ROMULUS, MY FATHER

Directed by Richard Roxburgh. 104mins. Aus. 2007.
Main cast: Eric Bana, Franka Potente

The directorial debut from Australian actor Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge, Van Helsing), Romulus, My Father boasts strong performances, elegant camerawork and striking early 1960s production design. But it's a tough working-class tale that grows ever more harrowing as it intensifies and, despite the formidable presence of Eric Bana in the title role, will remain strictly an arthouse item after its May 31 release in Australia. The combination of star and vivid country locations will doubtless ensure it attracts international festival attention.

Nick Drake's sparsely powerful screenplay is mined from the 1998 memoir of philosopher Raimond Gaita, who emigrated to Australia in 1950 at the age of four with his Romanian-born father Romulus and German-born mother Christina. As dirt-poor "new Australians", the alien family settle in rural Victoria where Romulus (a permanently unshaven Bana) works all-hours as a blacksmith and craftsman in ironwork while Christina (Potente) goes unquietly crazy. The movie sees the world from young Raimond's (Smit-McPhee) uncomprehending point of view and director Roxburgh allows his audience to make connections and conclusions as the boy matures and gains understanding.

Christina is a delicious mystery to her son: she smothers him with love and affection, but then disappears to Melbourne for long periods to be with her husband's former comrade. Romulus himself is the epitome of hard working, honest manliness, a heroic father figure, yet with a frightening streak of recklessness and growing desolation. Raimond has to cope with an ever-darkening adult world of jealousy, dangerous passions, despair and encroaching madness, even multiple suicides.

There's an idyllic view of the boy's life to begin, with elderly neighbours baking him scones and the local tramp teaching him how to boil eggs in a tin of urine. To say that the narrative soon darkens is an understatement, for Raimond suffers a harrowing succession of blows that eventually leaves the audience reeling. The Gaita memoir was noted for its sombre lyricism, for the constraint and understatement by which terrible events are narrated. But full-blooded acting from an expert cast (particularly Potente as the hot/cold, chronically unfaithful mother) make dramatic understatement impossible on-screen. As ghastly events accumulate, so the boy's plight begins to harrow and melodrama looms.

Eric Bana is muscular and rock solid as the good father struggling against hard times and a gutting marriage, though his descent into mental turmoil seems unprepared and comes too suddenly. Kodi Smit-McPhee is an expressive and sensitive young actor but too beautiful and well-spoken to fully convince as a country ragamuffin from Romania with few English-speaking contacts.

Roxburgh and his distinguished cinematographer Simpson (Shine, Oscar & Lucinda, Under the Tuscan Sun) maintain an impressive classic style with many a potent image. A lonely, forlorn Raimond perches on the prow of a high tin roof waiting for his father to return along the country road as fierce sunlight morphs into star-strewn darkness.

Always impressive to watch, the feature delights in its precise 1960-62 period details of settings and costumes, both in country Victoria and in depressed, low-rent suburban Melbourne. The atmospheric music by Basil Hogios is elegantly simple.



DR PLONK

Directed by Rolf de Heer. 84 minutes. Australia, 2007.
Main cast: Nigel Lunghi, Paul Blackwell, Magda Szubanski

Rolf de Heer, perhaps relaxing from the extreme directorial hardships of last year's Ten Canoes and the grim themes of The Tracker (2002) and Alexandra’s Project (2003), has produced a feather-weight comic curiosity as his latest feature. Dr Plonk is a silent, monochrome, fixed camera homage to early slapstick film making. It transmits its maker’s respect and glee and will be much sought after for 2007 festivals. Premiered on the final night of the Adelaide festival with a brilliant live band playing composer Graham Tardif’s sprightly score, this oddball feature weaves a curious but definite magic.

Relieved of modern widescreen production values, writer/director/producer de Heer takes obvious delight in his homespun, micro-budget sets, costumes, makeup and effects. The zany plot begins in (and time-travels from) 1907 Adelaide, de Heer’s home town, and the style and technicalities he employs stay rigidly true to that pioneering time. There’s a single, deliberately clumsy pan among the locked-off wide shots, and when a vigorous chase sequences is shot from the back of a moving vehicle the sudden explosion into movement is exhilarating. It’s possible for a modern audience to taste the blissful novelty of early movie going.

Destined to be a festival favourite, the quirky feature is set for release by co-backer Palace Films to local art houses later in the year. How it will appeal to a general audience is unknown: an interest in movie history and an appreciation of early two-reelers may well be required. There’s certainly no language barrier to international release or understanding: the witty stand-alone captions can be translated into every language on earth. It’s pleasing to be reminded of the international reach of pre-sound film.

The plot is as bald as its eccentric inventor hero, Dr Plonk (Lunghi), who lives with his fully rounded wife (Szubanski) and half-witted deaf mute assistant Paulus (Blackwell). Convinced by his experiments that the world will end in exactly a hundred years, he attempts to persuade the Prime Minister that something must be done. Needing proof, he decides to build a time machine and check out the future for himself.

Plonk’s ramshackle invention is delightfully silly and quickly achieved. The time travelling compartment itself is only coffin sized, with a small chimney that emits a puff of smoke each time Plonk departs into the future. After a false start that takes him 10,000 years into the past (and into the arms of the cast of Ten Canoes!), Plonk gets to Adelaide 2007, where his progress is followed in 1907 style. The tinpot time machine is soon puffing backwards and forwards, carrying all three household members in various combinations, sometimes with their ball-chasing-obsessed Jack Russell terrier, Tiberius.

Labelled a ‘terrorist’, Plonk is chased by 21st century police, soldiery and the SAS in a spiralling climax. But, having set up this interesting end-of-the-world scenario, de Heer seems disinterested in making too many political points. Broad comedy is his intention here. References to Chaplin, Keaton, etc abound. Banana skins are many times slipped upon, Paulus’s backside is many times booted. Occasional longueurs remind you how hard Chaplin & Co worked to keep the silent gags coming.

The experienced Szubanski (Babe and Babe 2) delights as the stern/simpering wife-mountain. Lunghi and Blackwell, both athletic street performers in their first feature, bring welcome energy and eccentricity. Tiberius steals his every scene with effortless over-enthusiasm.

Tardif’s wall-to-wall music is both faithful to the sources and instantly enjoyable. It’s recorded by The Stiletto Sisters, an attractive acoustic group comprising piano, double bass, violin and piano accordion. Played exuberantly live, the combination of music and silent film is a film buff’s sheer delight. The score is available for playing live at festivals: I certainly recommend inviting The Stiletto Sisters, too.



LUCKY MILES

Directed by Michael James Rowland. 105 minutes. Australia, 2007.
Main cast: Kenneth Moraleda, Rodney Afif, Srisacd Sacdpraseuth, Glenn Shea, Don Hany, Sean Mununggurr, Sawung Jabo, Arif Hidayat

Michael James Rowland’s debut feature follows a boatload of Iraqi and Cambodian asylum seekers cynically dumped from an Indonesian fishing boat on the vast, barely inhabited West Australian coast. Scenically, it’s terrific, with gorgeous sunsets and a rich gallery of inhospitable terrains. Dramatically, it’s less satisfying, for Rowland (as director and co-writer) bypasses the brute politics and despair of ‘people smuggling’ to focus on the essential niceness of an international bunch of lost souls, both visitors and locals. The film is unexpectedly lightweight and often as meandering as the wanderings of its lost characters.

Set in 1990, before ‘boat people’ became such a hot issue worldwide, the film emphasises humanity with a comic touch. This could well make Lucky Miles more accessible to a wider audience, though its theme, unknown cast and many subtitled scenes will restrict it to a local arthouse release (planned for July/August) where audiences will be looking for tougher analysis. Philip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence featured similar desolate landscapes, but his desperate travellers had a carefully explained political agenda.

International interest in this latest Australian odyssey could be highest in Asia; its humanistic feelgood message makes it a definite prospect for 2007 festivals.

When the piratical Indonesian captain (Jabo) drops his illegal load on the unfriendly Australian shore he advises them to catch a bus to Perth. Of course, there’s no bus and no road, just (in the words of a local) ‘plenty of bugger-all’. The new arrivals split on nationalistic lines — Iraqis one way into the wilderness, Cambodians another. Both groups soon realise they have been duped.

Next day the Cambodians stumble upon a remote pub and politely enquire after bus tickets. Arun (Moraleda), a polite young man in search of his never-met Australian father, by chance escapes the inevitable police roundup and runs into the desert. He stumbles upon determined, educated Youssif (Afif), last of the Iraqi group still at large, and Ramelan (Sacdpraseuth) who is the fishing boat captain’s son. The boat has sunk, entirely due to Ramelan’s moody inexperience.

These three form a brittle alliance, wandering together in 49O temperatures, tracked by a bumbling trio of local Army reservists ordered to bring them in. Arun has a dubious hand-drawn map, but it’s not until Youssif discovers a real map in an abandoned tin shack that they realise the size of the country and the hopelessness of their plight.

There’s plenty of danger, but Rowland avoids despair or grief or (highly likely) unhappy outcomes. He reveals mere glimpses of the main characters’ back stories, so current action dominates. As this action soon settles to unplanned wanderings, sometimes in circles, a sense of hopelessness and inevitability descends.

The local Australians are portrayed as unconcerned or drunk, the trackers are just as incompetent as the outsiders they are hunting. This is amusing, but unhelpful to the dramatic momentum of a longish narrative.

There are well-handled subtitles, many of them not ‘sub’ at all, but positioned on the screen beside the speaking character. This excellent device particularly assists in shots where several characters are interacting.

The multinational cast acquits itself well, with the increasingly dishevelled and wild-eyed Afif as the standout performance. A stirring mix of ethnic music from composer Trilok Gurtu helps the intensity of the action scenes.

Rowland and his editor (Henry Dangar) experiment with jump cuts, an uneasy idea when the illusion of time passing slowly is so crucial to the telling of the story.

Unequivocally successful is the sweeping photography of Geoff Burton. He contributes magnificently pounding beachscapes, endless dry-as-dust deserts, rock-strewn mountains and piled-up sand dunes — the full drama of the cruel, unforgiving Australian nothingness.



KENNY

Directed by Clayton Jacobson. 97 minutes. Australia, 2006.
Main cast: Shane Jacobson, Eve Von Bibra, Ronald Jacobson, Jesse Jacobson, Chris Davis, Ian Dryden, Morihiko Hasebe

Two years in the improvised making, 100% funded by a genuine Melbourne firm specialising in Corporate Bathroom Rentals called Splashdown, this unexpected Australian mockumentary about a kind-hearted portaloo installer is confirmation of the maxim ‘nobody knows what will make a hit’. Astonishing just about everyone in the local industry with his word-of-mouth success in theatrical seats sold and DVD units shifted, Kenny now turns his blue eyes to the rest of the world.

Overweight, divorced, with a lisp, earrings and goatee beard, Kenny Smyth (Shane Jacobson) is a decent and sweet-natured bloke, funny, brave and quirky. Lacking a narrative structure, the movie works as a gradual revelation of this very ordinary Aussie’s admirable character.

International prospects lie squarely on Jacobson’s chubby shoulders, squeezed so tightly into his shiny, much-washed overalls. But will the rest of the world get it, this unusual, Australian mixture of doco, comedy and romcom; of bawdy, honour and poo? The Castle was a big, funny local hit but didn’t travel well. Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla were serious comedies with many international fans. Crocodile Dundee was a deliberately planned crossover crowd-pleaser. Kenny’s his own man, almost certain to find favour in the UK, probably needing support and occasional subtitles in the US.

A true family affair, Kenny is spiritedly directed by Shane’s elder brother Clayton Jacobson. In the course of the long shoot, director Jacobson has made the most of Splashdown’s access to some action-packed locations. Kenny and his odd team of assistants bring portable toilets to a rock festival, a jet aircraft display, a truck rally and Australia’s iconic horserace, the Melbourne Cup. The actors convincingly inhabit these real events with some laugh-aloud straight-faced dialogue.

Then, just as the copious poo jokes start to wear thin, the movie swerves towards romantic comedy. Kenny, like Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee before him, is sent to the States — not to New York to show off his hunting knife, but to Nashville to represent Splashdown at a Pumpers and Cleaners Exposition. In tight shorts, as Aussie-unsophisticated as Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin before him, Kenny tours the colossal expo (“Poo HQ”), chats with the various exhibitioners, sells his own firm’s top-priced units to a Karaoke-loving Japanese businessman (Hasebe), and attracts the unlikely attentions of Jackie, a Qantas air hostess (Von Bibra).

By now we’re rooting for him, and soon it’s understandable why Jackie finds this decent, unassuming man so attractive. The action returns home for an more mocko at the Cup, ill-advised just when the belated narrative had started to grip.

The Jacobson brothers share writing credits. Some of Kenny’s banter, delivered without a trace of stand-up smartness, has already passed into regular local usage. “There’s a smell in here that is going to outlast religion,” says Kenny emerging from the waste tank he’s been cleaning. Festival goers are “as silly as a bum full of smarties”. “We’ll be busier than a one-armed bricklayer in Baghdad,“ he tells his crew, assuring them that “there is no pecking order in poo.”

Clayton also shares credits for the vigorous and convincing doco-style hand-held camerawork and for the lively editing. Natural comedy acting by mainly first-time performers adds to the many pleasures of this unclassifiable feel-good movie. But it’s Kenny himself who holds it all together. The unknown Shane won the 2006 AFI Best Actor Award ahead of Heath Ledger & Co., and deservedly so.



2:37

Directed by Murali K. Thalluri. 94 minutes. Australia, 2006.
Main cast: Teresa Palmer, Frank Sweet, Sam Harris, Charles Baird, Joel Mackenzie, Marni Spillane, Clementine Mellor

This impressively gripping debut feature was directed, written, co-produced and co-edited by a 20 year old with no previous film training or experience. Murali K. Thalluri, a passionate Indian/Australian, was unable to attract any state or national government funding, so he and his main collaborator Nick Matthews (cinematographer, co-producer, co-editor) raised their own finance. It’s a tribute to their talent and dogged determination that 2:37 premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May this year, opened the Melbourne Film Festival in July and has been invited to Toronto in September as part of the Vanguard programme. It opens on 50 local arthouse screens on August 17.

It was not just the director’s youth and inexperience that deterred the established funding bodies. Thalluri’s subject matter is teenage suicide and he tackles it head on, including a painfully horrific blood-spurting death scene. That, plus an extended, unflinching rape, has earned his movie a Restricted rating, which means no Australian teens under 18 can see what is clearly designed as a cautionary tale for them. Less graphic sex and violence may have blunted the filmmaker’s quest for reality, but would surely have increased his potential audience worldwide. International censors are likely to follow Australia’s lead.

2:37 is the (digital) time one sunny afternoon at a well-heeled, all-white High School when one of the film’s seven leading characters suicides so graphically. Straight after the opening credits we see the streams of blood and the appalled faces of staff and students — but we don’t see the victim. The narrative backtracks to earlier that morning and we meet the seven suspects in what becomes a Who-Done-It-To-Themself? It’s a neat idea, giving the film increasing tenseness and power.

Each of the Angst-ridden Seven could be the victim. Is it the girl with the unwanted pregnancy (Palmer), the achiever unable to win his father’s respect (Sweet), the limping outcast with a bladder problem (Baird, utterly convincing), the girl with an eating disorder (Spillane), the gay drug user (Mackenzie), the athlete with a secret problem (Harris), the girl who sees everyone’s pain (Mellor)?

Intercut with the day’s events are black and white talking head shots of the Seven, apparently interviewed at an earlier time, revealing aspect of themselves they feel unable to share with their fellow students. It’s a risky device but it works here because of the realism of the young cast, all of whom have had little or no acting experience. Thalluri certainly knows how to get truthful responses to the screen: his cast are uniformly excellent.

Standout is Palmer in a debut role that has already lead her to The Grudge 2 in Japan, Daniel Radcliffe’s love interest in his first non-Potter film December Boys, and a whopping Hollywood sci-fi action trilogy Jumpers, to be directed by Doug Liman. She is Australia’s latest gift to world cinema.

There’s a notable soundtrack, with edgy original music by Mark Tschanz, and brilliant sound design by Hollywood veteran Leslie Shatz who was chased by the unknown young Australian until he saw some footage and surprisingly agreed to join the low-budget team. He has compared working with Thalluri in the same catagory as working with Francis Ford Copolla and Gus Van Sant: high praise indeed.

The fluid tracking along school corridors and fractured time frames that allow moments to be rerun from different points of view inevitably recall the visual style of Van Sant’s 2003 Palme d’Or winner Elephant (itself a stylistic homage to Alan Clarke’s 1989 telemovie of the same name). In his clinical, nihilistic take on a US High School massacre, Van Sant was uninterested in character development or the cause and effect of conventional plotting. 2:37 is Elephant with all the characterisation you can handle, only occasionally overwrought, a tapestry of teen despair.



MACBETH

Directed by Geoffrey Wright. 109 mins. Australia, 2006.
Main cast: Sam Worthington, Victoria Hill, Lachy Hulme, Gary Sweet, Steve Bastoni, Mick Molloy, Kat Stewart

Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty Scottish warlords are here transported to contemporary Melbourne, recent home of Mafia-style vendettas, tit-for-tat slayings and alleged police corruption. It’s a good genre fit, and sheds much lurid light on the famous old plot. There are suavely dressed killers, their beautiful women and a steady flow of beatings, knifings, machine-gunnings and close-up garrottings. Too violent, too drug-fuelled, and with too much nudity for schools and colleges, this Aussie-accented Macbeth is limited to an art house audience at home (September 21 release) and internationally (opens at the Toronto Film Festival). However, older students seeking a robust and sexy version of their set text will keep DVD sales and rentals going way into the future.

Director Geoffrey Wright made an impact with his debut 1992 feature Romper Stomper, with a menacing young Russell Crowe as a vicious neo-Nazi Melbourne gang leader. Metal Skin (1994) was also set in the streets of Melbourne. His US teen slasher Cherry Falls (2000) was a disappointment, so there is considerable interest in this return to home turf. Working with High Definition Video on a tight budget ($A4) and challenging 25-day shoot, Wright restates his directorial panache.

Strongly aided by outstanding lighting and photography (Gibson), gorgeously rich interior designs (McKay) and rock-star costuming (Johnston), Wright delivers glowing images of blood, decadence and mayhem. Reds and crimsons dominate, from blood-soaked bodies to the criss-crossing aiming beams of dozens of attacking machine-guns.

The first 10 minutes is an all-action, no-talk drugs deal gone wrong, with plenty of pounding guitar-based music, so it’s something of a culture clash when the 300-year-old dialogue gets going, especially in the largely untrained mouths of some fierce-looking tough-guy actors. Non-English-speaking audiences provided with captions will fare better than those who have to grapple unaided with the range of Australian twangs on offer.

Wright and Victoria Hill (co-adapter, co-producer and leading lady) have freely hacked, trimmed and rearranged the classic text. They’ve retained the most famous lines and situations, though not always in Shakespeare’s order.

Many creative updatings work well. The three witches are presented as barely-pubescent schoolgirls gleefully desecrating a city cemetery or joining a drug-addled Macbeth in a naked nymphette romp in the cellars of ‘Dunsinane’, the Macbeths’ stunning out-of-town mansion. And it’s clearly masses of ingested drugs that allow Macbeth to see the slashed and dripping ghost of murdered gang-king Banquo and so thoroughly spoil his wife’s beautifully dressed dinner party.

Other ideas are not so satisfying. Wright and Hill have added an undercover police subplot, with hand-held cameras recording the gang’s secret doings and officers silently watching playbacks. But this leads nowhere, mainly because there is no re-assignable Shakespearean dialogue to sustain it.

Sam Worthington, 2004 AFI Best Actor Award-winner for Somersault, is impressive in the title role. With floppy hair and designer stubble, he grows from dissatisfied gang lieutenant to driven dictator dressed in Rock God satin suits and jangling gold jewellery. His half-mad climactic jig in a unexpected leather kilt is a memorable moment.

As his ultra-pushy trophy wife, Lady Macbeth, Hill has a model’s looks and catwalk strut, though the articulation of some very famous lines is occasionally a problem. Sweet (Duncan) and Hulme (Macduff) deliver the classic quotes with more assurance; Bastoni takes an impressive stab at the unwary kingpin Banquo, and is himself viciously stabbed many, many times by Macbeth. Comedian Mick Molloy plays a sadistic murderer with much well-contained relish.

Wright has given his design team a measure of freedom and they have repaid his confidence with some lush images. The Macbeth mansion has all the right furniture and accessories, all the electronic gadgets. Crimson curtains swirl behind massed candles. Gibson’s camerawork is particularly ravishing, an all-together different world to his stark realism in Wolf Creek.

Once you get over a 21st century Aussie gangster being greeted as the ‘Thane of Cordor’, there’s much to admire in this rich Shakespearean update; though, lacking the stars or the budget (or the gleeful wit) of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, it’s unlikely to cross over to a multiplex audience.



KOKODA

Directed by Alister Grierson. 91 mins, Australia 2006.
Main cast: Jack Finsterer, Travis McMahon, Siomon Stone, Luke Ford, Tom Budge, Shane Bourne, William McInnes

Fast-tracked for April 20 release prior to Anzac Day 2006, Australia’s near-sacred war memorial holiday, Kokoda celebrates the young, hardly-trained soldiers who faced the 1942 Japanese overland invasion of New Guinea. Their vastly outnumbered stand against a ruthless, fiercely determined enemy on the Kokoda Track — a steep, boggy, jungle trail — soon become a benchmark of heroism, sacrifice and mateship. The movie will do well on its 100-screen home release, and could cross over in other territories thanks to its lively horror-genre presentation.

For many years Kokoda had the same ring for Australians as Gallipoli had in the 1914-18 war. Peter Weir’s 1981 Gallipoli movie starring Mel Gibson had the budget to put famous military action into historical perspective. Alister Grierson’s debut feature has a small budget and less ambitious aims — to attract a modern multiplex crowd. But his lead actor, Jack Finsterer, has the clear-eyed intensity of a young Gibson, and a stirringly emotional conclusion leaves you in no doubt about the exhausted soldiers’ underdog achievements.

Director/co-writer Grierson graduated in 2004 from the prestigious Australia Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). From his graduation group he teamed co-producer Leesa Kahn, cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin, sound designer Aldrian Bilinsky, editor Adrian Rostirolla and composer John Gray — all working on their first feature. The Anzac Day deadline got the production moving fast: location shooting wrapped in September 05.

Grierson’s ‘lost patrol’ concept borrows heavily from action movies like Predator — unseen super-assassins pick off the exhausted soldiers one by one. The camouflaged Japanese are hardly seen: they rise from the jungle like aliens, they stab their wicked bayonets, decapitate mercilessly. There’s enough shock and gore for a couple of regular horror movies. All that’s missing are screaming female teen backpackers or dorm sisters.

Handsome young men are there in plenty, though far too gym-fit and well-fed for wartime authenticy’s sake. The relatively unknown cast take every opportunity offered, notably Finister and Stone as the Australian/German brothers from country Victoria, Mcmahon as the grumpy one, Budge as the outsider, and Ford as a dysentery sufferer (some unsavoury moments bring teen gross-out comedies to mind).

Bourne is a wearily pessamistic field doctor, and McKinnis contributes a beautifully delivered epilogue as a colonel praising the deeds of his young, stubborn fighters. He also does a welcome expository voicing over a map which goes a long way to establishing exactly why Australians were so concerned about Japanese intentions — the northern tip of Queensland is surprisingly close to the southern-most New Guinea shoreline.

Inspired by some iconic wartime photographic images, cinematographer O’Loughlin does well to make the Queensland rain forest locations so acceptably weird and forbidding. He achieves a remarkable establishing shot – from squelching, sliding boots, to a soldier surfacing from a bath of mud, to a high overhead shot of a forced march up a steep jungle incline.

Intense and violent combat scenes are shot from the soldiers’ limited point of view, with unnerving surround-sound bullets flying. Unseen creatures, creepy-crawlies, leeches, sickness and death assail us. We grow to understand and like this forward patrol of mixed greenhorns: there’s a noticeable drop in dramatic intensity when the remnants of the patrol join up with the main Australian force and defend the coast from the over-extended Japanese invaders.

Kokoda carries a first producer’s credit for Catriona Hughes, former CEO of the Film Finance Corporation Australia, the country’s principal movie investor. Her inside knowledge would have helped fast-track this tense and nifty debut movie – part war thriller, part teen horror show.



TEN CANOES

Director: Rolf de Heer. 91minutes. Australia, 2006.

The Adelaide Film Festival has an investment fund which, with its first feature flutter last year, shrewdly backed the critically acclaimed Look Both Ways. Sarah Watt's drama about fractured lives in a big city suburb went on to play well at international festivals - it won Toronto's Discovery award - as well as scooping four AFI awards at home, including best film and best director.

The fund's second released feature, Rolf de Heer's magical Ten Canoes, is thematically very different, following as it does an indigenous tribe in far northern Australia thousands of years ago. But it is certain to receive a similar positive critical reception to its predecessor after its Adelaide premiere at the weekend.

Also backed by the South Australian Film Corporation among others, Ten Canoes should enjoy strong play at home, where it will be released in June and marketed as showing a side of Australia long before the colonists arrived.

Buzz should also be good in arthouse markets overseas (witness the success of 2001 Camera D'Or winner The Fast Runner, based on an Innuit legend), particularly in continental European markets, where ethnographic features often find favour. Constant near-nudity may cause problems with more prudish audiences.

Marketed as the first feature made in an Australian indigenous language (there are hundreds, of which Ten Canoes features several) any problems in understanding are alleviated by colloquial subtitles and a brilliantly delivered English voice-over from Australian film icon David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu, better known as David Gulpilil.

He begins seriously ("Once upon a time in a land far, far away…"), before dissolving into giggles and steering the story's 10 bark canoes into mythical waters for "a story like you've never seen before".

Director, writer and co-producer de Heer is the centre of this considerable achievement. He worked with non-English-speaking indigenous people on the storyline, script and approach, gaining difficult permits and approvals from traditional communities living in Raminining, north-east Arnhem Land. Though their homes and lives seem modern, they still retain strong links to ancient laws, ceremonies, kinship rules and ancestor worship. Fashioning a tale of universal power, de Heer has assembled a non-professional cast who deliver spontaneity, commitment and a delightful sense of fun.

The work is in two intertwined halves, effortlessly linked by Gulpilil's friendly voice-over.

First, a black-and-white documentary approach introduces a group of men about to go on a goose-egg hunting expedition. The time period here feels indeterminate but it is around a thousand years ago, with no signs of outside influence. The hunting sequences are modelled on surviving photographic images shot by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the mid-1930s as, in formal National Geographic style, we watch the warriors prepare their ten canoes from tree bark and pole out across the Arafura Swamp.

It becomes apparent that one young man (Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil Dalaithngu, 20-year-old son of narrator David) is lovesick for the third and youngest wife of their leader (Minygululu). As the hunt progresses, the canny older man tells his potential rival an instructive ancestral story.

De Heer then switches to lush colours, as this cautionary tale takes the audience back to the Dream Time, “after the Flood”, tens of thousands of years ago. It too concerns a youth (Gulipilil again) who lusts after the third wife of his older brother (Kurddal). Now de Heer allows himself much greater cinematic freedom, with fluid camera movement through the bush, atmospheric lighting and dramatic sound montage.

The old man's mythic story of Lust Denied grows, says the narrator, like a great swamp tree with many branches. Most members of the tribe become involved: a wife disappears, a stranger is murdered and ancient laws of payback are invoked whereby the confessed perpetrator must dodge hostile spears until blood is drawn.

Both strands of Ten Canoes - expertly weaved together by de Heer’s regular editor Tania Nehme - are swiftly paced, compelling and illuminating. It’s a positive treat to see these indigenous people portrayed as empowered and in control of their lives and culture, in contrast to their frequent film presentation as passive victims of colonial aggression and disrespect.

Spectacular swamp and bush photography by Ian Jones is of prime importance to the overall impact, and proves all the more compelling when you consider the days he and his director spent waist deep in a tropical swamp alive with mosquitoes, leeches and crocodiles (a behind-the-scenes documentary, Eighteen Canoes, is also available).

Incidental music on traditional instruments is incorporated into sound design by James Currie and Tom Heuzenroeder which contributes hugely to the work’s authenticity and gravitas.




UNFOLDING FLORENCE

Director: Gillian Armstrong. 82 minutes. Australia, 2006.

Feature director Gillian Armstrong (Charlotte Grey, Oscar And Lucinda) makes a successful switch to factual film-making with Unfolding Florence, her packed and perceptive documentary about the “many lives” of feisty high society proto-feminist, opportunist and self-reinventor Florence Broadhust.

The project - originally planned as a one-hour TV documentary until Armstrong signed on - also benefits from a high-class script from award-winning theatre dramatist Katherine Thomson and a hand-picked technical team.

Apolitical, uncontroversial and without a penguin in sight, Unfolding Florence possesses none of the elements that in recent years have ensured theatrical success for other documentaries.

But it should still find an audience with older and female arthouse audiences, as well as enjoying a profile on the festival circuit and TV and cable airings. After its world premiere in the world cinema: documentary competition at Sundance, Unfolding Florence is released in Australia on June 29.

Florence Broadhurst led an extraordinarily varied and vibrant life. Born in back-country Queensland in 1899, she performed with a variety troupe in India, Burma and China during the 1920s before setting up her own Broadhurst Arts Academy in Shanghai.

During the 1930s she was a fashion retailer (“Madame Pellier”) in high-society London, then presented herself back in snobby post-war Sydney as a friend of royalty, painter and society leader. At 60 she began the most successful aspect of her life, as a designer of fantastical and highly expensive wallpaper.

Armstrong and Thomson adeptly show how, just as Broadhurst tested each of her personae and found it wanting, so she then wallpapered over them with a new style and invented background. As such she emerges as someone whose energetic determination and remarkable resilience have a huge impact on all around her.

At the same time the film-makers do not ignore her foul tempers, inveterate lying and motherly shortcomings, as confirmed on screen by her long-suffering only son Robert Lloyd-Lewis.

With only limited visual material available, Armstrong and her regular editor Nicholas Beauman intercut a widely researched mass of archival footage that illuminates each facet of Broadhurst’s varied life. Newly-shot 35mm scenes - with three actors representing Florence at stages of her life (Garbo as child, Price as go-getting young woman, lookalike Farr as Florence in her elderly fame) - also work well.

These scenes often contrast starkly with the many conventional interviews filmed on high definition video, although creative cutting to the archive collection diverts attention from their stolid staginess.

There is a pleasantly irreverent use of family sphotographs by Sydney animation studio SV2 which lends the material a Terry Gilliam approach. Family photographs and pictures of Broadhurst on stage, in costume and in foreign cities are brought to life Python-style as feet dance, large arrows point and backgrounds flash. It’s a cheeky touch which brings humour to the piece while adding poignancy to subsequent events.

Armstrong reveals early on that Florence met a blood-soaked end at the age of 78, murdered by person or persons still unknown. Having made a weekend appointment at her empty wallpaper factory, she was bludgeoned to death by a killer who exited the plant using keys only the owner’s regular friends and workers were aware of.

Throughout, Armstrong intercuts shots of Florence, colourfully attired, sporting her bright red hair, walking purposefully to meet her fate. It’s a clever device, binding the many disparate elements of biography, forcing audience concentration on the escalating tension.

The final tribute to this blazing survivor comes as Armstrong celebrates the worldwide revival in interest in Florence’s late-life designs, rounding off a remarkable tale told with respect and sisterly joie de vivre.



LITTLE FISH

Dir: Rowan Woods. Aus. 2005. 114mins.
Main cast: Cate Blanchett, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving, Martin Henderson, Noni Hazlehurst

Cate Blanchett last starred in an Australian film with Gillian Armstrong's Oscar And Lucinda (1997), in which her 19th-century heiress harboured dreams of building a glass church in the Outback. She returns to Australian film-making eight years later - and with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar - to play another dreamer in Rowan Woods' Little Fish. But Tracy Heart, a restless, brittle recovered heroin addict struggling with a blocked life in modern day Sydney, is a world away from Armstrong's period drama.

Typically for Blanchett it's no easy ride. But typically she's up to the challenge, delivering an award-worthy performance that combines layered honesty and gritty reality with her trademark luminosity.

Little Fish, which opened the Melbourne International Film Festival on Wednesday (July 20), is certain to enjoy major festival play during the coming autumn season. Sales already secured include Prooptiki (CIS), HBO Ole (Latin America), Ster Kinekor (South Africa) and Equinoxe (Canada). In Australia the film opens on around 40 screens on Sept 8 - enough in Australian terms to cover most key specialist and upmarket multiplexes.

Marketing is likely to target audiences who responded to more serious character-driven ensemble fare such as Paul Haggis' Crash or, closer to home, Ray Lawrence's Lantana: less attention will be made of the central character's past as a heroin addict, more on the emotional life choices that she now faces.

Overseas it should also enjoy similar awards attention and critical acclaim, although Woods' opaque approach and deliberate ambiguities means it is unlikely to enjoy the mainstream success it perhaps deserves. But sympathetic audiences will enjoy responding to the intelligent and emotional workout offered by the best Australian feature since Lantana (2001).

Tracy (Blanchett), clean from heroin for four years, feels she's wasted much of her adult life. She lives with her mother Janelle (Hazlehurst) and disabled brother Ray (Henderson) in a rented house and is now in the process of applying for a bank loan - likely to be unsuccessful - to buy into the small-scale DVD rental shop she manages.

On the edge of the family is Lionel (Weaving), a former Rugby League star who, the story suggests, was Janelle's partner during the kids' early years. Now he is a drug-addicted wreck, supported by gangster/developer and former gay lover Brad (Neill). Back into Tracy's life comes Jonny (Nguyen), a Vietnamese-Australian who suddenly left town for Canada four years ago. He's prosperous now, an unlikely stockbroker, and Tracy wonders if she can get the money she needs from him - not knowing that he has quite another agenda.

Working from an intricate script by Jacquelin Perske, Woods - directing only his second feature after chilling debut The Boys (1997) - delivers a tautly assured drama that builds considerable tension through its large cast of excellent actors at the top of their form.

He makes his audience work hard, asking them to pick up hints, clues and oblique references to past events from the sparse dialogue and edgy acting. It takes considerable screen-time before the family dynamic is established, and some key events and relationships from the back story are never fully explained. The (possible) car crash that was the (probable) cause of Ray's amputation below the knee and Jonny's departure seems crucial - but is not explored. And the bushland climax would have been tauter still if all motives were clearer.

But it's the acting that makes Little Fish so memorable. And while Blanchett admirably holds centre stage, she still faces strong competition.

Hugo Weaving delivers a revelatory performance, switching tack from the multiplex persona evidenced in both the Matrix and Lord Of The Rings series (and to be seen in Warner Bros upcoming V for Vendetta in November). Gruff, unshaven and sporting broken nose and multiple facial scars, he is at first unrecognisable, yet his self-hating, tough-guy, homosexual drug addict still manages to evince audience sympathy. This is great film acting.

Martin Henderson gets the sad, life-wasting brother note perfect - we disapprove of him, yet still like him - while Noni Hazlehurst is brilliantly warm, angry and confused as the long-suffering mother.

Camerawork and production design make the most of the striking suburb of Cabramatta, a Vietnamese area sometimes known as Little Saigon that feels incongruous when stood next to the rest of Sydney. Danny Ruhlmann's photography - sometimes handheld - almost floats through the neighbourhood's streets, workplaces and homes, drifting in and out of focus. The score from Nathan Larson (who won best music at Cannes in 2004 for The Woodsman) is a fully integrated electronic mix of mood and action, blending waterscapes, rumbles, mall sounds and wind chimes.



THE MAGICIAN

Director/Writer, Scott Ryan. Australia 2005. 88mins
Main cast: Scott Ryan, Ben Walker, Massimiliano Andrighetto, Kane Mason, Nathaniel Lindsay

This year’s Sydney Film Festival was noticeably short on new Australian movies. The UK feature My Summer Of Love played the opening night, usually reserved for a local premiere, and three Aussie micro-budget independents seemed tucked away at the smallest festival venue. Of this cheapo trio, The Magician, a gangster mockumentary chilling and hilarious in equal parts, made the biggest impression with unsuspecting audiences.

Scott Ryan’s debut looks capable of spreading wide when transferred from DV to film for its Australian release in September, is already slated for the Edinburgh International Film festival in August, and is a strong and original contender for the international circuit.

A half-hour version of The Magician won Best Film at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (MUFF) in 2003, where Ryan won Best Actor and Best Director. The buzz attracted producers Michele Bennett (Chopper) and Nash Edgerton, who convinced him to cut back on the comedy and strengthen the inherent drama.

Shot guerrilla-style with available light on some unlovely Melbourne backstreet locations for A$3,000, with the writer/director/co-producer/co-editor also playing the lead and the camera operator acting as well, The Magician has an intensity and power many conventionally budgeted thrillers miss. Robustly funny, X-rated dialogue delivered with laid-back confidence and stomach-turning nonchalance also help.

Framed as a student documentary, the film follows Scott Ryan’s hitman as he goes about his business in a standout performance, his lean, mean ex-army hitman a seductively unpredictable and dangerous presence. He smiles as he efficiently ensures people disappear, and chats confidently, smoothly and incoherently to camera about cars, movies, crap and his simple solution to the social problem of drug takers (shoot them all).

It’s a startling debut, all the more so when you remember he’s written the script and is directing the movie.

Ryan’s hitman allows his appalling opinions and brutal crimes to be filmed on the proviso that nothing can be shown until after his death. The Italian-accented cameraman asks puerile questions while following his subject’s deadly progress, getting the framing right while the victims dig their own graves. A tentative relationship develops between this odd couple, as it also does between the killer and his assigned victims (though Ryan is uninterested in the details of the hitman’s professional dealings, who hires him, for how much, and why.)

Elements of a broader approach remain - including some unnecessary out-takes and bloopers during the end credits - and further judicial editing could strengthen this undeniably gripping portrait of the banality of evil, Aussie style.

It certainly stands comparison with that other quirky Australian gangster portrait, Chopper. Ryan claims inspiration from the real Chopper Read’s published memoirs, and the unsettling humour and barely repressed violence is much the same. And, despite his virtually non-existent budget, Scott Ryan’s violent ‘magician’ recalls the impact of Eric Bana’s equally seductive and unsettling character.


THREE DOLLARS

Director: Robert Connolly. Aust. 2005. 119 mins
Main cast: David Wenham. Frances O'Connor, Sarah Wynter, Joanna Hunt-Prokhanovik, Robert Menzies, Nicole Nabout

Based on an award-winning 1998 Australian novel, Three Dollars is about a good, honest man utterly unable to compromise his integrity. David Wenham is sensitively intelligent in a role which requires him to bravely suffer through sacking, betrayal, bankruptcy and destitution.

Made with care and finesse by the established directing/producing partnership of Robert Connolly and John Maynard, and with the considerable bonus of Frances O'Connor's return to local movie making, the film has everything going for it — except dramatic momentum.

Told along several parallel lines, Three Dollars is defiantly fractured and slow to unravel. Chemical engineer Eddie (Wenham) is frogmarched from his office with two cardboard boxes of personal effects during the opening titles, but it is only towards the end that we learn that all he has left in the bank is those eponymous three dollars.

The opening act slowly introduces his passionate and depressive wife Tanya (O'Connor), their perky six year old daughter Abby (Hunt-Prokhanovik), and Eddie's mysterious childhood friend Amanda (Wynter), who crops up unexpectedly throughout the film.

One promisingly dramatic plotline concerns Eddie’s professional investigations into a dodgy land deal -- a housing estate has been planned for some badly contaminated bushland. But even though Eddie gets excitingly attacked by a crop-dusting plane in open country a la Hitchcock, the audience must wait and wait for further developments. The director/writers’ interest is clearly elsewhere.

Wenham and O'Connor are excellent as the urban couple, though his peace-loving, reasoned, almost saintly incorruptibility is hardly dramatic. He never fights back. At least O'Connor gets to react against his goodness, and much pleasure can be had from watching the detailed, close-up truthfulness of these two performances.

Production values are exceptional, with fine work by Nick Meyers (editing), Tristan Milani (camera) and Alan John (original score).