Emily Barclay in Suburban Mayhem: seriously brilliant.
Film
Hurricane Katrina
by Philip Matthews
Five highlights of this year’s World Cinema Showcase.
Bold, entertaining, funny and horrible, the Australian black comedy Suburban Mayhem features a seriously brilliant performance by New Zealander Emily Barclay (In My Father’s Den) as Katrina Skinner, a drug-snorting nympho and west Sydney solo mum who leaves a trail of devastation behind her. As one character says, “There are some things in life you can’t control. The weather. Wild animals. Hiccups. Katrina.” As in To Die For, stupid men are easily teased, lured and seduced for Katrina’s purposes; director Paul Goldman and writer Alice Bell take great delight in Katrina’s single-minded badness. Appropriately, the look of the film is more slick and stylised than grim and gothic, with occasional touches of Kath & Kim-like humour: “Danny chopped the guy’s head off. And that’s where John finally drew the line.”
SUBURBAN MAYHEM, directed by Paul Goldman.
Like Andy Warhol, Truman Capote is a figure to be endlessly impersonated. His life’s central myth is a trip to Kansas in search of murder, the source of magazine articles, a book (In Cold Blood), the 1967 film of the book and – in the past two years – two films about the making of the book, Capote and Infamous. Covering an identical timeframe to Capote, Douglas McGrath’s Infamous is adapted from George Plimpton’s gossipy oral history rather than Gerald Clarke’s solid biography. That surely explains its more frivolous tone, one that suits the frequent scenes in Capote’s giddy, bubbly New York high society but not the long sequences in the empty flatlands of Kansas – meaning that Infamous has little of Capote’s moody atmosphere or impression of depth. But it does have, in Toby Jones, an actor who genuinely looks and sounds like the author; as tiny as Capote, Jones nails the author’s nearly alien queerness and the squeaky voice that the too big, too macho Philip Seymour Hoffman couldn’t get. “What a brussel sprout would sound like if a brussel sprout could talk,” is how an actor playing Gore Vidal describes it.
INFAMOUS, directed by Douglas McGrath.
Little Fish had no heroin glamour, but it had an upside; Candy had its romance, and its wrecked and beautiful survivors. A newer Australian junkie film, Em4Jay, is bleaker than those, a low-budget no-exit story of a heroin couple (Nick Barkla and Laura Gordon) making bad choices. You start by getting wasted on slow-motion afternoons (“Has Judge Judy started yet?”); you end up putting on balaclavas and stabbing shop assistants. Drug use here is low-key, monotonous, even joyless, but the director knows about the outlaw appeal of the junkie couple – like a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde – even if they’realso dim and amoral. I wasn’t convinced of Candy’s reality, but I was convinced by this.
EM4JAY, directed by Alkinos Tsilimidos.
It surely isn’t accidental that one of the first shots in Rampage is of a Halloween party reveller dressed up as an evil George W Bush with devil horns and pitchfork. Australian photographer George Gittoes’s dense and sometimes brutal documentary works up a comparison between Baghdad and “war zones in America’s backyard” – here, the tougher neighbourhoods of Miami – through the figure of Elliot Lovett, a GI whom Gittoes met while making a doco in Iraq. Gittoes is fascinated by the hip-hop poetry that Lovett and his two brothers create from the violence of their surroundings (it seems telling that the professor of criminology Gittoes interviews always carries a gun), and he tries to create music-biz opportunities for them. So, Gittoes is by no means neutral; he seems almost over-involved, frequently in shot and complaining about the “haters” getting in his subjects’ way.
RAMPAGE, directed by George Gittoes.
“What makes a woman like you come to Transylvania?” asks Tchangalo (Birol Unel). “A man,” says Zingarina (Asia Argento). Back in France, Zingarina fell for a Romanian musician who was in the country illegally and was soon deported; accompanied by a French friend and a translator, she goes in search of him. Although the title of this atmospheric film by Tony Gatlif (Gadjo Dilo) naturally conjures up dry-ice-and-fangs horror, this contemporary Transylvania is a poor, ruined corner of post-communist Romania that is riddled with superstition and home to a vibrant pagan spirit that finds an outlet in Gypsy music. Borat country, in other words.
TRANSYLVANIA, directed by Tony Gatlif.
The World Cinema Showcase: Academy, Auckland, from March 15. Other centres to follow.
SUBURBAN MAYHEM, directed by Paul Goldman
INFAMOUS, directed by Douglas McGrath
EM4JAY, directed by Alkinos Tsilimidos
RAMPAGE, directed by George Gittoes
TRANSYLVANIA, directed by Tony Gatlif
SUBURBAN MAYHEM, directed by Paul Goldman
INFAMOUS, directed by Douglas McGrath
EM4JAY, directed by Alkinos Tsilimidos
RAMPAGE, directed by George Gittoes
TRANSYLVANIA, directed by Tony Gatlif
