2009 MIFF Diary part the tenth

A LOVING FRIEND
(Kerry Negara, 2009)

The posthumously published diaries of Australian draftsman, diarist, printmaker and painter Donald Friend (1915 – 1989) – especially the fourth and final volume, which covers the extended period Friend resided in Bali – reveal that the artist was sexually active with teenage and pre-pubescent boys, some as young as 10, over a number of years.

In her documentary A Loving Friend, filmmaker Kerry Negara sets out to confront the Australian art world with this fact, which has been largely ignored by Friend’s colleagues and associates as they attempt to bolster his standing as an artist of merit in the years following his death.

Artist Margaret Olley and academic Ian Britain are among those interviewed by Negara who either sidestep the issue, or obfuscate when confronted with the fact that Friend was a paedophile.

“He just liked the young company about him, and they’re easier to draw,” Olley claims of Friend’s predilection for the company of boys, despite the fact that Friend’s diaries are frank in describing his sexual activities with minors.

Unfortunately, A Loving Friend is an awkward, even strident documentary, and its flaws detract from its important subject matter.

Extracts from Friend’s diary are read aloud in a sibilant, echoing voice that evokes the tone of a horror movie rather than a documentary. The film’s score is heavy handed, and the filmmaker unnecessarily inserts herself into the film, at one point filming herself looking sadly out the window of Friend’s old house, a move that smacks of egotism at the very least.

That said, Negara is to be commended for tracking down and interviewing several of Friend’s former houseboys, now men, and interviewing them about their relationships with the artist and their anger that such details have been published in Friend’s diaries.

On the basis of this documentary, it would appear that the National Library of Australia, the publisher of Friend’s journals and an organisation with considerably more resources than the filmmaker herself, made no such attempt to gain the men’s approval before going to print with stories of their sexual exploitation as children.

Rating: Two and a half stars


WE’RE LIVING ON DOG FOOD
(Richard Lowenstein, 2009)

Premiering the day after Lowenstein’s digitally restored Dogs in Space screened at MIFF was this new movie which began life as a ‘making of’ about the feature film, but which evolved into a fascinating documentary about the period in which Dogs in Space was set.

We’re Living on Dog Food (which takes its name from an Iggy Pop song featured prominently in Dogs in Space) is an honest examination of a remarkable era in Australian music and pop culture history. Unlike the heightened drama of Dogs in Space, the documentary looks at the events of those times with a more cynical eye, detailing the world of the Crystal Ballroom and the ‘Little Bands’ scene of Fitzroy through a series of frank interviews and fascinating original footage from the late 1970s.

It also looks at everything that went on during the making of Dogs in Space a few years later. One participant, an extra who was 14 at the time Lowenstein’s feature film was made, recalls losing her virginity and trying heroin for the first time on set.

Others reminisce about the remarkable confluence of shared influences which shaped Melbourne’s punk scene in the late 70s, in a superbly edited sequence which opens We’re Living on Dog Food.

Although a little long and slightly self-indulgent, as an accompaniment to Dogs in Space, as well as a stand-alone documentary about Melbourne’s punk heyday, We’re Living on Dog Food is a fascinating, rewarding and very entertaining film.

Rating: Three and a half stars


UNMADE BEDS
(Dir. Alexis Dos Santos, 2009)

A young man yearning for family and a young woman trying to heal her broken heart are the protagonists of Unmade Beds, a beautiful new film from the Argentinean director of Glue (2006), which also screened at MIFF in 2007.

Like Dos Santos’s first feature, Unmade Beds is a richly textured, lo-fi drama about friendship and desire in which what goes unsaid is just as important – if not more so – than anything spoken by its often-inebriated characters.

Axl (Fernando Tielve) is a 20 year old Spaniard who has come to London seeking the English father who left him when he was three. Vera (Déborah François), a young Belgian woman, is seeking to ease the pain of a failed relationship by embarking on an affair with a handsome stranger. Both live in the same chaotic squat, but are too caught up in their own lives to ever meet each other.

Their stories run parallel for much of the film, illustrated by photographs to represent their internal thoughts, and occasional flashbacks to earlier periods in their lives.

Axl falls in to a ménage à trois with two of the residents of the squat – his blurred sexuality again reflecting an earlier bisexual coupling in Dos Santos’s Glue – while Vera’s relationship evolves anonymously, with neither her nor her new paramour knowing anything about the other beyond assumed identities and assignations made at random.

The film’s meandering, episodic structure may frustrate some viewers, but to my eyes was perfectly pitched to capture the drunken, drifting lives of its central characters. Coupled with the film’s eclectic visual style, and a rich soundtrack featuring such bands as (We Are) Performance, Tindersticks, Mary and the Boy, and Daniel Johnston, it results in a distinctive and vibrant exploration of hope and memory; a memorable drama with a pitch-perfect and deeply satisfying conclusion. Alexis Dos Santos is definitely a filmmaker to watch.

Rating: Four stars