A tour de force in its way and a simmering wonder, mostly, of great acting and fine directing, Fred’s awed glance at White’s World is nonetheless arch and portentous, expensive, smug and windy, and a crashing failure as drama.
Playing upperclass, boarding-schooled Australians raised rich in the 1930s, Davis and Rush correctly brandish the off-BBC accents of the time, but their rich Edwardian mother Charlotte Rampling sounds more like a Darlinghurst landlady. Though she has been lifelong a thundering snob and her two children both have titles — hers by marrying a Spanish prince, his by playing Shakespeare well in England — she despises them both from her deathbed, thinking them of little account or pedigree or moral worth. Though hers was a life of shopping, partying, petty adultery and tormenting servants (one, played by Helen Morse, is an Auschwitz survivor forced nightly to dance lewd Weimar cabaret acts in the manner of Sally Bowles in her late middle age), she judges her life on earth a better one than theirs, and we never see why.
Too much else is likewise unexplained. Sir Basil Hunter, the actor (Geoffrey Rush), a casual schtupper of loose-mouthed chambermaids, has nonetheless no titled wife nor hellcat mistress nor renegade children to speak of, but we are not told why. Dorothy de Lascabanes, the Princess (Judy Davis), has broken off with her titled husband, it seems, an international scandal, surely, like Grace busting up with Rainier, but we are not told why. Elizabeth Hunter, the mother (Charlotte Rampling) lived apart from her husband, he in the sumptuous farmhouse, she in the city mansion, for a decade or so, but we are not told why, what provoked it, what they had in place of a sex life, how it was managed, and how the money was made. Not much is told of the two important men in the women’s lives, and we don’t know why.
And what we are told comes in sudden impulsive self-knowing soliloquies like those in Eliot’s The Family Reunion, haughty and wise and stoic, in dialogue (by Judy Morris) more like ill-wrought performance-poetry than any known species of human speech in any recent Australian or British era. The actors struggle mightily with it, and sometimes prevail. A sort of substitute reality is achieved, and it works quite vividly now and then. Helen Morse as the high-kicking Auschwitz songstress, ever expecting, awake or asleep, the jackboots’ dread return, steals the picture, or does for a while. And then her fate, self-slaughter in a bath full of blood — for fear, we are told, of a life without Madam or employment as a cleaning person in Australia, 1972 –- is almost laughable. But there you go. Patrick said it, and the novel allegedly got a Nobel Prize for it. It must make sense, it must, somehow or other.
Judy Davis remains one of the greatest screen actresses in world history and is no slouch here either, on the tremulous edge of childless menopause, frustrated artistic impulse, foolish marriage and what for a while we think may be incestuous longing. Rampling is well-used. Rush gets well that edgy anglicised fraudulence one saw in those days in Helpmann, Michel, Fiander, Barrett, Blakemore, Colson, his fear of England, his greater fear of home. We are told his Lear failed, but not what Shakespeare parts he did well in. We hear at the end he is a playwright also, and that is a surprise. Friels plays well a kind of Bob Hawke running as Labor leader in 1972 for Prime Minister (and groping, as one does, the socialite in the back seat of the chauffeured Commonwealth Car), and that comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who voted that year for Gough Whitlam, a different sort of man; and so does the shimmering, white, uprearing Opera House, in that year still a dowdy concrete skeleton. Alexandra Schepisi is fine as Flora the below-stairs slut (watched closely in the naked love scenes in take after take by her father, the director), but a shock too when she goes with Basil’s growing foetus back to her working-class boyfriend and he takes her, thus encumbered, and embellished, in, and the London Sunday papers are not informed.
What is not a shock is that the woes of the idle rich do not much move a working-class and peasant country, not as much at any rate as Snowtown or Mullet or Australian Rules or The Dish or Newsfront. We identify with people who work for a living, or we usually do. We identify with people who bear children, but neither titled sibling in this movie does. We are not told why.
The best performances, probably, are by John Gaden and Robyn Nevin, as the stitched-up solicitor Arnold (lover once, like most men, of Elizabeth, the towering bitch) and his prim wife Lal. These are upper-middle-class people on a human scale, keeping their traumas to themselves and getting on with their minor, busy, pursed existences, and not billowing into shoals of chopped-up blank verse in the Patrick, Fred or Judy Morris way.
What a crabbed and rancorous old shit Patrick was. And how well this film, inadvertently, shows it.
What Schepisi was doing anywhere near it is a puzzle.
Name:
Do we take it you did not really understand it, Bob?
It is a snapshot – the eye of the storm – with only such extra information as is necessary to reveal the misery and miserableness of the major players.
Davis is wonderful, unrecognisable from her other roles, which have tended to be of feisty, vampish types. This is so different.
Are you a little envious of his prose, Bob? I am.
None of his prose occurred in the film, and the dialogue was awful. All the performances were very good. The character of Sir Basil made no sense at all. An actor-playwright with a knighthood but no wife and no children and an erectile dysfunction who offers a housemaid an acting career as his Eliza Doolittle, knocks her up and deserts her? Let us imagine ‘Sir’ Ray Barrett or ‘Sir’ Lewis Fiander or ‘Sir’ Kevin Colson doing that and the Murdoch News of the World not being informed of it and making splashy headlines of it. Let us further imagine, say, Rebel Penfold Russell being married to Prince Siegfried of Bavaria and breaking up with him and not being hounded by New Idea.
It makes no sense at all as a modern story. If ‘Sir’ Basil were as esteemed as he is supposed to be why is no mention made of the films he has been in, the Oscars he narrowly missed, the weekends at Notley with Larry and Viv? His career belongs to the 1910s, or the 1890s. In the 1959s and 60s it is ludicrous.
If he is also a writer why is he not seen writing? Where, and who, are his three wives? Why have he and his sister no children? Why is the subject not raised?
The story seems unconnected with, unknowing of, disdainful of, ordinary heterosexual life, or theatre celebrity, or Sydney in the 1970s, or Australian politics (A Labor leader who must be Whitlam groping a fifty-five year old woman in a speeding car while seeking the Prime Ministership? Come on), or the actual state of the Opera House two years before it was opened by the Queen in my presence, or what the mothers of famous actors are like (Never see him in a play? Or a film? Come on). ‘Elizabeth Hunter’ is as real as Blanche Dubois. Gets a housemaid to dress up and do Weimar cabaret numbers, does she? Why not see old movies in a specially-built screening room? She’s rich enough. Why not hire a real cabaret singer? If she’s so keen on cabaret why did she not travel to Europe when younger to see it? Why are there no flashbacks of this? Why are there no flashbacks of Auschwitz? Of Basil’s disastrous King Lear? He’s the narrator. Why is this trauma not seen? His mother suggests he will be stripped of his knighthood for it. What is she talking about?
Where does the money come from? Why is her husband not seen in the flashbacks? Why is the Princess’s marriage break-up not shown? Why do we see no more of the Prince than his bare buttocks jogging into the surf? I know the novel got a Nobel Prize but Jesus, did it also fail to tell us, in a hundred and twenty thousand words, these things too? Would, say, Barry Oakley, or John Duigan, or Malcolm Knox, or Kate Grenville, or Rodney Hall, or Hannie Rayson, have left all that out? And got a Nobel Prize for it? Really?
Some emperor, White or Schepisi, has no clothes. And you just won’t admit it.
The movie lost fifteen million dollars, and cost forty times as much as Careless Love, which looked more expensive, and I don’t see the point.
Do you?
See what you can do with a little pushing? I agree with all of that, but I think the thing White wanted to emphasise was that “the children” – one a successful knighted actor, the other a princess (even if only by marriage) are so astoundingly reduced to juvenile status and behaviour when in the presence of their mother.
Yes, it could have been so much more; it might have been a thousand pages instead of nearly 600. But it is what it is, and still a masterpiece.
Whether you are one or many is irrelevent when you all display such communally discordant characteristics. Sometimes social situations go well, sometimes they don’t. This one didn’t, despite the cult/troupe trying to create a sealed, homogenous, self-sustaining entity bubble within a greater entity in a Trojan horse style backdoor bid for glory. But no one else was or is on board. It is a train from nowhere, going to nowhere.
You’ve got to tailor the lubricant to the social pole. If you stand alone and transcendent above such squalid notions as greased social interaction, go be transcendent elsewhere because what you are doing is by definition a solitary, or “in-cult”, activity.
I hope that all the followers of this Film and Theatre Blog will enjoy the adventures of Mad Max In Mexico.
I’m confident you will.
It made me long for the productions of Henry Crawford, it was a veritable reminder of how far the Australian film industry has come, by showing us what it used to be like, and I am referring more to the days of TV in 70′s, it had no touch of cinematic impact, it looked like made for TV, no I take that back, it didn’t even look that good. I liked the music of Grabowski. Good performances, really? Really?
I only glanced at this production, but I did want to say how much I enjoyed this piece. Great analysis and spot-on about the people caught culturally between England and Australia.
True David. White was born in 1912, the generation that grew up during Worl War I, went through a depression in their early adulthood and many fought in World War II – all of it whilst being British to their bootstraps and colonials at the same time.
Many of the intelligentsia then and later fled to England to escape the parochialism.
I have not checked recently, but an amazing number of Australia’s best-known writers, including poets, seem to have come from ascendancy families. Patrick White, Judith Wright, and I think David Campbell, a poet of the Monaro near Canberra, were all, as far as I know, from the squattocracy.
Williamson, Buzo, Hibberd, Keneally, Herbert, Murray, Ellis, were from country towns and Oakley, Humphries, Romeril, two Hardys and Hewett from indifferent suburbs. Leak and Crabb from Adelaide….
What the FUCK are you talking about?
The Squatters form a definite historic-cultural faction and never get mentioned anymore. And they are tied in with the country as well as Melbourne (Squatter HQ). I think it was a prosaic point Collard was making but you can kind of get it if you bend your mind around it. It stands to reason that the squattocracy, on account of its power hungry nature, would form a certain stream of cultural influence down through the ages and it makes sense that it would work along familial lines. Judith Wright was no Banjo Patterson, you’re talking an entirely different level and perspective. In this country especially there has always been more than one value system vying to become the definitive version, and different versions hold the ascendancy at various times according to the political set up of the day.
In short, class warfare against the Squatter class is what has been sorely missing in this country. I have honestly always thought that since I was very young and played “Squatter” the board game.
I played it too – “Winton Boy III” wasn’t it? Late autumn and spring rains always good for the pastures . . .
I wasn’t trying to make some class war point. I am not of the squattocracy myself. I think most people would agree that White, Wright, and maybe Campbell, are all prominent writers of a past generation. All of them were apparently from the squattocracy.
“Vaccinate for pulpy kidney”.
It was a good game. I think I saw a copy on sale recently. I learned a bit from the game too.
Another example, close to home. When my mother was beaten out in the Australian Children’s Book Award in the mid-1960s, she lost to a book written by one Annette Macarthur-Onslow. I assume this lady was of the squatter class with a name like that.
I present data not comclusions.
David Collard, you and Bob list Australia’s best-known writers and poets…(and a journalist, Crabb)
I’m curious about who are regarded as the best? Patrick White is on top of my list, I’ll try and think some others…
I think the British to their bootstraps thing is part of modern day propaganda in arrears, referring only to the propaganda of the day as opposed to the reality.
No, I think it was reality, except amongst the Irish Catholic minority of the day. My parents were born in 1912 and 1915, and they were of that mindset up until attitudes changed generally, in the 1960s as Britain joined the EEC and abandoned its empire (or did the empire abandon it?) To those old enough, as Bob says : discuss.
“British to their bootstraps” describes a character from a Patrick White film adaptation. My family were never like that and we have the diaries of a great great uncle who fought and died. This is the generation that produced Chifley et al who were well versed in global empire movements. England was already sniffing around for oil in the Middle East as Turkey was well aware. The people and their media source are not one and the same and it’s a matter of degree as to what extent an individual adheres to and identifies with the propaganda of the day. I can’t imagine too many people who had a close experience of loss coming through it still proudly waving their Union Jack bunting in full subservience to queen and country.
It was forgotten though, I think, fairly quickly and this might be where the disconnect comes in. In the fifties, the boys at my uncle’s school used to imitate the sounds of rifle fire and bombs to scare the permanently shell shocked veterans living in a hospice next door. As Michael Parkinson once said and I had always thought, the baby boomers were shielded from the horror by their parents, who never spoke of it.
The WW1 soldiers were lied to and their sense of duty was taken advantage of. Very few Australians, I imagine, were trudging off to advance England’s economic interests.
My great uncle Jock Garden was a founder of the Communist Party in Australia; he later abandoned them and joined Jack Lang’s Labor group. But he was still always loyal to the empire! As if that made sense . . . see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Garden
Did he fight or lose a close relative in WW1? At any rate, he was already an adult when he came out here so his relationship with empire might not be a product of this country.
That’s a point, Reader1. I never really thought of him as anything other than an Aussie! Are you less an Australian if you choose – choose – to become one?
I am third, fourth and fifth generation Aussie; am I more entitled to call myself an Aussie than Gillard or Abbott, both born overseas?
I think not, but it’s a pity we can’t send Abbott back.
It’s whatever culture formed you and to whatever extent. Choice doesn’t enter into it.
A divergence. I am trying to remember a more chilling character on the screen than that portrayed by Stephen Rea in The Shadow Line, the BBC’s seven part noir thriller written, produced, and directed by Hugo E Blick. This is bleakest Britain, as bleak as the Red Riding Trilogy, far bleaker than The Wire, where the cops are corrupt, the reporters amoral; and the villains a cross-section of sympathetic characters and psychopaths. One, Jay Wratten [Rafe Spall], giggles his way through the tortuous interrogation of his victims with flashes of insight into the human condition and understanding of weaknesses which make you writhe and giggle along with this comic monster just to cope. So when in the first episode Blick introduces Gatehouse [Rea] into this paradise lost, here is a character at last who offers hope. He is everyone’s kindly English uncle. At the best of times Rea looks like a cross between Pluto and Goofy. Forever dressed in hat and coat and gloves, he is polite, old-fashioned, caring, re-assuring, warm, charming, his voice barely raising above a whisper for the entire series. By the third episode when his outline appears in the glass pane of a front door, [the three times repeated image a masterly piece of direction] you are screaming don’t let him in, for unlike one of those little men from the village who is hammering on the door over something about some reaping, Rea is truly death personified. The few facial muscles Rea calls upon become ampflied with meaning. This is not the played-down stuff of Oldman in Tinker Tailor; this is studied brilliance. It is so satisfying to watch a pro at work. Especially those who never stop learning. Compare Burton’s early stuff with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf; Plummer’s Sound of Music with Syriana; I’m sure we’ve all got our lists. And so many of these pros are bit parts; without recognition holding the whole together. The irony of The Shadow Line is the small ray of hope offered up at the end; ironical because it is represented by that insatiable monster that sweeps everything aside, the media. Anyone see it? I downloaded. Anyone want to throw up some chilling characters with explanations?
Shadow Line was so chilling I had to watch it wrapped up in a blanket, it was compulsive watching, even if I felt sick with all horror I had to watch it…the acting was amazing, really all of them were exceptional, the British are so professional, I enjoyed the earlier police drama Luther very much too.
I saw something similar on French TV, it was also very nihilistic, everybody was bad,cops and criminals,but it was not in the class of the English…I did not finish the series..
Sorry, no explanations, I can’t remember the names…
Off to the opening night of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus to see if he can recapture the magic of his Alien and Bladerunner. The latter is a perfect example in my view of how a director can see a seed of an idea in an ordinary piece of writing, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, and turn it into what a lot people consider a masterpiece. [Hope I am not doing an injustice to the screenplay writers, Hampton Fancher and David Peoples]. Nearly booked the wrong tickets, the 3D version. My experience of 3D to date is that of a dolls house peepshow. Kills atmosphere. Substance is lost amongst the props. Still, I don’t own a mobile or have a Facebook account, so really what would I know. 3D is on the rise. The future is The Seven Samurai in 3D and full colour, that will not only be interactive but tiny capsules handed out will cover taste and smell. I wonder if Scott is aware of Stanilaw Lem’s novels. To date Tarkovsky is the only one to mine Lem’s genius in his equally genius depiction, Solaris. Funny thing is Lem didn’t like the interpretation, and Tarkovsky just wished his film didn’t have a SF element. So who can you please? Off I go. Am I having a conversation with myself?
Well, Frank, you are. Don’t you get it? Everyone these days gets their own 5 minutes of cleverness and meaningless Shakespearean quotes and the show moves on. Catch up! John Faine. 5 minutes Victorian Premier. 5 minutes Syria [which eats my heart out because I was there the day the borders closed]; 5 minutes rape in marriage; 5 minutes GFC Mark 2; 5 minutes refugees – all in the name of entertainment; no resolution, no substance. As Terry Lane wrote in his farewell perspective, “Farewell, it’s time to turn off, tune out.” And, as with the sharing of shame, most of me went with him. The only problem being is – my words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven g
o
Did you prefer Bladerunner with the narrative voice of Dekard, or the Director’s cut without the overdubbed voice FW?
I prefer it with (a big no no in some camps).
I think Douglas Trumbull’s imagination is at work in making BR have that look and feel that for me made it the first SciFi film I actually enjoyed, and an added dimension of looking not too far ahead to what LA may eventually look like. Down here in Melbourne there is already talk of adding storeys to existing tall buildings, if you can’t go out go up.
In the end it is a personal response. Funny thing is that sometimes those evil hollywood producers are right, have that objectivity, that is lost on the director and writer eg Apocalypse Now and the Exorcist whose director cut versions sullied the originals by adding scenes that loosen all the cords and near perfection suddenly topples down. I liked the original Bladerunner for those same reasons, although I don’t think the director’s cut was a disaster. I think Capolla was in search of money when he released his. Sad to pull out the Mona Lisa and add hat and glasses to her for the sake of money.
I think the voice over gave it a nice Philip Marlowe, Private Detective feel, a la The Big Sleep.
The music in Bladerunner is one of the better soundtracks that lifts the film and gives it a timelessness, “lade Runner Blues” nd the “Love Theme, not to mention that 20′pastiche of “one more kiss” plus Vangelis’ electronica.
All those fine touches, the guy from Miami Vice, as the latino detective with the penchant for miniature origami, and one of the best bit part actors in the USA, Emmet Walsh.
Rutger Hauer’s character is truly tragic and his death scene is one of the finest in Cinema I think.
Howsabout Emmert Walsh in BLOOD SIMPLE. And Roy in BR: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in rain.
Time to die.”
Rutger Hauer claims he more-or-less ad libbed that. I like “Is this to be an empathy test …?”
For menacing and malevolence personified, I don’t think you go past the two young men that terrify the family in Haneke’s
“Funny Games”, the German version.
I was very impressed with Cache, Hidden,one of those movies that you ‘feel’..have not seen Funny Games…
Have a big blanket to hide behind Helvi, if you can take Funny Games you can move onto Benny’s Video and Seventh Continent (a heart breaking film).
You are talking to me, Frank. Blade Runner is one of my favourite films. I have the Dick novel, but I think my daughter has abstracted it. The blogger Udolpho has an interesting take on it, claiming that Ridley took the meaning out of it. Udolpho admires Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, another of my favourite films.