emerges from all this as a thoughtful, determined man who decided to use his Australian of the Year status in 2014 to speak out about Australia’s history of racial oppression: not in a spirit of recrimination but as a necessary step to reconciliation.

It is a psychological process many of us are finding painful. The predictable pile-on by the usual Sky commentariat followed his remarks. It’s all here in Darling’s documentary, compressed in a way that may indeed magnify the impact — though it may also downplay the slow seethe that poisons the mind and spirit.

The repeated collective booing from some AFL fans, which finally drove Goodes from the football field, is here and is ugly indeed. I would like to have seen some interrogation, by reporters on the spot, of individuals who joined this mass. Did they feel uplifted, exhilarated, justified? I guess many in the crowds at Nuremberg, or rallying for Mussolini must have gone home feeling uplifted — somehow vindicated joining their voices to others.

(If you think that comparison is far-fetched, consider this: one of the Fascists’ main propaganda posters at around the time American troops landed in Italy featured black American servicemen drawn as apes. Like the blood libel of the anti-Semites, the simian metaphor has a long history of attraction for white racists.)

On camera, Goodes comes out of this experience far better than Maradona did when he was forsaken by the crowd. Goodes is a thoughtful man and I am hopeful these scarring experiences have not broken him.

Now we all have work to do. But if there is a moment of grace in this film — though not quite a parallel to Maradona’s magic second goal in Mexico City — it is Goodes as he dances along one side of the field and mimes throwing a spear. It’s landed, Adam. It’s landed. •

The post Predictable pile-ons appeared first on Inside Story.

The idea of film as a source of historical information, different from what can be found in novels and other art forms, let alone what is usually thought of as historical research, has led to some provocative studies over the years, so it is probably no more than coincidence that two other such volumes have come my way in very recent times.

One of them has this to say on the subject: “film is unrivalled in allowing the historian to observe the minutiae of everyday life, what they wore at home and at work, what they ate and how their homes were furnished.” That is the view of Philip Gillett in his Film and the Historian: The British Experience. In examining an extraordinary range of British films over six decades, Gillett persuasively suggests that the “popular art” of film inevitably reveals much about the nation’s life both at the time of production and, in the case of the historical film, the time of setting, but that the former is the more pertinent — to the historian anyway. Kent Puckett’s War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945 explores the ways in which three archetypal British films of the early 1940s (Henry V, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Brief Encounter) may be viewed in the broader cultural context of the war years.

Jonathan Stubbs sets out not to make a close reading of the films he is concerned with — though more of that would sometimes have helped his case — but rather to consider how Hollywood dealt with aspects of English history. This recalls an earlier book, Mark Glancy’s When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film 1939–45 (1999), which considered in detail the wartime period that scarcely figures in Stubbs’s book, but also echoes Hollywood’s ongoing concern — thematic and commercial — with Britain.

Stubbs chooses to limit his concern to “England” on the grounds that Hollywood dealt less prolifically with Scotland or Wales. His aim is “to explain the prevalence and the apparent popularity of Hollywood films set in England’s past… and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America.” He proposes four perspectives from which to consider this phenomenon: practices of representation (mainly of the past rather than the English present); how the historical films reflect the contemporary conditions of their production; the relationship between popular culture and the broader historical context in which it is circulated; and the question of who gains from American film’s “projection of English oldness.” By “historical film,” he means one that in some way engages with the past, a definition that he realises embraces a wide range from detailed engagement with a specific period to the more informal manner in which some films simply reflect it.

What distinguishes Stubbs’s book from the other two I’ve mentioned is that he is at least as much concerned with film as an industry as with the individual films he has chosen to consider in his seven chapters. He is particularly interested in how the box office needs of American films (and the effect of Academy Awards on box-office potential) have influenced the films of his choice.

His first chapter, “The Uses of Literature: Adaptation and Englishness in the 1930s,” takes on screen versions of Dickens (David Copperfield, 1935), Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1935), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights, 1939) and Austen (Pride and Prejudice, 1940). With the imminence and then outbreak of war, films like the latter two took on a new significance: as well as making an appeal to middle-class sensibilities, they assumed importance for their deference to the literature of the nation that would become the US’s prime ally.

Other chapters include reflections on how, in the lead-up to the war, US filmmakers engaged with English imperialism in such films as The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Gunga Din (1939). Stubbs identifies “a growing closeness between representation of the British Empire and the American Wild West,” both seen as white incursions into territories where indigenous ways of life were under threat. With war looming, he points out, the sites at which English imperial adventures were examined tended to move to, say, Africa, whose “imperial locations proved to be less contentious than Indian settings.” Stanley and Livingstone (1939), for example, was released just before the outbreak of war and, while it returns to England’s imperial past and its heroes, it can also celebrate the American reporter who found the missing American missionary-doctor (“Dr Livingstone, I presume,” as the famous one-liner has it).

Other chapters focus on postwar medieval adventure films such as Ivanhoe (1952) and The Knights of the Round Table (1953), in both of which Robert Taylor swashbuckled his way heroically against threats to “merrie England.” Stubbs also looks at how Hollywood-funded “epics” such as Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) echoed changes in American attitudes in the cold war era. With the films now less overtly at one with the notion of British imperialism, the political context of these co-productions was apt to be more ambivalently realised.

The chapter on the Harry Potter franchise is almost entirely concerned with the business of getting the films made, and indeed my main issue with the book as a whole is that, thoroughly researched as it is, it becomes so preoccupied with the machinations involved in putting such productions together that it tends to lose sight of how “the English past” is being represented. This tendency, along with the films’ placement in their contemporary political climates, accounts for much more of the book’s length than interest in their artistic achievement.

This is essentially a book for film historians rather than buffs. The latter will want a bit more about the films as artefacts; the former will find some valuable resource material. All readers may feel that Stubbs’s concluding chapter attempts to reiterate the premises the book was based on, some of which seem to have been sidetracked along the way. •

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In a world so comprehensively dominated by Hollywood, theatrical releases of Australian films outside Australia have always been difficult, with the cost of creating publicity and awareness often exceeding the box office. (There are exceptions, of course, with Crocodile Dundee immediately coming to mind.) Now that online streaming services have reduced theatrical opportunities even further, most theatrical revenue is earned by superhero action movies aimed at the under twenty-fives. Aquaman, the improbable story of warriors who can breathe under water, has grossed over a billion dollars. But older audiences frequently prefer to stay home, pay their Netflix subscriptions and settle back for a new movie on their latest smart TVs.

So Ladies in Black is travelling the world via airlines and streaming services. But it has another life as well, doing its bit for Australian public relations at small festivals and special screenings hosted by our diplomatic corps. In fact, the film’s inclusive themes of immigration and multicultural understanding have made it a popular subject for diplomatic initiatives.

Ladies in Black was invited to be the closing night film at the Palm Springs Film Festival, a prestigious art-house event in the mid-century modern show-business resort close to Los Angeles. It also opened the Taormina Film Festival in Taormina, Sicily, where it played on a sultry July night on an enormous screen in the Greco-Roman amphitheatre above the town. The Italian audience had no trouble with Australian idiom of another era conveyed in subtitles, laughing along with the “reffo” and the Melbourne jokes and cheering the director when he came on stage as the end titles rolled.

The Australian embassy in Jakarta chose Ladies in Black as the feature presentation in its Festival Sinema Australia Indonesia, which screened at several Indonesian cities in March. A month later, the embassy in Washington hosted a screening at the Washington, DC International Film Festival in the presence of the ambassador, Joe Hockey, who kept a careful ambassadorial eye on ninety-nine-year-old Eileen Hammond, mother of Nicholas Hammond, who plays the film’s Mr Ryder.

Shortly after the Taormina screening, the subtitled print screened at Isola del Cinema on Tiber Island, in the heart of Rome. Each year the Australian embassy in Rome hosts some of the screenings at this open-air festival, which seats about 500 and runs through the summer. This year it chose Ladies in Black for an invitation-only event to start its program, and the film’s connection to the immigration history between Italy and Australia made it a perfect choice. (“Magda” in the film is from Slovenia, Italy’s next-door neighbour.)

The evening began with a cocktail party for members of the Italian arts and business communities on the cinema’s open forecourt in the shadow of the oldest Roman bridge still standing in Rome, circa 62 BCE. The Australian ambassador to Italy, Greg French, opened proceedings by singing, in Italian and English, a musical homage to the film and the filmmakers set to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda,” accompanying himself on the guitar. As a warm-up it could hardly be bettered, although it veered dangerously close to upstaging the film. The audience loved it, and it set the tone for a warm and informal evening in which Ladies in Black fitted perfectly.

The response to the film in Italy, Indonesia and the United States, and before a mixed English and Australian audience in London has been identical to the reaction of audiences in Australia. Wherever the film is screened, audiences laugh, cry and, whenever he is present, give Bruce Beresford a standing ovation. The film’s inclusive themes and its warm heart clearly touch a universal chord.

The revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s had the unexpected consequence of creating awareness of Australia around the world; our films were the first thing to attract international attention as Australia began to emerge from the long shadow of the British empire. Though perhaps in a less dramatic fashion now that sport and tourism are so well promoted, our films and our creative talent continue to raise awareness of our country and our culture. •

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This is one of several moments in this mysterious tale of yearning, fury and obsession when light etches Jong-su’s inner world. Earlier, Hae-mi had taken him to her little apartment, overshadowed by city towers. Maybe she just wants to make him an admirer. Maybe she wants him to oblige her by feeding her cat while she goes travelling.

He agrees to look after the cat, and she takes him to her bed. And as he makes love to her the sun momentarily shafts between two skyscrapers and bounces off the opposite wall. Jong-su is distracted, and then flooded with release.

How do we remember life’s turning points — those key moments of emotional imprinting? Stories? Songs? Smells? For many, memory is visual, and in this film Lee, one of the most poetic of this generation of Korean directors, illuminates the moments that shape Jong-su.

Burning is a triangular story adapted from a 1980s story, Barn Burning, by Haruki Murakami, who in turn drew on a 1939 story by William Faulkner. The third person in the triangle, Ben (Steven Yuen), is a wealthy playboy Hae-mi has acquired on her travels. On the night she dances on the terrace, Ben delivers a casual confession. He likes burning down greenhouses. It amuses him. He doesn’t like them littering the countryside.

Is he putting poor Jong-su on? When Hae-mi disappears from both their lives, Jong-su transfers his obsession to Ben, and the film itself catches fire. In all its versions, this is a tale about class, envy, rage and obsession. It was potent in the thirties and apt in the eighties, and is extremely potent now.

Lee Chang-dong, a novelist and filmmaker, served briefly as South Korea’s culture minister after the long American-sponsored dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, under which he had been blacklisted, was overthrown. He stepped up reluctantly in 2004 and stepped down, with relief, in 2005, and has made three other notable films: Secret Sunshine, Oasis and Poetry. He was blacklisted again under the government of Park’s now-disgraced daughter, Park Geun-hye, who, among other things, tried to abolish the quota system that supported Korean cinema. Koreans took to the streets again; Park Geun-hye was impeached and is now serving time for corruption.

Burning, Lee’s first film since the blacklist ended, delicately explores the psyches of those pushed to the margins.

In South Korea, held up as an exemplar of capitalist modernisation, class politics can be extremely feisty, and Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s wicked Cannes award–winning satire, lays it out plain. For once we have a Palme d’Or winner running directly on our screens, pausing only to pick up the Sydney Film Prize.

In Parasite, class is spatial and architectural. This is a tale of two families caught up in an almost universal law: the rich family has space and privacy, the poor family is crammed into a shabby basement where free-riding on others’ wi-fi is only just possible, and drunks piss up against the bins outside.

As in Burning, a young, workless student is our way into the story. Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is trying for the fourth time to pass a university entrance exam when an old school friend passes on a job tutoring the children of a rich family, the Parks. There are a lot of Parks in Korea, but…

Ki-woo doesn’t have academic qualifications, so his clever sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam), who’s good at computer design, forges them for him. He gets the job, and access to the eye-opening luxury of the Parks’ house. Tutoring the amiable teenage daughter, he sees in the mother’s fretting over her young son an opening for his sister Ki-jung. (Bong has a lot of fun with the earnest maternal concerns of Mrs Park, played by Jo Yeo-jeong.) Ki-jung invents a persona and becomes the five-year-old’s art therapist.

Slowly, Ki-woo’s entire family begins infiltrating the Park house. Built especially for the film, this marvel of minimalist luxury is architecture in the service of cinema. Not since Hitchcock’s Rear Window has domestic space been deployed so effectively.

The spaces are open, yet big enough to make privacy possible and even to contain secrets. Many secrets. In the second act, as the tone begins changing, they start to be revealed, as the film slides first into unease and then into a kind of “I don’t believe I am seeing this” comic horror. You might have liked the children’s birthday party scene in Rake, but this film does it better.

One reason Parasite works so well is that no one in these families — regardless of their naivety, their loyalties, their pomposities and immoralities — is presented as a caricature. Even the pampered five-year-old is allowed to craftily fend off his parents. Meanwhile, Kim Ki-taek, the head of the poor family who becomes the Parks’ driver, is concerned to keep everybody happy. He is played by Song Kang-ho, who has been with director Bong since early days, and a single glance by his broad, dependable face conveys worlds of apprehension.

In Korea, the politics are sharp, and political satire sharper. Early in his career, after a Korean working for the US military dumped a huge amount of formaldehyde in Seoul’s Han River, Bong Joon-ho used one of the horror genres — the monster movie — to talk about environmental despoliation. Song Kang-ho played the father of a hapless family running a snack stall on the banks of the river, now inhabited by a monstrous fish. But the real nightmare lay in how the military and civilian bureaucracy responded when the family’s young daughter is taken. Bong handles it all with great comic flair.

Bong’s two American films, Snowpiercer and Okja, tackled big themes of ecological crisis and genetic manipulation with much bigger budgets. But the bigger the budget, I think, the more ponderous the movie. Okja almost got there, but for the limitations of the giant digitally created pig. They’re pretty smart animals, pigs, but this one was not expressive enough to be taken seriously.

Back on home ground, Bong’s satire is sharper. Stand by, then, for a pretty wild movie with a truly manic ending. It’s not exactly “eat the rich,” though. These are quite nice people, Bong suggests, and look what they are doing to each other. •

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Viva Varda, the monumental Kristy Matheson–curated retrospective of the films of French director Agnès Varda — taking in ten of her features and four of her shorts — shows what an exceptional filmmaker she was, and what a singular gaze she turned on the world. After running through the Sydney Film festival, it’s playing in Melbourne until 30 June and then moving to Canberra.

Varda died, aged ninety, on 29 March this year. In the fourth phase of her career, a last late flowering following the triumph of her 2000 digital documentary The Gleaners and I, she put more of herself on camera and we began to know more about her. That she was tiny — less than five foot tall. That she still wore her hair in a kind of punk pageboy bob, like a medieval monk. That she was energetic, vehement in her opinions and partial to puns and had a wild sense of humour.

Who else would turn up at the opening of one of her installations at the Venice Biennale dressed as a potato? Or, receiving an honorary Gold Leopard at the Locarno Film festival, announce, “Well I have a Lion from Venice, and a Bear from Berlin. Now I can say I am a Leopard,” before producing a leopard-skin lycra onesie from her handbag. Somehow, I can’t see Jean-Luc Godard doing that.

Varda was an accomplished professional photographer when, in 1954, aged twenty-six, she wrote and made her first film. Had she known more about cinema she might not have attempted it. But she was interested in the moderns of literature — writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner — and wanted to make a cinema of impressions and emotions, very different from standard narratives.

Like Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms, that first film, La Pointe Courte, swings between two parallel stories: that of a couple from Paris, reassessing their relationship now the first passion has passed, and that of the men and women of this small fishing village. Varda cast real villagers and made drama of several struggles: a daughter wanting to walk out with her boyfriend, fishermen battling a bureaucracy that would stop their livelihoods, a pregnant woman, a group of women clustering around one dealing with the death of a child.

It’s also an extraordinarily tactile film. As her camera explores the surfaces around the two lovers, you want to reach out and stroke the celluloid. She brings the villagers to life with great verve, and her observations include the kind of drama — a child’s death, a pregnancy — that prefigures a lifetime empathy for the experiences of women. “I should have ‘Don’t Touch’ written on here!” wisecracks one of the village women, patting her pregnant belly.

Tactile: Agnès Varda shooting her debut feature, La Pointe Courte, in 1954.

La Pointe Courte was made four or five years before the first films of the French New Wave. And though Varda would collaborate with the Cahiers du Cinéma mob — she cast Jean-Luc Godard, for example, in a small film-within-a-film in her second feature, Cléo from 5 to 7 — she pursued an independent path. From 1977 on she ran her own company and was her own producer. In this, as in so many things, she was a pioneer.

From the outset Varda brought to her cinema her own experiences as a woman and equally an intense curiosity about others. She knew what it was to be a stranger, to be exiled, and to be on the edges of power. She knew celebrity, but equally she knew the people on the street where she lived, and she investigated both in her films.

In one way, it’s possible to look at Varda’s work and see her scrutinising most of the experiences women have over their lifetimes, from teenage passion to widowhood. Equally, she shows us a neighbourhood. And sometimes, without sentimentality, a community.

Diary of a Pregnant Woman (1958) begins with the filmmaker pointing the camera at her own pregnant belly and then exploring the people she sees in the street market of Rue Mouffetard. This is Varda, about to bring a child into the world, looking at those around her as she wonders what her unborn child’s life will be like. It’s a woman in the grip of the heightened emotions of pregnancy, scrutinising the faces of those whom life has treated harshly. The faces her camera scrutinises are not mere backdrop.

In the second phase of her career, when she followed her husband Jacques Demy to Hollywood, her political sympathies produced some significant documentaries: on the Cuban revolution (Salut les Cubains, 1964) and on the Black Panthers (1968), prompted by the trial of Huey Newton. While keeping a toehold in France, she used her camera to nose her way into her new world in California. Lions Love (… and Lies), the 1969 American feature film in which she persuaded the Warhol star Viva and the creators of Hair to take part, is a wacky exploration of the American cult of celebrity, counterposed with politics, that slips in and out of control.

Mur Murs (1981) — on the Latinos of Los Angeles, and the murals that marked their presence — is in this retrospective, too. So is Documenteur (1980), which despite its name is a fiction, if a thinly disguised one. One of the most nakedly painful of Varda’s films, it was made after she and Demy separated in Los Angeles, and tells the story of a woman with an eight-year-old son trying to find somewhere to live and dealing with the pain of separation. Mathieu Demy, aged eight, plays the son, and as the woman Varda cast Sabine Mamou, who was her editor on Mur Murs.

It is a raw and affecting film in which a series of inner monologues reveals Varda as a skilful writer in English, alert to rhythm and repetition. It also shows a side of Los Angeles far from the luxury of the Hollywood Hills: a beachside scene of crumbling apartments and concrete walkways, of casual kindness and occasional brutality. For all her concerns about the inner lives of her characters, Varda never uses the places and people around them simply as metaphors. Her gaze is turned on others with a mixture of curiosity and compassion.

The feminism of Varda’s earlier films was not always accepted by audiences. Cléo from 5 to 7 got a Venice premiere and was acceptable enough because it starred a beautiful young singer (played by Corinne Marchand) who walks the streets of Paris while she waits for news of a cancer diagnosis. Emotionally, it was about a woman rejecting the way others looked at her.

But Varda’s third feature, and her first venture into colour, Le Bonheur (1965), with its arresting code of rich, Renoirish tones to signify emotions, was widely misunderstood. Essentially, she was using irony to question the love–marriage–family–happiness cliché offered to women, embodied in the film by an uxorious husband, a blonde wife and two contented children. After the man meets an equally desirable blonde woman and she becomes his mistress, the wife obligingly suicides and the mistress takes her place. It’s fair to say most mainstream critics didn’t get it, and the outriders of the re-emergent women’s movement didn’t either. Some feminists, back then, had a lot of trouble distinguishing between description and prescription. Some audiences still do.

Varda was dividing her time between France, where she knew the film scene and had the necessary contacts, and California. She was also becoming more involved with the women’s liberation movement. She read the texts — Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer — and made a short film, Women Reply (1975), responding to the Bobigny affair, the outrageous jailing of a mother who procured an abortion for her raped fourteen-year-old daughter. Two years later came One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), a feature-length drama about two female friends from different class backgrounds, drawn together at different times while they consider whether they will have children or terminate pregnancies. It had the temerity to be a musical.

Across the divide: Thérèse Liotard and Valérie Mairesse in One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977).

There comes a time, for many who have worked for any length of time in cultural production, when they notice the waters of collective memory closing over them. There is a canon, and it is constructed and policed by middle-aged white men. The concerns of women don’t much interest them.

It happened to Varda in 1980, when Cahiers du Cinéma published special editions on French cinema two years running and omitted her entirely. The “mother of the new wave” had by this time been making films for more than a quarter of a century. She was deeply hurt, and said so in an interview in the rival journal Positif.

“I wasn’t mentioned even in passing,” she said, “not a single one of my films. God knows there were a lot of people mentioned, and very interesting people, different people, French filmmakers of all stripes, men, women, people from the Auvergne. But not me. Was it because I was in the US? Louis Malle was also over there. Was it misogyny? Surely not. Catherine Breillat, Marguerite Duras, and others were included. Was it the omission of anyone less than five feet tall? No, Chantal Akerman was in there. I was just plain forgotten.”

Varda learned the lesson, and in later years she would produce and direct her own cinematic autobiographies: The Beaches of Agnès (2010) and her last film, which premiered this February in Berlin, Varda by Agnès (2019).

But she had come back to critical attention well before that with one of her greatest films: Vagabond (1985), a riveting feature film about a young woman who has walked out of an office job and taken to the roads of rural France. At the centre is an astonishing performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, just seventeen when she was cast as Mona. Varda’s tracking shots of Mona with rucksack and tent striding along roads, across fields and through the farms and villages of wintertime Provence give the film a restless forward motion, the camera often racing ahead of a young woman who values freedom from authority above all else.

We meet an astonishing array of outcasts — they could be ours today — and those who prey on them. A gang of drunken youths. A dealer who wants to pimp her. Scam artists, thieves, squatters, labourers from Tunisia warehoused to work rural farms. There’s kindness as well as ruthlessness in these encounters. But there is always a catch, even if it is only satisfying the curiosity of the middle-class woman who picks her up when she is hitching a ride. The bourgeoisie do not come out well in these encounters.

Varda frames Mona’s journey with interviews, often voice to camera, with people Mona has met along the way. They each see her differently: for one rural housewife, she represents the escape from a prison of marriage; another, exploited by her layabout lover, envies the tenderness she thinks Mona obtains from a squatter boyfriend.

Vagabond is not an easy watch. Rarely does a film make so explicit the intersection of class and patriarchy. American road movies like Easy Rider seem laughably romantic and thin by comparison. By forsaking a single narrative stream, it is much more complex and insightful than later, lauded “outcast” films such as the Dardenne Brothers’ 1999 Rosetta, winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes.

Thirty years on, as homelessness increases, the brutalised corpses of women are found on the streets, the best that policy-makers can offer are education campaigns to combat male violence, and political leaders make an economic virtue of ignoring the jobless and the homeless, Vagabond is still a film absolutely for our times.

Viva Varda doesn’t deal with the third phase of her career, in the late eighties, when she nursed her husband Jacques Demy through a final illness and made first one, then a second film about his life and work. But the retrospective does include films that celebrate friendship — and fun, such as Jane B. for Agnès V., which uses clips of her friend Jane Birkin’s work to celebrate her career. She was “sampling” long before it became a thing.

The retrospective lets us see that the concern for social outcasts that dazzled new generations of film goers in her digital essay film The Gleaners and I was always there. She pointed us to the excesses of consumption of waste. That film is a great companion piece to Vagabond, pointedly critiquing the material waste and exploitation of consumption through the eyes of those who scrounge for its scraps. It’s also an essay on the way artists scrounge and recycle ideas, on her own ageing, and on our own attitudes to the old. It has enormous wit and warmth, and it opened new doors for Varda as an installation artist and photographer. She gleefully recycled some of her own “failed” works, such as the glowing gold film strips of Le Bonheur, to create a temporary dwelling. A home of cinema, if you like.

Viva Varda, first shown at Melbourne’s ACMI in 2014, is the most extensive retrospective attempted of Varda’s work. It’s timing was not accidental: there was still hope then that Varda would live long enough to once more jump on a plane. On view again in Melbourne, it celebrates the restored glory of Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre, just open. Wherever it shows, it’s worth a visit to see Varda’s wit and prescience. It’s time now to seize the cinema canon and shake it. Varda’s films will keep on giving. •

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The peasants have a weakness: coffee. This is, after all, Italy — or at least Sicily. The precious substance is offered to them by a rather simple young man called Lazzaro (Adriano Tardiolo), so sweet-natured, so endlessly smiling that he is easily exploited.

So basic are the lives of these workers that we could be watching a film out of time… or a film set any time in the nineteenth or twentieth century. But something jars when the padrona, the hard-faced Marchesa Alfonsina De Luna (Nicoletta Braschi), visits with her family. She has two teenagers, and the son, Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), is bored. His mother won’t give him money to leave, and there is no reception for his mobile phone.

Mobile phone? What actual period are we in here? The idyll of the “happy peasants” making their happy folk music — a community presented with considerable charm — starts to fray. Indeed, it calls into question many such cinematic pastorales.

Tancredi persuades Lazzaro, an innocent rumoured to have been sired by the late Count, to show him his own secret place on the estate, where he keeps his few treasures… and a coffee pot. Then he persuades Lazzaro to deliver a message — a ransom demand — to his mother. He plans to screw money out of her by claiming he’s been kidnapped.

The alarm that ensues will upset the village’s entire way of life. The modern world intrudes with shocking abruptness. And Lazzaro mysteriously falls asleep to wake up in a different world entirely.

Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro Felice) is the third feature film from Italian director Alice Rohrwacher. She and her sister, the actress Alba Rohrwacher, were born in Tuscany, where their German father was a beekeeper on a rural estate. She incorporated some of that beekeeping lore, and an authoritarian father, into her second feature film, The Wonders.

Rohrwacher’s inventive imagination has produced some fabulous screenplays. There are effortless time shifts in Happy as Lazzaro, and telling comparisons between the world of the villagers and the modern world discovered by Lazzaro. Oddly enough, community persists.

Italy’s mezzadria system of sharecropping was only abolished in the mid seventies. When my own parents moved there and rented an old farmhouse on a small estate, the abolition was so new that the contadini, the seven workers until recently indentured to the estate, asked to borrow the barn to hold their first union meetings.

Rohrwacher’s film was triggered by a newspaper report from the 1980s about the discovery of a remote estate like L’Inviolata, where the children had never been to school, nor villagers ever to see a doctor, and where they believed they were owned by the padrone.

But this is far from a realist movie. Its dreamlike sequences reminded me of the earthiness of Kusturica’s gypsy communities. It’s held together by Tardiolo’s Lazzaro, whose smiling innocence takes him, like Candide, across social barriers and throws the venality of those around him into sharp relief.

I suspect Rohrwacher had some trouble ending this film. She settles, as have many directors before her, for a rather operatic finale. It didn’t quite work for me, but it is a small grumble about an otherwise astonishingly original film. •

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While there is no likely end to this flow of adaptations of Shakespearean plays, a trickle of films has also developed about the Bard himself. Some of them, such as Michael Rubbo’s documentary Much Ado about Something (2001) or Roland Emmerich’s feature film Anonymous (2011), speculate on the perennial question of the authorship of the plays, while John Madden’s popular Shakespeare in Love (1998) concentrates on being a charming romantic comedy about the young playwright’s love life.

Of those three, only Shakespeare in Love has any real value as a film. One of its many pleasures is how its strands of meaning and structure parallel those of Romeo and Juliet, with subtle gestures towards Twelfth Night. Madden manages, without relinquishing either comedy or love story, to give a feel for a bustling, crowded life with the theatre as one of its highest expressions in its period, as one might argue that film is in its time. And you can’t not like a film in which Shakespeare slouches into a pub, demanding, “Give me to drink mandragora” and the barman replies, “Straight up, Will.”

Kenneth Branagh, director and star of All Is True, has recently added to the list of films about Shakespeare with his imaginary exploration of how old Will coped with his abrupt retirement in 1613, after the Globe Theatre, scene of his emergence as the greatest-ever playwright, burnt to the ground in June of that year.

All films come to us with baggage of one kind or other: here, it not only includes whatever experience we’ve each had of Shakespeare but also and perhaps more pertinently our knowledge that Will is being played and directed by an actor who has contributed greatly to keeping the Bard before cinemagoers’ eyes in recent decades. Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and Hamlet (1996) are just two major examples; in each, he fearlessly followed in Laurence Olivier’s actor-director footsteps while managing to establish his own take on the plays and their protagonists. Now, in All Is True, he has assumed the identity of the playwright himself, and in the process totally obscured those visual aspects of the Branagh persona we’ve been used to.

Branagh isn’t the film’s only cast member with Shakespearean form. Judi Dench was Mistress Quickly in Branagh’s Henry V and, bizarrely, Hecuba in his Hamlet, as well as the (real) Queen in Shakespeare in Love and dozens of other formidable types in her illustrious career. At eighty-four and still indefatigably busy (her Red Joan is also currently in the cinemas), she shows no sign of slowing down and seems to have become an institution in film. In All Is True, she plays Anne Hathaway, Will’s long-neglected wife.

In Ben Elton’s astute and often witty screenplay, Will Shakespeare has returned after a long period away to his home in Stratford-upon-Avon and to wife Anne Hathaway (Dench) and their two daughters — unmarried Judith (Kathryn Wilder), living at home, and Susannah (Lydia Wilson), married to a Puritan husband. But it is his son Hamnet (Sam Ellis), who died at eleven, and at whose funeral Shakespeare was not present, who haunts his mind these many years later. “You scarcely knew him,” says Anne. Accustomed to Will’s absence in London, she is by no means ecstatic at having him back home, and allocates to him the guest bedroom.

The best of Will’s life seems to have passed, and the film must make drama from his attempts to deal with this realisation. Not only is he haunted by memories of Hamnet and the uncertainty surrounding the cause of the boy’s death — was it the plague or did he drown? — but his daughter Judith is bitter about his obvious preference for her brother, and Susannah’s behaviour is giving rise to rumours of infidelity.

This Shakespeare may have conquered the world, but it is clear that he has been less spectacularly successful in his dealings with those closer to him — or those to whom he should have been closer. Judi Dench, without ever playing for easy sympathy as Anne, achieves a real poignancy as the illiterate wife who has kept the home fires burning, as does Kathryn Wilder in rendering Judith’s jealousy of Hamnet and her sense of the futility of her own life. “You lost a son; a daughter is nothing,” she says with bitterness. This is a world in which marriage and sons were required to ensure a woman’s status.

A third actor of comparable stature to Branagh and Dench, Ian McKellen, brings his experience to bear on the role of the Earl of Southampton. Was this man, for whom some of Shakespeare’s love poetry is said to have been written, really “the dark lady of the sonnets”? When he comes to visit Will at Stratford, he can say, “You must write again, Will. London needs you. I need you,” but when Will tells the visitor, “They were only meant for you, your grace,” the Earl puts him down by replying, “It’s not your place to love me.” This is a brief interlude in the film, but in McKellen’s rich, extravagantly bewigged cameo of aristocratic assurance a further tension in the poet’s life is evoked.

How much any of this is factually accurate I can’t say. Scholars — and others — are always coming up with facts (or are they?) about Shakespeare’s life. But the film establishes a rich texture of frustrated lives, vividly portrayed village life, and matters from the past that its protagonist needs to come to terms with. As Will, Branagh creates a convincing sense of the conflicts, even torments, he tries to resolve; and in Zac Nicholson’s cinematography the contrasts between the confinement of domestic scenes and the grandeur of rural vistas work as symbolic representations of the world Will “conquered” and the narrower spaces that are now his lot.

“If you want to be a writer… search within,” Will advises in one scene. “And if you’re honest with yourself, then whatever you write, all is true.” I don’t know how “true” much of this film is, but it makes for a richly enjoyable entertainment in the hands of people who know what they are doing.

Not a great deal is true, of course, in the screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, but no one looks there for clues to the real history of England or Denmark or Italy. The pleasures lie elsewhere, and producers, directors and actors seem happy to mine them over and over for audiences that seem never to tire.

The fact that there are so many British films of the plays isn’t surprising; after all, Britain has all those distinguished stage-trained actors and directors used to playing Shakespeare in some of the world’s most prestigious theatres and no doubt eager for the financial rewards of filmmaking. But the United States has a long history of filming the plays, too, at least as far back in talkies as The Taming of the Shrew in 1929, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1936 and — with its rather elderly young lovers (Leslie Howard, forty-three, and Norma Shearer, thirty-four) — Romeo and Juliet in 1936.

Versions of Cymbeline (2014) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2016 and 2017), a Macbeth set in a stretch limousine (2106) and a Hamlet set in Utah (2015) have all appeared in recent years. Australia has its own screen Macbeth, of which more later, Russia has taken on Hamlet and Othello, the Japanese have tackled Lear, and recently I’ve read of a Latvian go at Macbeth. But mentioning these titles doesn’t begin to touch the sides of what’s been filmed in countries round the globe.

The countless silent screen versions included “scenes from” rather than whole plays, as in Macbeth (released in 1898, two years after the birth of cinema) with Johnston Forbes-Robertson in the lead role. Missing from those versions, of course, was that sense of hearing the words as if for the first time, growing out of a conversation that just happens to be in some of the most wonderful verse ever written. Perhaps the abiding challenge in filming Shakespeare is in reconciling the screen’s remorseless demand for a level of visual realism with the equally remorseless artifice of iambic pentameters.

My own feeling about adaptations of Shakespeare for the screen — and indeed any adaptation of a classic work — is that the filmmaker should confront me with something new. Orson Welles once advised a younger filmmaker who was about to adapt a Henry James novella in these words: if a filmmaker has nothing new to say about the novel he is adapting he should leave it alone. Welles was in a strong position to expound this view; just think of how he extracted that superb example of Shakespeare on screen, Chimes at Midnight (1965), from Henry IV, Pts I and II, and Henry V.

Several comparatively recent screen versions testify to the sheer adaptability of the Shakespearean texts. Take Julie Taymor’s 2010 version of The Tempest. Anyone recalling her 1999 version of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first published play, would not have been expecting any reverential treatment of what is reputedly his last. Taymor created the network of jealousies at work in the Roman Empire with a fine visual sweep that brought the saga of revenge-begetting-revenge to potent life. It was often breathtaking in its panoramic compositions or sudden close-ups, boldly juxtaposing ancient Rome with 1930s music or young punks drinking beer from cans. Flamboyant stuff certainly, but preferable to a stifling reverence before the idea of Shakespeare.

Taymor’s Tempest moves more or less inexorably to the play’s final wisdom: “The rarer action is/ In virtue than in vengeance.” The Tempest is a difficult play, pervaded by a sense of “lastness,” of moving almost painfully towards resolution of what may have seemed irreconcilable conflicts, as if its author shared with Miranda her view of a “brave new world/ That has such people in’t.” Hovering over its various fields of action is the figure of Prospero, as puppet-master and magician, standing metaphorically perhaps for the playwright, with his own command over his created drama, and appraising the values of the life he has lived — and the world he’s lived it in.

Taymor’s Prospero is Prospera and, in Helen Mirren’s performance, she is utterly dominant not merely when she is depicted, for example, on a rocky outcrop against the sky. The issue of gender has often been raised in relation to this play, which seems to insist on the absoluteness of patriarchy, but Taymor mines it provocatively, and Mirren is persuasive enough to ward off accusations of mere trendiness.

Another contemporary resonance lies in the film’s touching on matters of postcolonial critique. On an obvious level, Caliban has been relegated to inhospitable parts of the island, and African actor Djimon Hounsou projects the anger and poignancy of the subjugated “native.” At film’s end, he too is embraced in the new spirit of reconciliation, just as Ben Whishaw’s androgynous Ariel is given his freedom.

The Tempest has attracted other filmmakers of maverick leaning, too. A highly regarded piece of Hollywood science-fiction called Forbidden Planet (1956) placed the action on a planet called Altair IV, to which an expedition is sent to investigate the disappearance of two people twenty years earlier. More recently, Derek Jarman’s 1979 version, despite some bizarre trappings (Elisabeth Welch as a “goddess,” for example, leading a chorus of sailors in “Stormy Weather”), offered a surprisingly plain reading of the text — reminding me, in this respect, of Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyant Romeo + Juliet (1996), in which every word except one (“shriven” becomes “forgiven”) is Shakespeare’s.

Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) was more venturesome, and to eloquent effect, virtually setting the whole film in Prospero’s mind and stressing his manipulation of all the other characters, to the point of his speaking most of their lines. If you cast John Gielgud, one of the most famous exponents of the role — and his century’s most renowned verse-speaker — as Prospero, you’re entitled to feel your film was in safe hands.

Two other films from around that time draw, albeit without mention in the credits, on King Lear. They are the family melodrama House of Strangers (1949) and the western Broken Lance (1954). In the former, Gino Monetti (Edward G. Robinson), a first-generation American, has worked his way up to owning a bank. Three of his sons work in the bank, while the fourth, an attorney, has his office in the bank building. Gino keeps them under his thumb, with the promise of inheriting the bank encouraging them to toe the line. In Broken Lance, despotic cattle baron Matt Devereaux (Spencer Tracy) holds his three sons by his first wife on a tight rein while favouring his fourth (his Cordelia, perhaps) by his second wife. It was suggested at the time that it was a reworking of House of Strangers, but certainly both could trace some key narrative and thematic strands back to their famous precursor, as I recall some contemporary reviewers noted.

Australian cinema has shown little interest in adapting Shakespeare to the screen — or, with rare exceptions, non-Australian works of any kind. Surely it can’t be because filmmakers think he’s irrelevant to antipodean life? Back in 2006, however, director Geoffrey Wright placed Macbeth in Melbourne’s gangland wars. His film’s crucial boldness lies in combining the visual sheen of dark streets and clubs, and leafy suburban and hillside hideaways with the shock of the aural. It is realist in setting and ambience, but Wright also retains the original’s iambic pentameters (unlike the feeble British gangster version, Joe MacBeth, 1955), with a diversity of flat Australian vowels intelligently uttering verse most often associated with a theatrical delivery. What emerges is a strong sense that these actors, portraying criminals of various kinds and degrees of depravity, know what they are talking about.

As for generic relocation, we must add the 1953 musical Kiss Me Kate. It is, of course, derived from The Taming of the Shrew, which has been filmed, in one form or other, more than sixty times, probably most famously in 1967, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor preserving the play’s dated attitudes to gender. In 1999 it was the basis for a teen romance called 10 Things I Hate about You, taking as its setting Padua High School, naming its characters Stratford and Verona, and making one of the heroines a shrew. As is the way with teen movies, this is hardly subtle but often funny, and one of Shakespeare’s least attractive plays adapts well to its unlikely location.

10 Things has a few songs, but this can’t compare with Kiss Me Kate, which has a wonderful score by Cole Porter, composed for the stage play. It’s too long since I saw the play on stage to be sure about how closely the film follows its structure, but the film offers a cunning parallel between the offstage sparring of two Broadway stars and the onstage dealings of Petruchio and Katherine. It opens with Porter (Australian actor Ron Randell) trying to persuade soprano Lilli Vanessi (Kathryn Grayson) to star opposite her ex-husband, the play’s producer, director and star, Fred Graham (Howard Keel) in a musical based on The Shrew.

Lilli and Fred have an acrimonious relationship involving the sort of competitive banter that characterises Shakespeare’s protagonists, and it makes itself felt when, during the onstage performance, she bites his hand and he smacks her bottom with a vigour beyond the demands of the script. Some of the songs are part of the offstage squabbles, as when the Bianca character berates her gambler boyfriend by singing “Why Can’t You Behave?” Others, like the love song “Wunderbar” are inserted into the on-stage action. The two gangsters (on stage and film) singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” key us into the film’s playful dealings with the original, and with Shakespeare at large.

Finally, I want to briefly mention two remaining direct descendants. These are the 2011 British film of Coriolanus and the 2012 American version of Much Ado about Nothing. Each relocates Shakespeare in time, place and genre, but each is also concerned to preserve the language and structure of the original. They are not, however, any less daring or imaginative for it, and both testify to the sheer adaptability of the plays.

Coriolanus may be one of the most difficult Shakespearean plays to come to terms with, its central character one of his most unlikeable protagonists whose relationship to “the people” sets a new low for politicians — even by modern-day standards. What exactly he stands for, apart from unbridled egoism and personal ambition, is hard to discern, but, though one doesn’t warm to him, he is utterly compelling.

As a drama of political opportunism, with treachery always waiting quietly by to seize its moment, it is compelling stuff. Essentially, it is the study of Caius Marcius (Ralph Fiennes), a Roman general given the name of Coriolanus when he captures the town of Corioli in a war against its Volscian rulers. Rome makes a fuss of him, but his distaste for the people (“rabble,” to him) leads to his banishment, during which he makes up to Aufidius (Gerard Butler), Volscian leader, turns against Rome, and so on.

Director Fiennes and screenwriter John Logan have fashioned an enthralling drama from this uncompromising material. Set in a twenty-first-century city bearing the name of Rome, it was actually filmed in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. This is a city that echoes with the decades-long conflict in the Balkans, and in some miraculous way the use of modern war machines and media reporting serves to heighten and not at all to distract from the hard political core of the drama. The use of TV coverage of the political and military scene works on levels of contemporary accessibility, never merely as gimmick.

This is an object lesson in how a film adaptation of a famous literary work can be venturesome while, to use that most tiresome word in this respect, remaining “faithful” to its source. Even more dazzling was the US Much Ado, a strong contender for the best Shakespeare-derived film ever. If, like me, you hadn’t watched any of the 145 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), you may have been unfamiliar with the name of Joss Whedon, its director, but I, for one, can never think of Whedon with anything but gratitude. Without sacrificing the words of the original, he has made a film that seems like a descendant of those hugely popular 1930s screwball comedies, reminding me of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant striking sparks from each other, as if the final clinch weren’t inevitable, in the great Philadelphia Story.

This Much Ado is a brilliant example of Shakespearean adaptability to Hollywood genre. Whedon clearly sees it as a sparkling romantic comedy, recalling those spirited heroines who were not about to succumb easily to male blandishments and dedicated themselves to winning the day on their own terms. Maybe the choice of luminous monochrome was dictated by financial constraints, but it also seems to insist on locating the film in the time and place of some of the smartest filmmaking ever.

What is most wonderful is the apparently seamless wedding of the Shakespearean verse drama with the conventions of film. Shakespeare’s language is preserved with immaculate precision and conversational ease, the cast members persuading us they are thinking about the matter of their dialogue as they speak, as if making the words up as they go along, but without any diminution of the original’s wit and rhythms. We seem to be hearing conversations that just happen to be sharper and more literate than we’re used to. The broader comedy, for me sometimes the least effective part of the play on the stage, is very funny indeed as the “palace guards” have now become an incompetent security unit, muddling away with CCTV and an insecure grasp of grammar and vocabulary.

But at the core is the “merry war” between Beatrice and Benedick. This is the reason we love the play. It is they who create the emotional trajectory of what may be the greatest romantic comedy in the language, and it is joyously re-enacted here. In this, and in the best of the other films I’ve mentioned, the Shakespearean vision has transcended the constraints of time, place and genre and impelled filmmakers to mine the fluency of cinema. Long may this continue. •

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So, what has first-time director Carl Hunter put before us? In genre terms, descriptors such as family drama, dark comedy and fantasy come to mind, and yet none of them (or even a combination of them) seems quite convincing. Given too that it stars Bill Nighy, an actor whose persona always seems to resist pigeon-holing, and that it is one of the few films in which Scrabble plays an important role, its genre-bending is perhaps not surprising.

Sometimes Always Never opens on a long, wide shot of a man, seen from behind, alone on a rather bleak Northern England beach, and this establishes at once two crucial aspects of the film. Nighy’s character, Alan, is essentially a man alone, but equally significantly we are being introduced to the pervasive visual style of the film. This is a film that rarely deals in close-ups; rather, it places its characters in settings that either confine or isolate them.

Alan is joined by his son Peter (Sam Riley), with whom he seems to have a somewhat fractious relationship, and they drive off to the morgue. Their purpose is to see if the corpse lying there is that of Alan’s older son Michael, who has been missing for a decade, having stormed out of the house after a quarrel over a game of Scrabble. On the way, they quibble over words — Peter has “stuff” to do, whereas his father insists the correct term is “work.” In this film, no trivial exchange is wasted, and words are several times highlighted on screen in ways that challenge the idea of a constricting realism.

At the morgue is another couple — Margaret (Jenny Agutter) and Arthur (Tim McInnerny) — whose son has also disappeared and who are also there to identify the body. The visuals preclude intimacy; people are glimpsed through doorways or separated from others by wide spaces or, as when Alan and the attendant go in to inspect the body, seen in shadowy form through a translucent window.

In an opportunist move, Alan challenges Margaret and Arthur (a former pop star) to a game of Scrabble. The camera homes in on the Scrabble pieces prior to Alan’s financially rewarding victory, and Richard Stoddard’s superbly inventive cinematography inserts black-and-white memories of games Alan has played as a child.

I’m aware while writing about this film that I’m constantly drawn back to the imagery, but that is essentially what makes it so memorable. That also leads me to wonder how far this visual style is Stoddard’s work, and how far it reflects Hunter’s insights into the way the characters work in relation to each other and their settings. As to the latter, the film was shot entirely in the north of England, giving a reminder of those gritty British “new wave” productions of fifty and more years ago.

When the body in the morgue proves not to be Michael’s, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s subtly constructed screenplay embarks on its key narrative impulse, seeking to hold Alan’s connection with his lost son, who he comes to believe is trying to reach him through online Scrabble, in balance with his faltering relationship with Peter.

Carl Hunter steers his cast through episodes spiked with comedy and the odd touch of poignancy, which account for the film’s generic hybridity. When Alan fetches up at Peter’s house after a night-time wander through a graveyard, we’ve been prepared for a certain edginess in his dealings with his son but not for the effortlessly friendly welcome from Peter’s wife Sue (Alice Lowe) or the enigmatic responses of their schoolboy son Jack (Louis Healy). Alan doesn’t approve of Vegemite as a substitute for Marmite; he gives Alice a labelling device he has used as a means of registering control over drawers and other inanimate objects; he shares a small room with Jack, flopping on the latter’s bunk to avoid climbing to the upper one. If all this sounds quirky, so it is — and beguilingly so.

Sometimes Always Never is as much a treat for the eye as Roma, in its different way and to different ends, with its black-and-white evocation of suburban Mexico. But though it’s tempting to stress the film’s visual qualities, this is not to underestimate the holding power of its move towards a sort of resolution, which of course I can’t reveal here.

Liverpool-born Hunter, who has a background in TV documentaries and in popular music, shows an astute eye for place and for the slithery dealings between people that bodes well for a feature career. As for the cast, Nighy plays with that cunning blend of idiosyncratic behaviour and ambiguous internal reflections that so often characterises his work, and his playing of Alan is among his best. Sam Riley, vividly remembered from Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), catches admirably the uncertainties that have made dealings with his father a tricky business, and as a pair they contrive to be both comic and touching.

The film as a whole might also be thought of as a tricky business, but it is entirely worth persevering with. •

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Though it is over half a century since their last film, they have always had an assured place in the nostalgia of movie memory. Only two years ago, a very diverting book (by John Connolly) with the idiosyncratic title of he presented itself as a novel that was part-biography, part-cinema history, part-Hollywood gossip column. The eponymous “he” was Stan Laurel, and he, as in Jon S. Baird’s new film, Stan & Ollie, is depicted as the brains of the partnership. In fact, he never seems to stop working and worrying, often protecting Ollie from unpalatable truths.

Who were they, then? The short answer is that they were a hugely popular comedy duo for more than twenty-five years. Ollie’s screen debut was in a 1914 short called Outwitting Dad and Stan’s in 1917 as a mental patient in Nuts in May, but history really began when the pair appeared together for the first time as a team in 1926, and they remained that way till 1951, mostly to resounding box-office success.

The pair was under contract to the Hal Roach studio, and their falling out with Roach (played by Danny Huston in the film) is a key early event in the film, establishing Laurel (Steve Coogan) as the sharper negotiator and Hardy as the more indulgent, satisfying his urges as gambler and matrimonial practitioner rather than worrying too much about money matters. In an early discussion between the pair, Ollie Hardy (John C. Reilly) reveals that he has just proposed to the woman who will become his third wife Lucille (Shirley Henderson) and complaining about the financial demands of an ex-wife, while Stan announces firmly that he is never getting married again. He’ll be wrong about this.

Baird’s warm-hearted, sharp-witted film compares the on-screen personae of Laurel and Hardy with how the partnership worked off-screen. Reading about the two of them in Film Fun or watching them on-screen, Ollie always seemed to be bossing around meek little offsider Stan, as if the big guy was calling the shots, and as often as not precipitating them into another fine mess (the title of their 1930 film). As the film makes clear — this is not to make claims about or to discount its historical accuracy — Stan is the one with ideas, but as soon as the camera turns on the duo dancing their Way out West the old magic turns life on its head.

When their film careers have tailed off, the scene switches to “Sixteen years later, Newcastle 1953.” They are touring in the country that Stan earlier dismissed with, “I don’t miss England one little bit.” As they begin their tour in half-empty provincial theatres and variety halls, making do with the modest lodgings assigned to them by somewhat smarmy impresario Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), Stan must have felt he was right. But their fortunes will change as audiences respond to their still-potent comic brilliance, and it says much for Coogan and Reilly that they can make us believe this and share the excitement when they fetch up at London’s plush Lyceum Theatre to a full house. By this time, as they pull into the Savoy Hotel, there’s been a lift in their accommodation standards too.

Putting the historical facts to one side, what Baird and his screenwriter Jeff Pope have set before us is an affectionate and astutely observed recreation of the lives and careers of the legendary pair. Crucially, the film must give us a sense of that comic genius and this is achieved by creating (perhaps re-creating) some of their famous stage turns. For instance, there’s the railway platform from which they keep misplacing each other as they exit through the two doorways into the station — and how cumbersome that account sounds compared with the effortless facility and timing with which the episode is performed!

The great strength of the film, or at least the strength it couldn’t have done without, is in the casting of Reilly and Coogan. Reilly, in a fat-suit and with inflated jowls, and Coogan, looking as if he can’t afford to take his mind off the professional demands of life, are a superb team. They are convincing on stage while also imbuing their private-life selves with the insight that accounts for the bond between them even when times become difficult. As Ollie says when his health is on the downward slide: “It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it Stan?” But if that sounds wet it is offset by Ollie’s earlier, less benevolent remark: “You loved Laurel & Hardy, but you never loved me.”

When their wives turn up about halfway through the film, we get further insight into the pair – as well contributions from the two women. Tiny Scottish actor Henderson, as Ollie’s third wife, Texan Lucille, has a touching moment when she makes clear she genuinely loves this self-indulgent fatty, however careless he is about his and other people’s lives. As Stan’s more astringent Russian wife, Nina Arianda is more prepared to steer situations in directions of her choice. She makes an effective contrast with Henderson, and together they weave a new and lively strand in the exploits of the titular pair. As well, each is concerned to keep a watchful eye on the health of her partner.

Director Baird knows exactly how much is needed to establish the on-stage or on-screen personae of the two and this provides some very funny episodes. As a sort of biopic, covering only the years of Stan and Ollie’s partnership, the film strikes an admirable balance between the laugh-out-loud moments when the innocent wit of the comic routines is put before us and the quiet pathos that comes with their awareness of the fleetingness of fame. This latter effect is achieved without ever being mawkish: providing hysterical laughter for audiences is one thing; as the film suggests wistfully, this comes at a cost.

But the film’s best achievement could be to bring the pair to a generation that may never have heard of them. It might be a case of Film Fun all over again. •

The post Fun while it lasted appeared first on Inside Story.

Breamer was born Sylvia Bremer in Sydney’s Double Bay, the second child of Frederick Glasse Bremer and Jessie B. Bremer (nee Platt). The Bremers were a noted naval family — her grandfather, Sir James, had claimed Hong Kong for the British — and Sylvia was raised among the cream of Sydney society. Educated at the elite Ascham school, she enjoyed horseriding and amateur theatricals.

In 1910, the year she turned thirteen, a series of events transformed Breamer’s world. Her father died suddenly, aged only fifty-six. Then, just four months later, her mother remarried and Sylvia acquired a stepfather, judge A.G. Plunkett. Finally, that same year, Breamer began the elocution training that would launch her theatrical career.

Although lessons of this kind were commonplace in Breamer’s milieu, her vocal talents and ingenue charm soon set her apart. Within two years, she was the standout at the Commonwealth Eisteddfod and began to star in amateur theatre. Then, in 1913, she was signed for her first professional engagement by the theatrical behemoth J.C. Williamson. The next few years of frenetic work and ill-fated romance set the tone for what was to come. As part of the Williamson company, she toured the latest Broadway hits around Australia and New Zealand, and in June 1914 she married Edwin Willett Morrison, a Williamson producer twenty-eight years her senior.

Breamer’s big break came when she replaced indisposed leading lady Muriel Starr in a 1915 production of Bought and Paid For. After winning glowing reviews for her performance, Breamer set her sights on an overseas career. For most Australians during this era, “overseas” still meant Britain, but Breamer had a different destination in mind. J.C. Williamson was a trans-Pacific operation that exported American plays and stars to the antipodes. Breamer had spent three years immersed in this US-centric company, her new husband was an American, and her mental universe centred on Broadway rather than London’s West End. And so, in October 1916, she and her husband set sail to try their luck across the Pacific — a quest that would soon become a rite of passage among Williamson alumni.

Unlike most of the Australians who would follow in her wake, Breamer had little difficulty cracking the US market. After starting out in a major stage production on the east coast, she signed with film mogul Thomas Ince and shifted to Hollywood. Her first film was the 1917 baseball drama The Pinch Hitter. When her contract with Ince expired the following year, she became a staple in J. Stuart Blackton films, with the war drama Missing (1918) providing the first of many leading roles. The war also prompted a name change. With anti-German sentiment running high, Sylvia was advised to alter the Germanic “Bremer” to “Breamer.” While her career went from strength to strength, though, her marriage hit the rocks. In December 1916 the couple separated, and in 1918 Breamer filed for divorce.

By late 1918, this young Australian was the talk of Hollywood. Photoplay chose her for its December cover, and the accompanying text proclaimed Breamer “the most successful new young lady of the year.” As her profile grew, Breamer’s persona became fused with an exoticised idea of Australia. In a tradition that continues to this day, her Australian roots saw her branded as a natural and authentic beauty whose looks derived from sun and sport rather than cosmetics. Reporters invented a childhood spent among “crocodiles, Aborigines and iguanas,” and marvelled at her “hypnotic” gaze. According to the photographer Paul Greenbaux, Breamer’s eyes had “a deeper and more poignant appeal than those of Mona Lisa.”

Sylvia Breamer by Witzel Studios, c. 1920. National Portrait Gallery

As the jazz age began, Breamer’s life fell into place. After a visit in 1920, her mother, stepfather and two siblings decided to join Sylvia in California. The family migrated the following year, her brother Jack entering the movie business as a cameraman and her sister Doris marrying stage actor William J. Kelly and settling in New York. After several years of freelancing, Breamer won a contract with First National Pictures and began making the biggest films of her career. She played the sister in flapper classic Flaming Youth (1923) and the title role in The Woman on the Jury (1924). But her greatest hit was The Girl of the Golden West (1923), a goldrush epic adapted from the celebrated David Belasco stage play. Breamer played the “girl,” and her performance was hailed as “flawless and charming.” By this point, she was earning $1000 a week and co-owned a weekend getaway in Laurel Canyon.

In November 1924, at the peak of her fame, Breamer wed Harry W. Martin, a celebrity doctor who did a brisk trade in abortions and VD treatment. Swept up in her new role as wife, Breamer told the Los Angeles Times she was “out of pictures for good.” But this second marriage proved no more successful than the first. Breamer filed for divorce in 1928, citing “mental cruelty.”

Single once more, Breamer looked to work for consolation. But her 1924 retirement declaration had proved prescient: from this point, she appeared in only one more silent film, Lightning Reporter (1926). After that, the offers dried up. Her youth was on the wane, she had no agent to hustle on her behalf, and the “talkies” were about to revolutionise the industry. Like many silent stars, Breamer had no luck in the sound era, and returned instead to the grind of stock theatre. When not touring, she was a fixture on the Hollywood party scene.

In 1931, Breamer wed her third older man, Edmund Russell Bohan, an LA businessman twenty-three years her senior. Her new husband’s wealth provided a buffer from the Depression, but work remained elusive. Her final movie credit — and only sound film — was a supporting role in Too Many Parents (1936). Three years later, around the time her mother died, Breamer’s third marriage ended in an ugly lawsuit.

After moving to New York in 1940, Breamer’s physical and mental health declined rapidly. Apart from her sister’s family, she was near friendless in the city, and sought refuge in liquor. Her fatal heart attack in June 1943 went little noted. Despite her forty-eight film credits between 1917 and 1936, Breamer’s death was met with only a brief notice in the New York Times and resounding silence in the Australian press. She had shunned Australia since her 1916 departure, and now her birth country returned the favour. Image-conscious until the end, her death certificate listed her age as forty. She was, in truth, a few days short of forty-six.

Further reading

Who Was Sylvia? A Biography of Sylvia Breamer, by Ralph L. Marsden, Screencrafts Productions, 2016

The post An Australian in silent Hollywood appeared first on Inside Story.

In the Academy press room, Spike Lee compared Green Book to Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture twenty years ago, when his groundbreaking Do the Right Thing wasn’t even nominated. “Every time somebody is driving somebody, I lose,” he said. “They just change the driving positions.”

The Oscar for Green Book, ahead of BlacKkKlansman and Roma and, for that matter, Black Panther does say something about where the heart of liberal Hollywood is right now. It wants reconciliation without tears. It is still not ready to face the toughest truths about the American past, and its present. Victimhood is okay. Arguments followed by warm reconciliation are okay. But spiky, pointed representations of a recent past that included thousands of lynchings, at a time when racist killings are ignored by a president playing to a gallery of white grievance: nah.

I take an anthropological view of the Oscars. This is a ceremony at which the storytellers tell stories about themselves. So the Best Picture vote tells us something.

Oscar nominations are voted on by the guilds: writers determine writers, directors determine directors, and so forth. But all Academy members get to nominate and vote for Best Picture. They are still overwhelmingly old, white and male, despite determined efforts by the Academy governors to diversify the membership. (And once an Academy member, you’re a member for life.) The Best Picture award is, in a sense, a snapshot, a poll and, yes, a popularity contest. It’s voted on by digital designers and hair and makeup people and sound mixers as well as the big names on the red carpet. It is speaking for a broader Hollywood, and the members wanted a film that would make them feel good about the race issues rending America.

And feel-good is what they got, with predictable tropes: a story about a casually racist white guy (Viggo Mortensen as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga) driving the fastidious, elegant Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) on a music tour through the segregated south, which in the end has the white guy saving the black guy’s bacon then, after the black guy has learned the white guy a thing or two, welcoming him into the arms of a big, boisterous Italian-American family.

Gosh. Sound familiar?

The film has been popular with audiences at the same time as it has been fiercely rebuked by many for perpetrating the tired “white saviour” trope. And there is truth in that. To be fair, the film does honour Don Shirley’s music, and it does, clunkily, show Shirley instructing Vallelonga how to write love letters to his wife. This, I imagine, is a pass at making the white man learn from the black. Equalising, you know?

But — music aside — the balancing act doesn’t convince.

“We did the best we could with the material we had,” said Mahershala Ali, who won Best Supporting Actor for his role as Shirley.

“This is a film about love,” declared director Peter Farrelly from the stage. “We are all the same.”

No we aren’t, because black and white pasts and present experiences are so very different. We are not there yet.

Viggo, what were you thinking?

Why make another film about Vincent van Gogh? Paul Cox (Vincent, 1987), Robert Altman (Vincent and Theo, 1990) and Vincente Minelli (Lust for Life, 1956) have all had a go.

At Eternity’s Gate is by Julian Schnabel and that says something. Schnabel, a painter and filmmaker, famously infuriated the critic Robert Hughes, who held him up as an example of all that was shabby in postmodernism. Hughes was wrong. Any critic who draws an aesthetic line in the sand should be aware that the next wave will wash over it.

Schnabel’s films are, broadly, about artists and what drives them. He is drawn to outsiders. Basquiat (1996) portrayed the street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Before Night Falls (2000) was about the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who daringly escaped homophobic Cuba to find freedom in New York and then died of an AIDS-related illness. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) told the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered “locked-in syndrome” after a massive stroke but learned, laboriously, to write, and described his condition in a memoir published just before he died.

Van Gogh is a natural subject for a director fascinated by the process of creating. In Willem Dafoe (nominated for best actor in the Academy Awards) he has found an unforgettable van Gogh. His Vincent is both lonely and yearning — longing for a community of fellow artists, of friendships in Arles. He is also obsessed with showing those around him the world he sees. That gaunt face, that huge jaw shaded by the artist’s beard, is made for van Gogh, and we spend considerable time reading it. Despite a couple of cheesy lines, it’s a compelling performance of shifting moods. Elation, bliss, bewilderment, misery. Nothing overstated.

Broadly, At Eternity’s Gate tells a story of the last years of van Gogh’s life, his passage to Arles, his bonds and his missteps in the community there, his confinement in a lunatic asylum, his release, and his death.

It’s an exceptionally strong cast. Good actors like working with Schnabel: Oscar Isaac as Gauguin, Rupert Friend as Theo, Mads Mikkelsen as a compassionate pastor, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, Mathieu Amalric as Dr Gachet and, in a single arresting scene in an asylum, the great Niels Arestrup.

There are two contentious things about this film. One is the version Schnabel gives us of van Gogh’s death, at thirty-seven, by gunshot wound to the stomach. The accepted version is suicide, but Schnabel has embraced the theory posed by two recent biographers, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, that the painter was shot accidentally by others. (There is some evidence, both forensic and circumstantial, to support this.)

The other issue is the cinematography. Director of photography Benoît Delhomme uses a handheld camera for many sequences in an attempt to show how the artist sees the light and landscape. At times he uses a dioptre, which gives more depth of field but splits the image. Most of the time, this shaky pursuit of light in nature works, and enhances the mood. But there’s just a little too much bobbing through wheatfields. Mercifully, key scenes are not shot this way.

Despite the wobbles, this is a rewarding film that manages to show not just a way of seeing but a state of mind. There is no doubt that van Gogh suffered considerable mental torment. His great bursts of productivity, broken by misery, may well have been bipolar.

We will never really know. But I am sure we will never see a better van Gogh than this one. •

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The tensions between the two women have been fodder for theatre and opera as well as film. It was German polymath Friedrich Schiller’s verse play Maria Stuart (1800) that first portrayed the irresistible but non-existent meeting between Mary and Elizabeth at Fotheringhay Castle. That highlight of Schiller’s play, which is currently being performed at London’s Almeida Theatre, is certainly my most vivid memory of the 1958 production at the Old Vic. It is also the dramatic climax of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda, which had its premiere at La Scala, Milan, in 1935, and has since been a regular in the world’s most famous opera houses. As the famous line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance­ goes, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Mary Queen of Scots is the first film for director Josie Rourke, whose prolific theatre background includes time as artistic director of London’s Donmar Warehouse, where she directed dozens of plays both classic and modern. In Mary, working from Beau Willimon’s screenplay based on John Guy’s book, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart, she grapples with a series of potentially dangerous historical oppositions.

The film is bookended with titles reporting historical facts, as if to persuade us of its authenticity. Rourke is also careful about dates: the first such title is “England 1587,” the year of the execution; the second, shortly after, whisks us back to “Scotland 1561,” when Mary, the Catholic widow of the French king, returns to Scotland, where she is the object of a seaside rescue.

My critical advice is not to worry too much about the minutiae of history. The drama is probably true enough in a general way, if not necessarily in detail — but it’s a film, not a historical tract. By “in a general way,” I mean Elizabeth’s growing sense of the threat posed by her Scottish cousin Mary, a threat that she can only entirely eliminate by ordering Mary’s execution.

It’s best to focus instead on the film’s core drama — the two queens in their respective realms, with their surrounding courtiers and lovers — and on how Rourke builds the tensions between the two. With such notable collaborators as production designer James Merifield and costume designer Alexandra Byrne, she works the contrast between the two women with insight and sympathy and keeps them at the forefront of our interest.

The film opens with a view from behind as Mary (Saoirse Ronan) prays. She is then stripped of her jacket to reveal a vivid red undergarment (or is it a dress?) and led to the chopping block, at which point the film cuts back to the 1561 seashore. The poignancy of her short life and its tribulations is vividly enacted in this juxtaposition, and the image of the red garment will recur at the end of the film.

Between these images, the film creates a persuasive sense of the differing worlds the two women inhabit, adeptly rendered by John Mathieson’s camera. Away from the seashore, Mary is seen proudly seated on horseback as she and her followers make their way through desolate, hilly country to the gloomy Holyrood Palace, where she hugs the half-brother from whom she has been separated during her sojourn in France. In the much grander English court, Elizabeth (Margot Robbie), in chilly discussion with advisers, learns of Mary’s return.

Rourke moves the film back and forth between the two strong-minded women, each determined not to be constrained by gender, their insistence making the film very timely for the proponents of #MeToo. But the film’s real strength derives from its two central performances: it could scarcely have done better than the Irish Ronan and the Australian Robbie to carry the narrative’s weight. Ronan in particular, beneath a touching simplicity, conveys a determination to have what she believes is her due; Robbie strikingly incarnates the command of a woman who has always had her way. In a film based on oppositions of various kinds, theirs provides the spine.

Each is surrounded by hordes of scruffy males whose facial growths can make them difficult to distinguish. From time to time it’s possible to distinguish, say, Guy Pearce as Lord Burghley or David Tennant as Presbyterian reformer John Knox, who is apt to denounce Mary from the pulpit as a “harlot.” These and other actors could have been given more to work with in the interests of clarifying the dangerous oppositions — Scotland vs England, Catholicism vs Protestantism — that billow around the regal pair.

The film’s design and lighting sharply render the contrasts between the two countries. Scotland is made to appear both gloomier and less confined than England, where life seems chiefly lived in lavish interiors. We witness a border skirmish and several armed encounters, and the film is not without ideas, but its real potency is in the conflict that can only end tragically for one of these formidable women. Rourke’s stars are more than equal to these demands. •

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Superficially, The Favourite is a lesbian bodice-ripper of high style. There are plenty of these in print but few on the screen, apart from the 2002 BBC series Tipping the Velvet and Hulu’s recent Harlots, screening on SBS. This story of two favourites — Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (a very spunky Rachel Weisz), and a young cousin, Abigail (Emma Stone, cunning, wide-eyed and flirty) — manoeuvring for the position of the Queen’s favourite at the court of the last Stuart monarch is enjoyable in the way Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988) is enjoyable. Sexual power is a huge part of their armatures. There is spite, and revenge, and there is also desperation. As the obese, gout-afflicted Queen, Olivia Colman gives a performance completely without vanity, in which her loneliness, physical pain and emotional dependence are underscored.

With this, his sixth film, and his first with a big budget, Yorgos Lanthimos has great fun in the formal spaces of Hatfield House. He uses the long corridors and a fisheye lens to emphasise the isolation of the monarch and the desperation of the scrambling favourites. The production design is equally witty. Within these spaces, The Favourite achieves occasional eroticism: it does so, moreover, from the point of view of a disabled, dependent woman. Dependent she may be, but not stupid. She can tough it out when she must.

Historically, Anne was shrewder and smarter than the film allows her to be. She manoeuvred between Whigs and Tories, between Stuart secessionists, Scots and English, to advance the cause of a united and Protestant Great Britain. (She was raised an Anglican, despite her father’s secret defection to Catholicism.) I doubt that a single film could adequately encompass the politics, any more than a single film could encompass the nightmare historical drama that is Brexit. (The temptation to frame Anne as an icon of a united Great Britain has thankfully been resisted.) We see her here, widowed, midway through her reign, with factions jockeying either for more troops for the war of the Spanish succession, or for a complete pull-out. Sarah, of course, wants her husband, the old Duke, to have more troops.

Deborah Davis wrote the original script, first as a radio play. Does stripping out much of the politics, as Lanthimos and his second screenwriter Tony McNamara have done, make this a caricature?

Not completely. It is the first duty of British queens and princesses to breed. Decades ago, historian Antonia Fraser drew attention to the huge pressures on women of that time, high-born and low, to make babies. The lower orders bred their own labour; women were breedstock and labourers both. The women of the ruling class were equally bound, and underneath the trappings of royal romance, this is still true, though Hilary Mantel was pilloried for saying so.

Between her marriage at seventeen and her husband’s death when she was thirty-five, Anne endured seventeen pregnancies. Seventeen. Twelve miscarriages and five live births, four of whom died as infants. Only one, William, Duke of Gloucester, lived out his childhood, and he died at eleven, leaving his parents grieving. Imagine the punishing cycles of hope, sorrow and emotional distancing Anne endured. And survived. While running a kingdom.

Beside these facts, skirmishes about whether Sarah pleasured Anne or, as Sarah claimed, Abigail did, are trivial, and so are social media arguments about the history of cunnilingus and #MeToo-ish doubts about whether it’s a good idea to show three powerful women as able, at times, to be amoral and cruel. The Favourite is fiction, and the filmmaker may do as he wishes. In previous films Lanthimos has shown his fascination with the cruelties people may inflict on each other, for pleasure or out of boredom or for survival. Here he has reined it in, just a little. His is not a view of human nature that I share, but it could be a metaphor for the age.

In bringing us back to the personal, Lanthimos and his screenwriters use a clever metaphor to suggest Anne’s displaced maternalism, but his film, and Colman’s towering performance, left me wondering. Was Anne’s maternalism entirely projected onto the wider realm? Hers was not a matriarchy. There were too many powerful men manoeuvring about her, and the film shows us that. But she used what power she had astutely.

Managing to play off warring factions and unite a kingdom while her body slowly weakened, puffed, ached and drained her is a quite remarkable achievement. Despite Lanthimos’s fascination with cruelty, this revenge comedy turned tragedy sent me out with a whole stack of poignant questions. And that’s not a bad thing.

Green Book, from director Peter Farrelly, sets out to be a heart-warming parable about black–white friendship and the overcoming of prejudice. It’s comforting as custard. Or pasta. Or fried chicken. There’s a lot of comfort food in this film, but not much food for thought. It will challenge very few prejudices.

Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, The House of Cards, The Hunger Games) plays real-life musician Don Shirley, a brilliant classical composer and pianist who welded many forms. Shirley believed in the power of music to change people’s feelings, and for a time trained as a psychologist to demonstrate this, running real experiments with audiences in Cuba. In the 1960s, as a deliberate challenge to race segregation laws, he put aside an international classical music career to tour America with a jazz quartet. (The Negro Motorist Green Book, referenced in the film’s title, was a guide for non-whites seeking accommodation in the segregationist states.)

Viggo Mortensen plays Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, hired as Shirley’s driver and security guard. Together, Ali and Mortensen give this film considerable class. Mortensen put on forty pounds to play Vallelonga, and food plays as emotional a part as music in this film. There’s a weird fascination to be had in remembering the once-beautiful youth of his early films and the assured Strider of The Lord of the Rings while he is up there on a big screen stuffing his face.

The film plays off Shirley’s fastidiousness against Vallelonga’s wolfish appetites. Ali’s Shirley is quite startlingly elongated, and ramrod straight. The story picks its way through his closeted homosexuality: it’s there, but the psychological journey is actually the straight white man’s. There’s a fine dance here between exceptional actors, but dramatically this is a predictable film, every move signalled ahead. No insights, no new questions raised to disturb any complacency about the segregationist battles of the sixties. It’s engaging enough to send one out sated, but by the time we got to soul food I began to feel queasy. If this film’s glimpse of America’s segregationist history beats Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman it will do nothing to help Americans reconsider their past.

Finally, to Loro, Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Silvio Berlusconi, the salesman who launched his own political party to ward off judicial attacks on his tax evasion and corruption. Cut together from two films I saw last year in Italy, it runs almost three hours in our cinemas.

Though Sorrentino had hopes, Loro didn’t make the Oscar cut. He was also working on a second series of the deliciously cinematic television show The Young Pope, seen in Australia in 2017. A director can only handle so much, so Loro was released in two parts in Italian cinemas but didn’t make it to Cannes. That Sorrentino’s usual Italian co-financer, Medusa Films, is owned by Berlusconi’s Mediaset can’t have helped finesse it through to release.

The filmmaker had plenty to work with. Starting as a property developer in Milan, Berlusconi employed cajolery, the exchange of favours, and tax evasion to build his wealth. His first television station drew viewers by employing housewives to perform in striptease competitions, capturing an audience for his real estate promotions.

In a sense, Berlusconi was the prototype of Trump and Morrison. In the shambles of Italian politics after the tangentopoli scandals of the eighties and nineties, this marketeer saw a vacuum and created Forza Italia as the party symbolising Italian aspirations. Indeed, he used his media empire to reinforce those aspirations. For young men, it was to be a footballer (he bought AC Milan); for women, it was to be a velina prancing about on screen to keep Italians watching everything from a quiz show to a political commentary. George Clooney was once engaged to one.

In Italian, Loro means them. As in us and them. There is very little us in Loro, or at least in the three-hour version screening in Australia. In this version, the figure embodying these aspirations, a young hustler and pimp from Sicily played by Riccardo Scamarcio, fails to engage. Toni Servillo, whose performances have built Sorrentino’s career, does better as the aged Berlusconi. With a fixed rictus smile and the famous, by now rigid, hair transplant, he’s like a ghostly Robert Mugabe.

There are some terrific set pieces in this film. Berlusconi’s luxury villa in Sardinia, with its artificial lake, mechanical volcano and curious sheep (presumably also representing us) makes great absurdist comedy of the fantasies of a man with immense will and limited imagination. In a tour de force scene, Servillo’s Berlusconi tests his marketing skills by cold-calling a woman chosen at random, to sell her a non-existent apartment. But really, even this cut-down version of Loro is baggy, and the story seems to have lost some of its rhythms. At times it’s tedious, like a party from which there is no escape. (And Sorrentino is very fond of party scenes.)

Other attempts have been made to capture Berlusconi and Berlusconism on film. Nanni Moretti tried, and failed, with The Caiman in 2006. That film primarily signalled the immense media power Berlusconi wields. The best I’ve seen is Videocracy, a 2009 documentary in which Erik Gandini, a Swedish Italian, examined the way Berlusconi shaped Italian aspirations. Loro amplifies most of Gandini’s points, and makes another: the salesman and former crooner wants to be loved.

The real Berlusconi, now eighty-two, may still contemplate a bid for the Italian presidency, vacant in 2022. He’s come back before. He’s served a piddling six months of community service for tax evasion, and Italy’s Supreme Court has cleared the way for his return to elected office. Given the power the hard right is exercising in Italian politics, that’s not a pretty thought. •

The post Dangerous liaisons appeared first on Inside Story.

And the third time as vaudeville? Adam McKay’s cinema account of the rise and rise of Dick Cheney, White House staffer to Richard Nixon, defence secretary to George H.W. Bush and vice-president to George W. Bush, gives us history as a series of chilling acts, tricked up with directorial gimmicks. This is Vice, and it is being heavily promoted in the Oscar race.

Vice is the story of a man who never got to be president but built his own empire in the White House. It was Cheney who oversaw Operation Desert Storm for Bush Snr, became president and CEO of Halliburton, a company that profited immensely from America’s wars, and then, as vice-president to Bush Jnr, used dodgy intelligence to claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and went on to oversee the invasion of Iraq, the setting up of Guantanamo Bay, the legal opinions authorising torture, and Abu Ghraib. Advised by a lawyer named David Addington, Cheney vastly expanded presidential control of the executive — the departments of state, defence, and so on — under the doctrine of “unitary executive power.” McKay’s exploration of this thesis, which essentially rejects most efforts of Congress to rein in presidential adventures, is one of the most illuminating parts of this film.

McKay ran the writers’ room for Saturday Night Live before moving to film with such comedy hits as Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Those were fun. Then he turned to serious stuff, and made The Big Short (2015), which used Jennifer Lopez, and Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, to explain the intricacies of subprime mortgages. Never let your audience become bored, right? They have short attention spans. Let’s not get too, uh — heavy.

McKay’s devices make Vice fly along, skittering from one piece of political bastardry to the next, and give little time for contemplation. Yet these attention-grabbing techniques make for an oddly unbalanced film because, at the centre, is a strong performance from Christian Bale, overweight and lumbering, playing Cheney with terse gravitas. Bale gives Cheney such a slow reaction time when confronted with crisis it’s a wonder the man ever passed a driving test. Maybe he didn’t. He was twice charged with driving under the influence at twenty-one. Then he married Lynne (Amy Adams), who is credited with straightening him up.

Under her bright, preppy exterior she’s a Republican warrior as ambitious as her spouse. One of the film’s most diverting sequences has her conferring with him in the marital bed, slipping into Shakespearean dialogue as they plot. Sam Rockwell, always convincing, plays a butterfly-brained George W. Bush, Cheney’s patsy. Steve Carrell, less convincing, plays Donald Rumsfeld.

Cheney’s career is huge, so this film has a lot of exposition to manage. The first part is heavy with voice-over, and McKay invents an army veteran called Kurt (Jesse Piemons) to do much of it. As in The Big Short, the film breaks the fourth wall at times to have characters talk direct to camera. I found the barrage of directorial gimmickry irritating rather in the way the ABC television series The Checkout became irritating as it dolled up excellent research with sketch comedy. But there were also times, as the film described how Cheney traduced presidential power and built his secretive empire, when I was riveted. How did he get away with this?

Cheney’s younger daughter, Mary, came out as gay at college. McKay is at pains to give Cheney credit for holding back conservative campaigns against same-sex marriage in Bush’s time, though when their elder daughter Liz runs for Congress, he breaks this promise at Lynne’s urging.

How accurate is this depiction of Cheney? His final, unrepentant soliloquy to camera is apparently built verbatim from Cheney’s public utterances. But perhaps we’ll never know the full story, because during Cheney’s years Bush’s White House “lost” twenty-two million emails from a server owned by the Republican Party.

If you’re interested in American politics, Vice is undoubtedly a film to see, if not necessarily to admire. Sit through the final credits and you will see a misjudged directorial sequence attempting to frame audience reactions in a way that underlines McKay’s shortcomings. You can take the writer out of Saturday Night Live but you can’t necessarily take Saturday Night Live out of the writer. 

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War is as thrilling as it is beautiful. The music makes it so. Because the film matches sadness and exultation so exquisitely, it led me to ponder the relationship between melancholy and melodrama.

This is the story of a love affair begun in Poland during the 1950s, and of lovers constantly parting and reuniting. The political tensions that divide them are explicit but never laboured. It’s the story of two lovers who can never quite be together.

Joanna Kulig is Zuzanna, or “Zula,” a young singer who catches the eye of two musicians travelling the countryside recording folk songs and teaching young communists to perform them. Wictor (Tomasz Kot) is one of the musicians, a pianist who believes young Zula has a spark. His colleague isn’t sure: the girl blagged her way into the auditions and has served time in prison. They ask her why. “My father mistook me for my mother,” she says. “I used a knife to show him I wasn’t.” She passes probation and joins the troupe, which gains the approval of visiting party dignitaries.

The two become lovers, but Zula also warns Wiktor she is spying on him, reporting his words and actions to the commissar (Borys Szyc), who is her patron. When the troupe is invited to perform in Berlin, Wiktor sees a chance to defect, and urges Zula to join him. She is the shrewder, or more cautious, of the two. The film’s second act is set in the émigré bars of Paris; the third back in Poland, where the pair’s roles are in a sense reversed.

Pawlikowski, who based this love story loosely on that of his parents, has shot the film in black and white. Every shot is considered, many are dazzling and the screenplay’s sweep is handled with impressive economy. The performances are strikingly good, and Kot’s reserved intensity plays beautifully against Kulig’s tempestuousness.

Music powers the emotions of the film and it ranges wide: from the Polish folk song “Dwa Serduszka” (“Two Hearts”), plaintively performed a cappella then syncopated as a number for the troupe, through Cole Porter, Gershwin, Chopin (of course), Bill Haley, and Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. Much is performed onscreen, including a drunken, impudent samba danced by Kulig. Kudos to arranger Marcin Masecki, and to all the musicians who contributed to this near-flawless film. •

The post Running hot and cold appeared first on Inside Story.

In recent times, Netflix has scored a resounding triumph with The Crown, about to begin its third series, and TV networks have screened three seasons of Victoria, the three-part docudrama Elizabeth I, and numerous series about the contemporary royals. On the big screen, though, the period pieces are probably the most vivid, and two lavish productions highlighting regal women have appeared in Australian cinemas within weeks of each other. These are The Favourite, which opened on Boxing Day, and Mary Queen of Scots, a mid-January release. The former highlights the early-eighteenth-century reign of Queen Anne, the latter the tricky relationship between its eponym and Elizabeth I, both of whom have in the past attracted many formidable actresses, including Katharine Hepburn (Mary) and Bette Davis (Elizabeth).

Both the new films are concerned with the potentially lethal relations between a monarch and those around her, whether on a personal level — and The Favourite especially gets very personal indeed — or in uneasy political times. The threat of war, civil or otherwise, and the difficulties confronting women in these majestic roles make for absorbing drama, and offer rewarding roles for some of the most compelling performers in film today.

Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, reigned from 1702 to 1714, during which time England and Scotland became Great Britain, and her majesty’s government was attempting to restrain French and Spanish military interventions. My only serious criticism of the film is that it might have provided a more clearly defined political and military setting for the wittily and uncompromisingly conceived personal dealings that account for its narrative core. I am not sufficiently well informed about the facts of Anne’s reign, domestic or political, to know just how accurate the film is in its representation.

As we know, Shakespeare often played fast and loose with the facts in his history plays, and that doesn’t trouble most of us when we respond to what he has made of them. Without suggesting that The Favourite aspires to this level, I would say that the innovative Greek director, Yorgos Lanthimos (of The Lobster fame) has made an absorbing drama of the relationships at the film’s heart, and of the power tussles on every side of them.

The Favourite opens as a very severe-looking Anne (Olivia Colman) is having the finishing touches applied to her dress. She turns to smile at Sarah, Lady Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), and their intimacy is at once implied, with the hint that Sarah may well have the upper hand. The threat to whatever is the nature of their relationship is introduced when Abigail (Emma Stone), a mud-spattered young woman who has fallen out of a carriage, arrives at the palace and proves to be a relative of Sarah. She seeks employment at the palace and the basis is set for her to work her way up the hierarchy until she will challenge Sarah’s privileged position with the Queen.

In witty and telling scenes, Anne deals with her ludicrously bewigged politicians, including the foppish Harley (Nicholas Hoult), described as “a useful ally but a dangerous enemy.” There is talk of increased land tax to cover the expenses of war, and Harley warns the Queen that the people are turning against her because of the way the war is going. But it is almost as if Lanthimos regards such matters as little more than background for the key figures in the film’s tapestry — the three women — and what is going on among them.

Early on, it is startling to hear how Sarah talks to Anne. “You look like a badger” is her response to the Queen’s make-up, or later: “You do not lisp, but you are mad.” Only Sarah can address her in this way, and this familiarity hints at the intimacy on all levels that exists between them — and also the sense of Sarah’s having the upper hand, at least behind closed doors. Her primacy is first threatened when Abigail, still at servant level, finds a herbal remedy for the Queen’s inflamed legs.

Outlining the major plot trajectory in this linear way undervalues the film’s richly textured way of acquainting us with the pushes and pulls of power. A shooting party scene with Abigail and Sarah competing for kills says more than mere words, as do those shots of the Queen’s increasingly bedraggled appearance as her health declines. But mention of words reminds me that they are anything but “mere” in this film, both in the sort of outspokenness attributed to the women and in the prevalence of words beginning with “f” or “c,” not to forget a tasteful reference to “fingers in your arse.” These usages are shocking but appropriate for making us aware of the kind of life — a life often of vicious power play — that is being conducted in the exquisite interiors of the palace. As well, there are locutions (such as “just the ticket!”) that may not have been common at Anne’s court but help effect an easy compromise between her time and ours.

The performances of the three women are beyond praise, and they could easily find themselves in competition with each other at Oscar time. Colman, who came unforgettably to attention in the first series of Broadchurch (2013), has since established herself as one of those actors who so effortlessly inhabits a role that one can scarcely imagine her as having any other existence. As Anne, she bravely submits to a physical journey from the plain to the grotesque and is moving in her attempts to grapple with the facts of her fraught existence. Her latest royal incarnation is as the older Elizabeth in the third series of The Crown. Weisz and Stone imbue their portrayals of Sarah and Abigail with exactly the right blend of ambition, the exercise of power and the tug of sexual urges. Both have already been awarded Oscars, so perhaps they could stand aside and leave the way open for Colman to join them?

Robbie Ryan’s stunning cinematography, with fisheye lens distortions that seem to encircle the constrained lives of the palace, and Fiona Crombie’s equally ravishing production design make this a film that is as much a treat for the eye as it is for the mind. •

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Since The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), his first brush with cinema, McEwan has written the screenplays for several of the screen versions of his novels, and this is again the case with The Children Act, an absorbing adaptation of one of his toughest works. He is reunited here after twenty-five years with director Richard Eyre, who also directed The Ploughman’s Lunch. Eyre, in a sort of parallel with McEwan, has also won plaudits for achievements in two media: not only has he directed such memorable screen fare as the two Judi Dench starrers, Iris (2001) and Notes on a Scandal (2006), but he is also a formidable, award-winning stage director.

The third name that gets one excited about the new film is that of Emma Thompson, and I’ll come back to her shortly. Enough to say now that her performance holds together McEwan’s complexity of ideas and the subtleties of Eyre’s direction. It’s not all that common to find a film dealing in ideas, but in this matter The Children Act is wholly intended for grown-ups — or for very alert teenagers like the boy whose plight is at the centre of its drama and dialectic. McEwan obviously had to shrink his novel in the interests of the film’s running-time, but he has contrived to retain — and dramatise — the same sense of belief and actuality, and law and morality, pulling at each other.

Thompson plays Fiona Maye, a High Court judge we first glimpse typing away at night in the vast apartment block where she lives with her husband Jack (Stanley Tucci), who soon won’t be living there. Her obsession with her work in the family division has reached the point where it has undermined her marriage. The film makes quite clear how and why the sorts of cases on which she has to pronounce judgement might have led to this pass.

The drama of her life is in her handling of such demanding possibilities. She simply can’t respond to her husband’s suggestion of a night at the opera — nor to his bald statement, “I want an affair.” “When did we last have sex?” he asks, and she can’t remember. What is persuasive is the way the film manages to suggest that they may love each other but that their marriage is foundering because “the law can take over your life.” Jack, a decent but now sexually needy man, leaves.

Fiona’s most recent court experience has involved the proposed separation of conjoined twins: either she allows it to go ahead, in which case one will die because of key shared organs, or she does not, in which case both will die. Either outcome will bring grief to the parents, but she has to be guided by what the law allows or, indeed, requires. “This is a court of law, not of morals,” she says from the bench with impressive command and dignity.

This may well be the central issue of all Fiona’s decisions, but the film also suggests persuasively that she is partly the product of this requirement of her profession. Perhaps it stands in the way of any compromise in her domestic life.

The case at the film’s heart involves a boy of seventeen, Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead), who will die of leukaemia without the blood transfusion that he and his Jehovah’s Witness parents are refusing. The film’s emotional charge is toughened, but never sentimentalised, by Fiona’s own childlessness, as well as by the marriage disintegration, but in her magisterial grasp of the sources of strain Thompson enjoins unfailing empathy in the viewer. Fiona is work-bound and has been barely aware of the marital aridity in which she and Jack have been living.

The case of Adam Henry unsettles her professional firmness. The media scrum outside the court contrasts with the rigour of the courtroom, where she presides over the hearing in which medical experts, counsels for and against the transfusion, and the father all put their cases. Andrew Dunn’s camera prowls the courtroom, focusing on each in turn, before moving very slowly to Fiona’s face as she ponders the various testimonies. She must weigh the prediction of an expert witness — that it will be “a horrible death” — against what the Henrys see as the ultimate test of their faith.

The turning point comes when Fiona realises that, after so much careful listening, she needs to speak to Adam himself. The film moves to the hospital, where a surprising and moving rapport is struck between the two: the highly intelligent seventeen-year-old boy and the fifty-nine-year-old judge. For those unfamiliar with the book and planning to see the film, I won’t give further details, except to say that, though touching and wholly convincing, their relationship is not what you might expect, and it is acted with superb control of nuance by Thompson and Whitehead.

I should add that the cast is full of striking character players — including Nicholas Jones as the steely expert witness and, in a witty three-minute cameo, Rupert Vansittart as a wildly sceptical colleague of Fiona’s — which enrich the texture of this fluently written and directed film with its equal respect for ideas and narrative power. •

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And what a film. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a fictionalised memoir of his childhood — an extension, if you like, of Y Tu Mamá También, the riotous road movie that made his reputation and that of the young actor Gael García Bernal. That film was a celebration of youthful exuberance, a tender coming-of-age movie. Roma, set in the suburb of that name in Mexico City during 1970–71, takes us back further, to a time when a young family is being held together by a working mother and two maids, Cleo and Adela. It is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) who nurtures the children, dressing them, taking them to school, giving them dinner, settling them to lessons. Hers is the tender care to which they return. Adela (Nancy García) rules the kitchen.

Sofía (Marina de Tavira), the mother, is dealing with an enormous challenge. The father is away on business. Mostly. We do see his hand in an opening sequence, holding an ashy cigarette while attempting to squeeze an enormous American car into the narrow carriageway of the old deco apartment. Later, we see Cleo carry his suitcases out to a smaller car in which he makes his getaway to a life elsewhere.

Cleo (in real life Libo, still alive at ninety) is the centre of this story as the four children come to realise their father has left them. At first their mother shelters them from the news — he’s at a conference or on attachment to a research facility in North America — but small glimpses, overheard conversations and Cleo’s instructions to write to their father combine to create a growing understanding among the children.

Cleo’s story — an unwanted pregnancy to a martial arts–addicted boyfriend and the choice she made to have an abortion — gives glimpses of the social and political context of Mexico at the time. When she tracks down her opportunist lover he is training with a group of paramilitary volunteers. He doesn’t want to know her or to hear about her pregnancy. A scene on a makeshift barrio drill ground, where her lover is among those being trained by a North American expert, is sweetly comic.

She glimpses him once more in the havoc surrounding the Corpus Christi massacre of June 1971, in which 120 students were gunned down by Los Halcones, a group of CIA-trained paramilitaries. Cuarón handles this scene imaginatively: with Cleo, we see it through a slow tracking shot, looking down from the window of a furniture store. The muffled shots, the stunned realisation that students are falling, the panic as demonstrators and bystanders seek refuge in the store — Roma evokes a massacre more effectively than any other contemporary film I can recall.

Roma is full of cinematic riches. A Christmas excursion to an uncle’s estate for a bizarre shooting trip; a New Year’s Eve carnivale at a friend’s estancia, where costumed guests carouse then the next day help put out a forest fire triggered by fireworks; a dramatic near-drowning at the seaside. Sequence after sequence creates images that glow in the memory.

This is one of the best memoir films I’ve seen since Fellini’s Amarcord, and it is touring cinemas with the Latin American Film Festival. Together with ACMI, which hosted the Melbourne screenings, Palace has managed to break the stand-off between Netflix and cinema exhibitors, which began with a dispute at Cannes in 2017.

Palace’s strategy of hosting foreign-language film festivals is now well established, and is becoming more important as the exhibition and distribution landscape changes. Along with the annual capital city film festivals, this is where film lovers will find the year’s screen treasures. Cuarón is right to say that Roma deserves the big screen. The dates are here, and it will also pop up again at ACMI and may well appear in cinemas in other states. The Netflix release will follow.

Long ago I realised that the best documentaries demand two things from film-makers: they must embrace their subjects and simultaneously stand back from them.

These days I would add a third observation: the very best documentary-makers not only embrace their subjects but walk alongside them, for as long as it takes. This is a hallmark of the films of Curtis Levy, honoured this year with Australia’s highest documentary film accolade, the Stanley Hawes Award.

Levy walked alongside Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid (known as Gus Dur) during the crucial transition to democracy after the fall of the Suharto regime. They had met ten years earlier when Gus Dur was a popular Islamic leader and Levy was filming the ABC series on Indonesia, Riding the Tiger. Levy’s “minder” on the series was Fakhri Amrullah Hamka, the son of a revered Islamic leader, and Hamka helped him negotiate his way through various military and police obstacles to astutely scrutinise power in Indonesia.

Gus Dur trusted Levy and invited him into the palace to live and film alongside him during a period when the president was wrestling with the military. The resulting film, High Noon in Jakarta (2009), is intimate and hilarious. Much later, the Australian government got into big trouble for listening to phone calls in and out of the palace; ironically, Levy was allowed to film many of the president’s phone calls. “The Australian government should have kept me on in the palace,” he joked.

More recently, Levy has walked alongside Terry Hicks, father of Guantanamo Bay political prisoner David Hicks, as he went first to Afghanistan to retrace David’s steps and then to New York, where he stood in a cage to protest at his son’s imprisonment. Levy’s film, The President versus David Hicks (2004), shows the remarkable growth of insight and courage in a man with little education who was determined not to forsake his son.

Levy has made other notable films, including the magnificent documentary Hephzibah (1998), a portrait of pianist Hephzibah Menuhin based on a trove of her letters and drawing on the friendship she formed with Levy’s mother during her stay in Australia. He was given incredible access to her private life.

At an OzDox tribute in Sydney this week, Levy’s former partner Christine Olsen (screenwriter of Rabbit-Proof Fence) recalled a tussle the pair had over the focus of the documentary — and particularly over Hephzibah’s decision to leave her children to the care of their squatter father and his family in order to work alongside, and eventually marry, social reformer Richard Hauser (father of Eva Cox).

In the audience at the OzDox tribute was another film-maker, James Ricketson, recently released from prison in Cambodia. He was looking well and contemplating a return to that country to continue working with his two adopted children.

When Ricketson was imprisoned in Cambodia in June 2017, a huddle of Australian film directors got together to decide how to help. Among them were Phillip Noyce, whose assistant director Ricketson once was, and Curtis Levy. A seasoned Asia traveller, Levy offered to go to Cambodia to tell Ricketson he was not alone and forgotten. Somehow he got there and gained access to the prison. Levy contracted tropical dysentery on that visit, and ended up fighting for his life in a Sydney hospital. He spent seven weeks in intensive care and almost died. Twice.

But Levy is, as documentary-maker Bob Connolly remarked, “a stubborn old bugger.” Recovered now, and remarkably spry, Levy says he has a couple more films he wants to make. The OzDox tribute ended with a hilarious clip from his last film, The Matilda Candidate (2009), in which he turned the camera on himself and stood as an election candidate on a single platform: that Australia should adopt “Waltzing Matilda” as the national anthem when we become a republic.

The serious intent was to unpack the layers of history embedded in the song, but in the process Levy persuaded his producer friend Jo Smith to act as his campaign manager. She turned out to be a monarchist, and the camera catches some furious arguments between them over the positioning of campaign boards and attempts to fit a wheezing electronic harmonium into the boot of a too-small car after it turned out to play “The Wedding March” instead of “Matilda.” A delightful film. •

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Colourisation has been around for a long time and has had a chequered history, from the kind of hand-tinting first attempted at the end of the nineteenth century to the strange effect of coloured filters applied to silent film — suddenly turning the screen from black-and-white to a vertigo-inducing red or blue — and the lame colourisation of black-and-white classics in the first days of VHS, which gave Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, among others, a disconcertingly vampiric look. Those fads didn’t last; and notwithstanding the success with audiences of They Shall Not Grow Old, it is unlikely that a new enthusiasm for colourisation will take off, not least because of the height of the bar. These days our expectations of what constitutes “living” colour are far more demanding than they were in the 1890s or 1920s or 1980s.

Leaving aside the question of whether the process, however sophisticated, can ever be entirely convincing, there is no doubt that the colourised footage in They Shall Not Grow Old has had a tremendous impact on those who have seen it. The point in the film at which old black-and-white footage morphs into colour and the image simultaneously expands to fill the entire screen, a point that comes about twenty minutes in, does rather take the breath away, even on repeated viewings. When, towards the end of the film, the process happens in reverse, and we are taken back to the smaller, black-and-white world, it feels as if the reanimated soldiers are once again moving away from us, back into history.

The long central section of the film, much of it in newly applied colour and focusing on the front itself, is thus bookended by a more old-fashioned-looking, historical-feeling introduction and conclusion, covering the war’s build-up and aftermath. These beginning and concluding sections are carefully counterbalanced, the latter taking up and repeating themes, and sometimes reusing footage, from the former.

The common humanity and fellow feeling of the British and German troops, for instance, is highlighted at both the beginning and the end of the film. A voice recalls being at a dinner following a game of football with an opposing team from Germany when they received word that war has been declared. By common consent, the two teams agreed not to spoil things but to continue with their evening’s enjoyment. “As far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow.” Towards the end of the film, when the Germans are surrendering in numbers and peace is in sight, we see soldiers from the opposing sides laughing and trading helmets, posing for the cameras.

They Shall Not Grow Old makes inventive use of audio archives too, stitching together extracts from interviews with survivors, recorded some half a century later, to form what is in effect a commentary on and elucidation of what we see unfolding on screen. The film’s sound design seems to have been influenced by the phenomenon of podcasting and its emphasis on the natural-sounding, apparently untutored voice. Interestingly, some of these interviews were also recorded on film, but we hear only the voices. Moreover, these voices remain unattributed, at least until the final credits, and even then we are unable to link a particular name with a particular voice.

Instead we are encouraged to hear the voices as a collective interpretation of the war, more than as a series of individual comments and recollections. The archival sources — footage and still images from the time, together with the later audio material, some of it recorded for the BBC’s influential series The Great War (1964) — have been meshed with remarkable delicacy and sensitivity, to complement and illuminate one another. Jackson has been quite explicit in interviews about his intention. “I didn’t want individual stories about individuals. I wanted it to be what it ended up being: 120 men telling a single story.” (For those interested in hearing more, all fifty-six episodes of the BBC’s compelling radio series, the recently broadcast Voices of the First World War, drawn from the BBC’s own archives and those of the Imperial War Museum, are available as a podcast.)

Occasionally, when forensic lip-readers have been deployed to determine what silently moving lips are actually saying, the voices of actors have been dubbed in, lending the smoothed out, colourised footage a greater and even eerier immediacy. The voices illuminate the images, and the images illustrate what the voices are describing, whether it be food or latrines or what it was like to be gassed.

Remarkably, though, Jackson manages this process while never allowing us to make simple connections between the voices we hear and the faces we see. Apart from the use of superimposed background noise — explosions, indistinct chatter, a laugh — and those few instances where we can see that the person on screen is actually speaking and that what he is saying has been cleverly dubbed in, apart from those we remain clear in our minds that the voice does not belong to the face. It is a universal experience that is being recreated, by implication of other wars as well as of this one.

“It was a different war from year to year,” says one of the first voices we hear, and the film follows that cue, the tone growing progressively darker as more and more men are wounded and killed. In that sense, it is a conventional narrative of the war, conforming to the modern understanding of its progress that we have derived from numerous other sources. Yet it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that all these young men, who are made so alive with the help of technical wizardry, were shortly to die in battle, even as we know that this cannot be true, given that we are hearing the voices of some of their comrades as recorded half a century later.

The names of these comrades are likely to be recognised now only by their descendants, if indeed they are remembered at all by anyone still alive. Occasionally, though, a name among the final credits strikes a chord: Australians of a certain age, with very retentive memories, may just about recognise the credit to the splendidly named Captain Frank Officer, later Sir Frank, who served with the Australian Imperial Force and went on to crown a distinguished career of public service as Australia’s ambassador to China and then to France. In other words, for those who survived, life went on, and often it was a very successful life, by all external measures at least. Even so, the experience of the war was always there in the background, corralled from the trajectory of ordinary life, difficult to talk about and impossible to forget.

Recent years have seen a huge revival of interest in the documentary form. While it remains unusual for a documentary to go mainstream — in the sense of enjoying wide cinematic release and high box-office returns — there are everywhere signs of its renaissance, not only in dedicated streaming sites and film festivals but also in the active participation of big names like Netflix and HBO in funding new work in this earliest of cinematic genres. If we stretch a point and include reality television, the phenomenon is even more noticeable.

This is happening alongside another sea change, the full significance of which is still barely discernible, namely that we are increasingly inclined to distrust performance in favour of an elusive authenticity (itself a kind of performance, but that’s another story). To say, for instance, as a few loudly do, that a particular character should be played only by an actor who can lay claim to a matching background and experience of life seems to contradict our most basic understanding of what it means to perform a role. But it is also a sign that we are in the midst of a complicated process of reassessing the dominance of performance in our culture.

How “real” then are these colourised Tommies, and how far have they been reformatted as actors? Purists will argue, and are already arguing, that They Shall Not Grow Old is not a documentary at all, but a fictionalised version of the front line, deploying the wonders of contemporary technology to compromise the integrity of the archive, by reanimating and colourising and smoothing out, and also by zeroing in on faces, returning to some of them again and again, and in the process giving them starring roles.

You can see their point. Some faces do stand out, and the camera accordingly and lovingly notices. In many cases its attention seems to be caught by teeth, and more than one commentator has been struck by the images of soldiers smiling for the cameras, revealing the appalling state of their mouths — teeth missing, blackened, almost theatrically misaligned, and thus markedly out of step with our current, obsessive quest for dental perfection.

It is a risky business, venturing into history. As many have noted, some in passing and some in a huff, the film’s title is almost but not quite the first line of the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s famous poem, “For the Fallen,” which reads in the original “they shall grow not old.” In rendering the line as the more vernacular and more modern “they shall not grow old,” the film-makers are perhaps doing nothing more than reflecting the way in which most of us are inclined to retain that culturally iconic line in our heads. To use the original and self-consciously poetical word order for the title of the film would have sounded a jarring, artificial note in a project that sets out to reveal the essential ordinariness, and the extraordinary ordeal, of the men who served.

But amending the original line was the right call for other reasons too. The full text of Binyon’s poem, seven stanzas long, now reads as turgid in the extreme. “Death august and royal/ Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres” gives the general flavour. Only the lines from which the film’s title is very nearly taken retain the power to move: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:/ Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”

Crucially, the poem was written and published in 1914, only a few weeks after the outbreak of the war. The seeds of doubt had not yet been sown; belief in the justness of the cause and the value of sacrifice were very much in the ascendancy. It is the mood that is captured in the introductory section of Jackson’s film, the twenty minutes of largely monochrome, mostly small-screen sequences, some bucolic — sheep in a field, young girls dancing round a maypole — most detailing the process of recruitment, the enthusiastic rush to join up. We had to go, the voice-overs tell us.

Binyon’s lines are in tune with the time in which they were written. The men will grow not old, but they will grow in other ways, despite but also because of their deaths in battle. They will continue to acquire stature and significance. It is the ones who are left behind who are condemned to a slow and unremarked decline, rendering the fallen almost to be envied. To a twenty-first-century reader, this is likely to seem perverse, glamorising the real tragedy, namely that these men were not given the chance to live out their lives in peace.

In that sense, the film’s revisionist title is more in accord with the mood of the closing minutes of the film, when it reverts once more to black-and-white and to the small- screen format, as the war becomes the past and the survivors return from the front to a world that would prefer to forget what they went through, and move on. Indeed, one of the cruellest effects for survivors was how the war permanently divided participants from those who had remained behind. Fellow soldiers understood; non-combatants didn’t and never would.

They Shall Not Grow Old is, among other things, a celebration of the backroom arts of cinema, of the work of editors, sound technicians, compositors, matte painters and voice artists, restorers and researchers, all of them masterfully orchestrated by Jackson. Whether this elaborate and passionate exercise in restoration and modernisation brings us closer to the people and the time, closer to understanding what they went though, is infinitely arguable. It may be an indelible feature of war that to understand the sheer intensity of what it was like you really had to be there.

Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich shows this to be a phenomenon common to all armed conflicts in her haunting collection of interviews with veterans of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and their loved ones, Boys in Zinc (1989), a book that in many ways foreshadows Jackson’s technique. “We were suspended between life and death,” says one of her informants. “Is there anything stronger than that feeling?” •

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Early on we see jackeroo-turned-youth-worker Bernie Shakeshaft and a gaggle of teenage boys, each with a dog at his side. He shows the boys how to push the dogs gently down to the ground.

“I want you to rub your hands together,” he says. “Like this. Rub them until they are really warm.”

“Now put your hands like this.” He stretches his hands out, palms down.

Their hands hover just above the dogs. “That’s right,” he says. “Like this. You don’t need to pat your dog, just hold your hands above them. Nice and slow.”

It’s an exercise in focus and concentration. The dogs are tranquil; it is the boys themselves who are being trained to be calm.

Backtrack Boys is about an unorthodox experiment that began a decade ago in a shed outside Armidale, New South Wales. It seems to be working, taking kids in trouble, kids in danger of being locked up, kids who have been locked up, and helping them find a purpose.

“We have three aims,” says Shakeshaft. “To keep them alive. To keep them out of jail. To help them find their hopes and dreams.”

Catherine Scott, a seasoned documentary-maker, followed the boys for two years. She draws out three of them, and we get to know two really well.

Zach, a tall, gangly kid just starting to shave, is one. He’s been in the program for a few years, and is stepping up to take responsibility. He’s discovered that he can read, and that he enjoys reading for himself. One of the most affecting glimpses we get is of the boys working in a reading program, reading aloud to each other with a growing confidence. “These are kids who’ve been labelled unteachable,” says the volunteer teacher, in a quiet aside. There’s also an inspiring glimpse of a young girl, sitting in a paddock, reading to her dog.

Another we get to know is young Russell, aka Rusty. He’s small, tow-haired and at times defiant. He hasn’t yet hit puberty. Life has dealt him a pretty rough hand. His mum died when he was a few weeks old, and his father admits he’s pretty useless as a parent.

When things get too rough for Rusty, he’s inclined to have an outburst of rage and punch a wall. “Muck up,” he says. “I spit on a girl and punch a hole in a wall.” Now where can he have learned that?

In country towns, Friday and Saturday nights are the danger zones for kids with nothing to do. Years ago, Bernie discovered that many agricultural shows have cattle-dog trials. The boys trained up the dogs, and themselves, and hit the road in a specially designed truck ready to show off their stuff. They’ve rarely been beaten, and it’s a lovely thing to watch. Should a dog fail the jump on the first go, youthful arms catch him. I guess there’s a lesson there too.

According to Shakeshaft, 78 per cent of boys sent to juvenile detention reoffend. The systems, he says flatly, don’t work. School suspensions, juvenile detention, adult prisons. None of them works.

Many of the Backtrack Boys are Indigenous, though not all. That’s not the film’s focus, but the demoralisation of going to job interviews — the sheer challenge of trying to dream a future in areas where there is little work — underlies one of the setbacks we see.

But we see moments when the boys are gently encouraged to overcome them. It’s quite something to be able to gain these boys’ trust sufficiently to enable them to talk about their feelings. Bernie Shakeshaft does it. And so does Catherine Scott. It’s an all-woman team behind this film: Scott was her own cinematographer, as well as writer and producer–director. Andrea Lang has edited it so that the story unfolds with moments of tenderness and small flashbacks, the drama building to a chest-tightening finale. A number of women share various producer credits with Scott: it speaks of an impressive collective endeavour, supporting the film.

It’s also quite something to share the film’s final moment, which involves eight excited puppies trying to lick to death a boy lying on the grass.

Beautiful Boy is another film about a boy in big trouble. In this case, he’s a kid who appeared to have everything going for him: top grades at school, his pick of colleges, a supportive mother and stepfather, a home with books, music and choices. A boy who became addicted to methamphetamine.

It’s based on two memoirs, Beautiful Boy, by the writer David Sheff, and Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, by his son Nic. Sheff had previously written about his experiences with his son’s addiction in the New York Times: looking back on his reportage, it’s clear that the film smooths out many bumps.

Originally Cameron Crowe was slated to direct the film; finally the producers found the Flemish director Felix van Groenigan (The Broken Circle Breakdown), and Luke Davies reworked the script.

Beautiful Boy is suffocatingly sincere. Steve Carell plays the father, David, and the young male actor of the moment, Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name), plays his son Nic. Carell’s performance is full of controlled, internalised anger. Chalamet, even when lying, manipulating, stealing, panicking, shooting up or cooking up, is never less than engaging. And pretty. Which is one of the troubles I had with the film. The ugliness of meth, the wreck it makes of bodies, moods and minds is shown in soft focus.

Sheff’s early journalism about his son’s addiction and his own response at least tried to carefully explain the science: what methamphetamines do to the brain. The film attempts this, but only cursorily.

With the drug being described as “every parent’s nightmare,” I found myself wondering what Beautiful Boy could tell people in Sheff’s situation that they did not already know about the cycles of disbelief, anger, guilt, denial, hope and despair. Yes, there is a way through — for some. But recovery is fragile and always conditional.

In addition to prettifying the wreckage of methamphetamine addiction, the film-makers add insult to injury by loading the soundtrack with every iconic song they could find. Nirvana, Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy,” Neil Young, Massive Attack, and more — including, of course, the ultimate insult: Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. All are fine in themselves, but loading a soundtrack like this is a sure sign van Groenigan and producers don’t trust their audiences’ responses. There’s even a soundtrack album to match.

The only useful thought I could take away from this film is this: if your teenager, in the hormonal mood swings of puberty, starts declaiming the poems of Charles Bukowski, worry. Some early literary criticism might be prophylactic. •

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Lightness first. Ladies in Black, Bruce Beresford’s new film, is a charmer, a glimpse of the lives of a group of Australian women on the cusp of the sixties, as postwar prosperity began to open doors to immigrants and a new generation of young Australians. It was again a time of possibilities.

When sixteen-year-old Lisa (Angourie Rice) takes a summer job in the frock department of Goodes Department Store she is about to learn many things. It’s her first venture into a world beyond school and family, and she is avid. She is in the company of the formidable women in black who epitomise the store.

So many lessons. She must learn how to dress, how to speak to customers, how to soothe their egos. She must learn the pecking order among the women.

Lisa was christened Lesley but she hates her name. Lisa is how she thinks of herself and Lisa she becomes. She learns fast. She is a watcher, a thinker and a reader. She wants to go to university, though her father has yet to be persuaded. She thinks maybe she will be a poet. Or write plays. This is not an ambition familiar to many of the ladies in black. Even the fact that she is waiting for her leaving certificate results singles her out for startled comment.

But Lisa makes a friend, Fay, and then finds a mentor. To some jealousy, she is seconded from Cocktail Frocks to Model Gowns, a glowing oyster-coloured cave where wealthy women buy creations from Paris and London way beyond the reach of most. Model Gowns is presided over by Magda (Julia Ormond), a Slovenian émigré who has a pungent take on Australian culture and its shortcomings, but also warmth and an appreciation of what Australia has offered war-scarred Europeans. Magda is imperious and worldly. She sees the possibilities in Lisa.

This is an ensemble film. While Lisa and Magda are at the heart of it, over the course of that summer we also come to know Fay (Rachael Taylor) and Patty (Alison McGirr). Both are yearning and both are struggling with the shortcomings of Australian men at the time, with their sexual ignorance and their inability to speak to women or register feelings. Men who don’t see the point in girls going to university. At home, we see wives in their separate domains manipulate their way round husbands’ prejudices. Women’s Liberation was yet to come, but these were early stirrings. “Just let him be for a bit,” says Lisa’s mother as they consider how to get Mr Miles (Shane Jacobson) to sign the Commonwealth Scholarship application form. “We’ll pick our time.”

Bruce Beresford has a knack for making optimistic or life-affirming films (Tender Mercies, Crimes of the Heart, Mao’s Last Dancer). Ladies in Black is made in a much warmer register, but one reason it sings is that Madeleine St John, who wrote her novel The Women in Black in the 1990s, had a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. Much of it is in the film: it was, according to Beresford, the easiest adaptation he ever made.

It’s also beautifully cast. Susie Porter as Lisa’s mum and Noni Hazlehurst as Miss Cartwright both bring enormous empathy to their roles, while Ryan Corr and Vincent Perez add convincing émigré gloss. Most touching is Luke Pegler as Frank, a man ashamed of his desire.

I’m at odds with the reaction of a critic I respect — Christos Tsiolkas — who felt the film lacked a darker register, particularly in its treatment of the experiences of immigrants at the time. This is not the film about the immigrant experience of the Melbourne poet Pi O, for example, whose Greek-born mother sat arguing with the television in broken English. Nor of Tsiolkas’s own family, as expressed through his writing. These would be different movies. It evokes a time I knew, and a place I knew, to near perfection.

Ladies in Black is more than a frothy confection. It is shrewd. Class differences are registered pointedly in the film, as is a widespread distrust of immigrants. It doesn’t hammer these attitudes, but they are there, and part of Lisa’s getting of wisdom is to reject them.

For those looking for a sharper take on women’s experiences before the second wave of feminism, may I recommend Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’s 1951 novel Come in Spinner? This too is set in a hermetically sealed “women’s world” — a beauty salon in a posh city hotel (a thinly disguised Hotel Australia) during wartime. For many women, there was not such a huge distance between Sydney in 1945 and Sydney in 1959.

This Beresford film is also a salute to Sydney in all its summer sparkle, to light glinting on the harbour, to ferries and trams and thankfulness we weren’t in Melbourne. There’s a welcome place, I think, for films that permit audiences to leave feeling happy and evoke a time when we could.

Now the darkness. Custody (Jusqu’à la garde) begins at a judicial hearing with two lawyers arguing a contested custody case, the parents sitting tensely beside them.

At issue is access to a ten-year-old boy, Julien (Thomas Gioria). He doesn’t want any contact with his father, as a statement tendered by the mother’s lawyer makes quite clear. Neither does his older sister, Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux). Doubt is cast on an affidavit from the school nurse who recalls seeing bruising on Joséphine. The parties agree that the daughter, who is almost eighteen, can make up her own mind.

The mother, Miriam (Léa Drucker), has moved house and changed her phone number to protect herself and her children. She has never reported violence but her lawyer maintains that the father, Antoine (Denis Ménochet), has been stalking and harassing her.

Miriam sits stiffly throughout the hearing, saying little until she is questioned. Antoine, a big, burly man, has left his job and moved to a new house to be near his children. A son has the right to know his father, he insists, and he believes that the mother has turned his son against him.

This is wrenchingly familiar. And yet something seems not quite right during this fifteen-minute sequence. We are put in the position of the judge, and we wonder why. Why didn’t the mother report threats and assaults? Whom should we believe?

In the long second act of the film we see Antoine in action. He is simmering. The judge has upheld his right to access, though not to know where the family lives. When he collects Julien from an agreed location, we can read the boy’s dread in the slump of his shoulders, the way he tries to deflect his father’s questions, the desperate little lies he tells in an effort to protect his mother. It builds to a terrifying third act.

Xavier Legrand based this first feature on interviews with many women and children. He made it as a sequel to his 2013 short film, Just Before Losing Everything (Avant que de tout perdre), which followed the mother as she prepared to leave her husband.

The statistics are appalling: a woman is killed by her husband every week in Australia. In France, says Legrand, that figure is three. Beyond the awful, patriarchal murders is the ongoing damage to the victims. We have begun to hear from the women, but the damage to children is less explored.

These interviews convinced Legrand that the film’s focus should be on the children. He has done it simply, and well. There is sufficient in the glimpses we have of Antoine with Julien at the meal table, of Miriam as she tries to focus her daughter on her final exams, to suggest the long-term consequences of domestic bullying. The film is framed by a glimpse of the judge in very early morning light, wearily gathering papers in her chambers and walking the corridors to the hearing, and by a concerned neighbour calling the police and peering through her door. These are the protections the community offers, and they are not enough.

Custody is an exemplary film, and its M classification may serve as a trigger warning. Despite its raw subject matter, the screening I attended was packed. Watching the faces of older women as we left the screening, I wondered how many of them were recalling, as I was, childhood trauma. We didn’t speak of such things then. Now we must. •

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