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

2009 MIFF Diary part the ninth

POST-PUNK MIX TAPE #2
(Various directors and years)

The cinematic exploration of the punk and post-punk era in Australia, and especially in Melbourne, is the focus of a central programming stream at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival.

Curated by Michelle Carey, Punk Becomes Pop: The Australian Post-Punk Underground consists of three feature films and over 40 shorts documenting the vibrant inner-city scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, where music, art, film and fashion fused together in a raucous and chaotic whole.

Post-Punk Mixtape #2 is the second of five short film screenings programmed as part of Punk Becomes Pop. This diverse array of film clips and experimental shorts included a hilarious, drunken interview with Boys Next Door members Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave; a film noir inspired music video for Sydney band Frontier Scouts, When Daddy Blows His Top, directed by Kriv Stenders; the hallucinatory and surreal short drama by Swinburne student Hugh Marchant, Meanwhile Elsewhere; and a short but fascinating film documenting Melbourne’s inner city music scene by the late Mark Zenner, Big Risk, featuring live performances by The Negatives, News, and The Boys Next Door.

A remarkable insight into the era, and a rare glimpse at an under-documented moment in history. The three remaining Mixtape sessions this Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday night should not be missed by film buffs or aficionados of Melbourne’s vital music scene.

Rating: Three and a half stars


BRONSON
(Nicolas Winding Refn, 2008)

With Bronson, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (best known to date for his Pusher trilogy, which has previously screened at MIFF) has created a remarkably vivid excoriation of life in the British prison system as seen through the eyes of the UK’s most notorious inmate, Michael Petersen.

Petersen, who changes his name to ‘Charles Bronson’ partway through the film at the urging of his boxing manager, is endlessly brutalised by prison officials after initially being sentenced to seven years for a post office robbery that netted less than £50 and in which no-one was hurt. Their violence feeds his, and vice versa; an endless feedback loop of brutality and suffering.

Part biography, part operatic fantasy, the film has been aptly described as ‘a Clockwork Orange for the 21st century’, featuring as it does numerous scenes of extreme violence set to beautiful music, including Verdi, Puccini and Wagner; as well as extended direct-to-camera monologues by Bronson himself, who is always aware of his audience, and indeed often pandering to them.

The violence in the film is carefully choreographed so as to always appear staged; and set to majestic bursts of music as if to celebrate Bronson’s growing prison notoriety. Gorgeous cinematography, and exquisite lighting and composition ensure that even at its most brutal, the film possesses a sublime beauty in every frame.

Dark humour also permeates the film, such as a grotesquely funny scene in an insane asylum where a drugged-up Bronson and his fellow inmates flail and sway to Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s A Sin’. A later scene, where a newly released Bronson visits his uncle and his drag queen friends, is also played strictly for laughs.

At its heart, Bronson is the story of a man struggling to stay afloat in a sea of shit. His violence, Refn seems to be saying, is a means of self-expression that would later be channelled through poetry (for which the real-life Bronson has won numerous awards) and art; a quest for self-expression that was challenged and assaulted at every turn.

Rating: Four stars


DOGS IN SPACE
(Dir. Richard Lowenstein, 1986)

The centrepiece of the festival's Punk Becomes Pop: The Australian Post-Punk Underground program is this digitally remastered edition of Richard Lowenstein's cult masterpiece, Dogs in Space, set in an anarchic Richmond share house and closely based on Lowenstein's own life and the lives of his friends and housemates - especially, and notoriously, the experiences of Melbourne playwright and musician Sam Sejavka, whose life and loves are exploited for the sake of the film.

Made at a time when the Australian film industry was largely concerned with national icons and an exaggerated sense of what it meant to be Australian (Crocodile Dundee was made the same year, and The Man From Snowy River just a few years earlier), Dogs in Space was radically different - an almost plotless film about the lives and times of a group of young people living in inner city Melbourne in 1978.

The film is episodic, fractured, moving in fits and starts towards its tragic conclusion, which is based on the overdose of Sejavka's real-life girlfriend at the time.

But while it may not be dramatically satisfying in the traditional sense, Dogs in Space is an enormously rewarding film in so many other ways. This remastered edition reveals the complexity of the sound design, and the rich cinematography that takes in everything from ticket queues outside Festival Hall to gigs at the now-lost Champion Hotel in Fitzroy (the home of the 'Little Bands' scene) and St Kilda's infamous Crystal Ballroom. The inclusion of bands of the day such as The Primative Calculators and Thrush and the Cunts, as well as songs by The Boys Next Door and Iggy Pop on the soundtrack make for a richly rewarding viewing and listening experience.

Performances vary, with the film's star, rock singer Michael Hutchence as Sammy in his first dramatic role, ranging from wooden to excellent, depending on the demands of the scene. Saskia Post as Sammy's lover, Anna, is superb throughout. Other actors vary enormously, but for me the performances matter less than the era they evoke, and for the passion with which the film is made. It's also fun spotting people such as filmmaker Tony Ayres making cameos at various points in the film.

Dogs in Space is an exercise in nostalgia about an influential but poorly documented period in Australian (un)popular culture, made less than a decade after the time in which it is set, by which point the time it evoked had already faded into drug-hazed memory. Seeing this immaculately restored edition, instead of a crappy old video copy, is both a delight and a priviledge. Seeing it makes me wish more than ever that I'd been born a few years earlier, so I could have experienced the time it documents first hand.

Rating: Three and a half stars