2009 MIFF Diary Part 12

BLESSED
(Dir. Ana Kokkinos, 2009)

Based on the Melbourne Worker’s Theatre production Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Christos Tsiolkas (which was first performed at the Victorian Trades Hall in May 1998), Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed will doubtless re-engage the audience she lost with her last effort, the painful The Book of Revelation.

Blessed is a bleak story of mothers and children set in contemporary Melbourne; and as with the play, a number of storylines play out simultaneously over its 113 minute running time:

• Tanya (Deborah Lee-Furness) and her husband Peter (William McInnes) watch their relationship fall apart as they argue and fight over their mortgage, while their son Daniel (Harrison Gilbertson) tries his hand at crime, having already been accused of theft by his mother.
• Young runaway Orton (an excellent performance by Reef Ireland) struggles to look after his mentally retarded sister Stacey (Eva Lazzaro) on the city’s streets, while their mother Rhonda (Frances O’Connor) struggles with the Department of Human Services.
• Two young school girls, Katrina (Sophie Lowe) and Trisha (Anastasia Baboussouras) pretend to be from a private school with unexpected consequences.
• A gay youth (Eamon Farren) runs away from home.
• A middle class Aboriginal man, James (Wayne Blair) deals with racism on the worksite, and finds himself lost between two worlds.
  

Frustratingly, at least for me, the film makes significant – and to my mind unnecessary – changes to its source material, especially to the characters created by queer author Christos Tsiolkas in Suit, his section of Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? (And I should add a disclaimer here: Christos is a mate of mine.)

In the play, the character of Daniel – who becomes Roo in the film – is an angry and aggressive gay youth, who, in a remarkable and confrontational monologue exploring the fetishisation of power by the powerless and dispossessed, fantasises about having sex with Jeff Kennett, who was the Premier of Victoria at the time the play was written.

In Blessed, however, the character becomes a weak and passive victim; and in one of the film’s most unlikely scenes (which like The Book of Revelation portrays sex as something ugly and to be feared) Roo is forced to masturbate on camera for a pornographer.

Not only is the scene filmed in a cinematically 'dramatic' decayed warehouse rather than in a domestic setting, as would normally be the case with amateur porn, Kokkinos also shows Roo weeping as he masturbates; yet he is still able to maintain an erection and ejaculate despite his obvious fear and discomfort. Unrealistic much?

Elsewhere in the film Kokkinos takes major liberties with the Aboriginal man, James, who in the play is shown as a flawed and conflicted character. As written by Tsiolkas, James is both a victim of racism and a perpetrator of it, and his vilification of a white prostitute reinforces the fact that racism is a two-way street. In Blessed, however, Kokkinos not only whitewashes the character (pun intended) but effectively writes him out of the conclusion of the film, which seriously unbalances the film’s dramatic structure as it reaches its conclusion and ties its various plot threads together.

I also had problems with some of the performances, particularly Miranda Otto and Frances O’Connor, neither of whom I was ever entirely convinced by. There’s a constant, niggling awareness while watching Blessed that one is watching middle-class Australian actors pretending to be working class; a sensation I don't have in similar films by other Australian directors, such as Alkinos Tsilimidos for example, which to my mind points to a weakness in Kokkinos' directorial style.

Coupled with the fact that I was sitting watching this film as part of a middle class audience seeking entertainment at a film festival, this made the whole experience somewhat unreal.

These criticisms aside, Blessed is still a powerful film, and will no doubt provoke a strong emotional response from its viewers upon its cinematic release later this year.

Rating: Three stars