MelbArts

Announcement - new blog

2011-06-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, the writer of Melbarts is still on the web. I'm sorry that I left this blog in recess for so long without explanation - truth to tell, I knew I wanted a change of direction but I wasn't sure where.

Finally I've started a new blog, Feminist Culture Muncher. It will incorporate some aspects of Melbarts, that is, reviews of books and film, but will range more widely to encompass politics and television. The reviews will be (hopefully!) shorter, less polished and more frequent.

Hope to see you there!

Book review: Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor

2010-07-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

Permanent marks etched into fragile human skin, and the soul of a whole city – these are the two disparate touchstones on which rests Fiona McGregor’s new and highly readable novel, Indelible Ink.

Taking her city’s natural beauty as a sine qua non, McGregor anthropologises her characters to reveal that the central truth of our time may be the banal but inescapable fact that real estate is destiny.

Yet the values of real estate sit uncomfortably with, but can never be easily separated from, equally important concepts such as attachment to and knowledge of the landscape of one’s home, the need to preserve architectural history and even the duties of parents.

In the light of this backdrop this panoramic novel unobtrusively deals with a vast number of themes with great wit and assurance – climate change and water shortages, tensions between siblings, the tortures of adolescence, sexuality and illness, the comfortable boredom of monogamy, creativity versus financial stability, the difficulties of single parenting and repartnering, the responsibilities of parents to adult children, female poverty after divorce, politically motivated policing, and gay singledom.

While this long list may make the novel sound like a sociological study, you’d never know it. In fact, McGregor’s clear observations and refusal to judge leave the reader floundering, desperately attempting to fill in the huge moral lacuna the author appears to have dug in the novel’s epicentre. This lacuna is one of the secrets behind the cleverness of Indelible Ink.

Widening the mainstream

McGregor is hardly the first novelist to take Sydney as her muse. The mythical aspects of Australia’s oldest and largest city exert a siren-like attraction for writers, its social fabric and arresting topography rent by rapacious capitalist heavies and, more lately, the unheralded catastrophe of climate change even while it continues to glow with its own astounding, seemingly indestructible natural beauty.

Recent treatments by Richard Flanagan (The Unknown Terrorist) and in the eighties Janet Turner Hospital’s now unjustly forgotten The Last Magician celebrate the great sexual and social decadence and urban decay of Sydney as much as they deplore it, seduced by the pulsing energy that a subtropical climate, sexual licence and the urgency of late capitalism cook up.

McGregor refuses to dichotomise and therefore avoids the salaciousness that ex-Catholic Flanagan, brilliant though he is, falls into. In fact, this novel shows her to be equally impatient with a number of fundamental oppositional pairs: good and evil, body and soul, life and death, abject and exalted.

With its emphasis on Melbourne’s eternal rival, the book could be read as a companion volume to Christos Tsiolkas’s now almost iconic Melbourne-based The Slap. The furious and unexpected success of this novel demonstrated not only that readers were desperate for fiction exploring ‘the way we live now’ (with all the contradictions in that concept) but that Tsiolkas himself, with his fearless placing of his own bodily and social subjectivity in the fictional spotlight, had actually extended the boundaries of the mainstream to include the experiences of second-generation migrants and gays, just as Garner did with women in The Monkey Grip and her subsequent fiction.

When Tsiolkas and McGregor came to prominence in the nineties, both were immediately filed away in the ‘grunge’ category. But this process of categorisation and their subsequent careers suggest that so-called grunge may have been above all an extension of realism through an attempt to bring the hitherto abjected reaches of bodily and social experience into the symbolic. How fitting that these two writers, also labelled ‘queer’, are now the ones ripping open the suburban blind to reveal particular cultural moments in their respective home cities.

As The Slap did for its author, this novel suggests a fictional coming of age for McGregor, a Generation X-er who rose to literary prominence with her searing short story collection Suck My Toes in 1994. At the time the craze for lesbian chic was at its height, and McGregor – with her shaved head, stunning looks and acerbic style – seemed to exemplify its more subversive aspects.

****Plot elements given below****

A privileged, spendthrift and alcoholic baby boomer, 59-year-old Marie King is reaching a turning point. Recently divorced from her advertising executive husband, Ross, and misunderstood by her children, she is reluctantly considering selling her beloved Mosman home with its view of the ‘dense blue harbour’, and leaving the North Shore.

After a lonely drunken evening she rolls into a tattoo parlour and acquires a shoulder rose. This foray leads to an insatiable need to keep decorating her body, an urge that causes her to question the values and lifestyle of her North Shore milieu.

She soon meets Rhys, an unconventional tattoo artist who introduces her to an alternative world not bound by the values of real estate. But as the sale of her home proceeds, Marie receives news that will throw her into the territory of her body like never before.

Marie is not a particularly heroic heroine in the traditional sense – in an early scene she buys a nine-thousand-dollar lounge suite without blinking – but from the start she’s likeable and unassuming.

Her greatest strengths are her deep affinity with the landscape and beach of the picturesque cove that her multimillion-dollar home fronts onto, and her encyclopaedic knowledge of the indigenous plants of her abundant Mosman garden and the natural dangers that beset them in Sydney’s seemingly idyllic climate. A nurturer of the land, she is old-style Mosman through and through.

Yet Marie achieves one great thing in the novel: ageing and its vicissitudes and the lure of the needle provide the impetus for her to reach a post-feminist awakening to her body, and through that, to discover an autonomous self, an enriched erotic life and connections with others who are not bound by the extreme materialism she’s been mired in.

In decorating her ageing skin and enduring the pain and exultation of body art, Marie also comes to extend the limits of her social and emotional repertoire. The experiences of the body, whether painful and pleasurable, enable her to know herself and engage with the world in a more honest and authentic way. As she decorates her body she learns to inhabit it.

It is to the novel’s credit that this transformation is as profound as it is subtle; after all, there’s already a staid kind of liberalism, complete with illicit affairs and drug dabbling, in the brash wealth of the moneyed world that Marie emerges from after her divorce. McGregor’s Mosman is hardly the uptight Moonee Ponds of Edna Everage, but a place so mired in competitive materialism that there’s little room for anything else. There’s also a surprising degree of ageism in the reactions of Marie’s friends and children to her tattooing odyssey.

****Plot elements end****

McGregor’s writerly style is quick, nimble and witty (‘they stared at a mob of shoppers charging through the doors for the Australia Day sales as though fleeing a tsunami’) but there’s sometimes a simultaneous sense of both depth and reach in her writing.

She flits from the tiny detail to the panoramic view and back again seemingly effortlessly, describing minutiae and wider concerns with equal authority: ‘The lawns of the reserve crunched between her feet like toast. The news said the heatwave death toll was three …’. She’s a highly visual writer, alive to the variegated beauty of nature and the human attempt to emulate that beauty through art – including body art.

Moreover, McGregor has a real knack for getting inside her characters’ heads and bodies while at the same time managing to present a panoramic view. Even the most mundane activities, such as refilling a car with petrol, give us insights into the characters’ inner lives, as well as Western culture as played out in Sydney: ‘Her car was a tick sucking up its weekly supply, injecting its host with poison simultaneously’.

As readers it’s Marie’s inner life we most often have access to, but at various times we also view the action from the perspective of her three children, Clark, Leon and Blanche. Some may be shocked at the Machiavellian ease with which these characters navigate and view their lives, particularly Blanche, who’s easily the most materialistic and, like Marie’s Mosman friends, obsessed with ephemera.

On the cusp between Generation X and Y, but owing their values to the latter, Marie’s children nurture various degrees of self-obsession and to some extent are seemingly trapped in a never-ending adolescence; however the dog-eat-dog, survivalist atmosphere of Sydney seems to be partly to blame, despite the three being so firmly middle-class. Although McGregor is faithful to their inner worlds, at times it’s hard to feel much for them apart from a basic sympathy, except perhaps in the case of Clark, significantly the only one who has a child.

McGregor’s political project is to retain the exigencies of the body at the forefront of the action, and we are as familiar with Marie’s digestive problems as we are with her newfound joys in her decorated skin or the awkward disjunctures her tattooing opens up with friends and family members: ‘a ream of burps emerged from her mouth, harsh and bitter like sulphuric gas’. Similarly, McGregor’s sex scenes are original and graphic while never being merely titillating. She’s able to present sex in a way that is funny and at times poignant but never romantic; for her, it’s a site where mind and body are often at odds with each other, much as they would like to coincide.

Her modus operandi also enables her to avoid romanticising the landscape and flora of Sydney, much as she appears to adore it. The subtropical climate leaves Marie’s angophora vulnerable to fungi; a street of ‘hooded figs’ leave an ‘acidic carpet of figs and fig shit dropped by bats at night and lorikeets during the day’. Nor is nature a still landscape for us to contemplate; it’s dynamic, noisy, pulsing and sometimes almost human, forever competing with the never-ending buzz of human activity: ‘The clouds parted and a billion tiny legs in the trees around the house grew frenetic with their worship’.

This natural plenitude, although distantly threatened by climate change, is mirrored in the abundance of fresh, beautifully prepared food in the novel (‘Susan unwrapped a piece of dark chocolate and began to grate it over a pear tart’); McGregor’s Sydney is still a land of plenty for the upper middle classes, one in which climate change has so far failed to quell the urge to excess that money fosters. In fact, with its adumbration of frenzied, upiquitous activity on every level of life – the rampant materialism no more meaningful or thought-out than the instinctive sun-worship of cicadas – it would be easy to assume that McGregor's view of life is Darwinian. I think it would be more accurate to read her style as a refusal to preach; her aim is simply to let the reader make up their own mind.

An insider’s view from the outside

The quarrel I have with the concept of ‘how we live now’ is that ‘we’ are all too often well-rewarded Fairfax journalists writing their smug but guilty columns from the security of their inner suburban veggie patches. McGregor’s feat here is to bring us a front-row view of a prime economic and cultural site with an insider’s knowledge but the cool gaze of the outsider.

Like so many of Australia’s prominent writers, and in stark contrast to Tsiolkas, McGregor’s background is unremittingly upper middle class; she grew up on the lower North Shore, in what is undoubtedly the epicentre of social prestige in Australia. But having occupied the outsider role in both life and fiction (she is a queer performance artist), she brings a bloodless, gimlet eye to this world.

The dinner party that Marie attends with her old friends the Joneses is one example. The various conversations and interactions are a delight. The question of whether one of Marie’s friends has had a boob job and is using Botox, the merits of Morocco as a holiday destination, and the competitiveness of Ross’s former business partner, who spends hundreds of thousands on a Nolan painting merely to compete with him, are all subjected to ironic scrutiny.

Marie’s children are all obsessed with real estate, with varying degrees of ruthlessness in their pursuit of the security ownership brings; but time proves that their generation doesn’t have the monopoly on selfishness. And while Marie is in many ways ‘old style’ Mosman, in comparison to the brash multimillionaires transforming it, a previous ‘gothic pile’ had once been demolished to build her loved home.

McGregor tells us a rollicking good story, a ripper yarn, as she drags us along, sometimes at breakneck speed, on Marie’s often wild journey, with its 360-degree turns and sharp emotional drops. But, like the finest literary misery memoir, McGregor refuses to fill in the dots with whys and wherefores, or to supply convenient heroes and villains.

Instead she leaves us with quietly devastating scenarios built around her central thesis, that the chief divide in Australian society may be neither gender nor class, but whether one ‘owns’ or not. I won’t give away the ending here, but the subtle traces of certain off-stage characters in the final scene brilliantly echo McGregor’s refusal to overtly pass judgement, even as it devastates.

This is what I took from the novel: in all the emphasis on the solidity of bricks and mortar, on their ability to both provide and remove everything that matters most – security, stability, wealth, a planned future – the body itself must and should be made paramount. Walls and houses were once things built to provide shelter for the fragile body. Now they have the ability to decide which bodies thrive and which don’t. If we all undertook a journey into the body such as the one that Marie bravely embarks on, there’s a slim chance that they might return to their original function.

For more recent book and film reviews, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!

Exhibition: Contemporary Australian Drawings 1, RMIT Gallery

2010-06-12T21:50:00.000-07:00

You might assume that drawing in art is the basis for a finished work that is later painted and multicoloured, or simply a sketch in a commonly used medium such as pencil. But you’d be wrong. While the idea of drawing evokes the line, the figure and the outline, in fact curators consider that drawing comprises works on paper; the medium itself isn’t important.

That may be true, but the idea of the line – be it a squiggle or swirl, a bold paint stroke or a basis for the figurative – is still powerful in this exhibition of contemporary drawings at RMIT. Drawing is also associated with a kind of unthinking, childlike creativity, and some of these works evoke the most instinctual and primeval elements of the psyche.

This is an exuberant exhibition that celebrates movement, dynamism, and the playfulness inherent in the many mediums the artists choose. But it is also a survey of Australian drawing over almost 40 years, with 35 artists represented from the present to as far back as 1973.

Indeed, while Generation X is certainly represented here, Godwin Bradbeer, one of the participants, has suggested that the exhibition is a coming of age of an earlier generation of artists who embraced the figurative despite being birthed in a modernism that abhorred the image. And these various modes of the figurative and beyond are everywhere here.

Curator Irene Barbaris has deliberately hung this exhibition as an installation rather than a salon. Given the small size of the gallery this is an inspired decision, with the works drawing from and speaking to each other; transitions, complementarities and contrasts all abound.

The gallery is still too small for the large number of works, and you really need more than one viewing, as there’s too much to take in at once with so little white space; but Barbaris’s extensive knowledge and sensitivity, as well as the high walls of the gallery, mostly make up for this.

In Aida Tomescu’s ‘Sodium II’, ‘Sodium IV’ and ‘Sodium cyr’ 2009, pastel markings in white and yellow dominate the foreground, against darker, shifting background brushstrokes, depicting a sense of chaos and incomprehensibility. These works struck me as more guttural and primeval than the more subdued yet still energetic earlier works of Tomescu I’ve seen, as if she had begun to dig further down into her psyche.

Spanning both the abstract and figurative, but equally inspired in its seductive use of colour, complex layerings, and seemingly random paint strokes is Graham Fransella’s moody portrait of an outlined semi-human figure. The vagueness and ambiguity of the figure combined with the painterly play of the work’s surface creates a strength and luminosity that stays in the mind like a vivid dream.

Moving further into the figurative is Mandy Martin’s ‘Wanderers in the desert real: Wallerawang power station (triptych)’ 2008. This diminutive set of paintings, in brown and grey hues, feature viscous-seeming sculptural textures that add aesthetic weight and immediacy.

These paintings enact a central paradox, evoking a surprising beauty from industrial ugliness almost abandoned by humans, apart from a small lone figure in the central painting who hurries through, dwarfed by cooling towers on each side and anxious to leave.

Critics have situated Martin in the tradition of romantic landscape painting, and the tiny scale of these paintings, as well as the subject matter, suggests Martin’s simultaneous subversion and celebration of this tradition.

Sarah Tomasetti demonstrates her mastery of a form she specialises in, fresco, in her series ‘Worldlines’ 2010. Tomasetti’s concerns with the numinous, the liminal and with aesthetic pleasure continue here, with the series of 12 frescoes in small boxed frames all depicting the same orbicular shape, presumably the Earth.

The seductively cracked textures and differing colour gradations through and around these surfaces also glory in texture, but these works encourage a meditative as well as an emotional response.

A complete change of mood occurs in Greg Creek’s bold and playful ‘Manifesto drawing’, dominated by a violent splash of off-white on a narrow black surface supported by plywood. The effect is something similar to a very steep, almost vertical slide that turns up at the bottom. It’s deliberately unkempt and slapdash, evoking the rawness of pure creativity.

Exuberance of a different nature is evident in Stieg Persson’s untitled drawing of 2007, a large ribbon-like design of great intricacy that celebrates decorative calligraphy with thriving pulsation.

This theme of decoration recurs in the striking ‘Anonyme’, 1998, by Deborah Klein. In this intricate and precise black-and-white linocut, the highly stylised head-dress of a Victorian woman, shown from the back, becomes itself pure decoration – is this an aesthetic violence or a triumph of the feminine on design – or both?

There’s enough to satisfy the traditionalists here, including Philip Hunter’s landscape triptych, and striking, relatively traditional portraits by Virginia Grayson and Pam Hallandal (who won the Dobell Prize for drawing in 2009).

There’s delightfully intricate and exacting attention to detail, the thing that sketching does so well, as well as a sense of Freudian absence and the melancholy of war, in a sketch by Raymond Arnold of a soldier’s jacket encasing an absent body.

In ‘Ancient Cypress’ Beijing’ 2001 and ‘Prunus (Flowering Cherry) jardin du Plantes, Paris’ 1996, Elizabeth Cross imbues her trees with life, soul and muscularity; there is something tortured about them.

Not so in Helen Wright’s ‘One tree on the island (II)’ 2010, a collage of birds of many different species perched on a tree. This work makes a strong point about conservation in a way that is deceptively sweet, conventional and decorative.

Perhaps the standout of the exhibition for me was Godwin Bradbeer’s Imago XIX, 2007, a striking, luminous image of an Asian face presented as a beautiful, generic object that is at once aestheticised and deeply human; totally lacking in personal revelation, it’s still seductive, even moving. Silver oxide and pastel dust give this image its remarkable sheen and increase its aesthetic power.

Bradbeer’s work has been positioned at right angles to Irene Barbaris’s startling and dramatic ‘Light circle #10: 8 points’, 2010. Barbaris has said this work is an examination of ‘the random line and the structural line’, but it is also a powerful collision of line, unapologetic colour and artificial light.

Noel McKenna’s series of animal sketches and Vivienne Shark LeWitt’s glorious ‘untitled sketch dancing couple’ 1994 reveal artists who are absolute masters of the art of outline, drawing form, soul, mood and even narrative from the barest illustrative details.

Also watch out for a gentle painting by Jenny Watson and an energetic video by Mike Parr.

There’s a related exhibition next door, Constellations: A Large Number of Small Drawings, that’s well worth taking a look at. This exhibition explores the use of drawing in a range of professions, so the drawings tend to be fairly traditional. And sometimes they’re so precise and beautifully patterned you want to eat them.

Both exhibitions run until June 26.

Book review: The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter

2010-04-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

Neoliberalism has stolen much from the experience of being young in Australia. High university fees and rental costs restrict its possibilities as a liminal period in which all kinds of education – sexual, emotional, intellectual – take place.

Early adulthood, especially in the university context, is a time characterised by uncertainty, intense but shifting friendships, and periods of apparent stasis in which the future may be quietly and steadily shaping itself. It is also a time in which romanticism must square up with cold and inexorable reality. Now that the coming of age of the young is once more blighted by class, we inevitably look to the privileged for models by which to characterise this period.

Emerging maturity among the upper middle class gets a fresh and unusual treatment in Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy, a complex narrative that uses a mystery story to describe youthful romanticism in ironic terms, undercutting it with doses of grunge realism.

The Legacy has been hailed as a literary triumph. The fact that Tranter’s agent, Lyn Tranter, happens to be her mother hasn’t harmed the publishing, marketing and reception of the book – apparently the first-time author received a six-figure sum from HarperCollins for two books, with a second novel to follow.

So does this genre-crossing novel live up to the hype? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good – there’s much to enjoy, even though the combining of genres does introduce its own limitations.

The story has a wide imaginative reach, encompassing six years and two cities on separate continents, Sydney and New York, in a back-and-forth sweep that seems to echo its heroine’s own emotional seesaw-ing; there are smaller temporal swings, too, that emulate the confusions of recollection. The plot is complex, both factually and emotionally, and the mysteries buried at its heart are skillfully conceived.

The mistakes that Tranter avoids may be as important as her achievements in The Legacy. There’s more than competence here; Tranter demonstrates a level of sophistication and mastery of story that elude many a first-time novelist. She writes with a kind of narrative ease, and reading the novel is sometimes a bit like watching a jazz pianist improvise – you feel that she’s exploring new territory yet still in her comfort zone.

***Plot elements given below***

It is the late 1990s. On a visit to Europe, beautiful young heiress Ingrid Holburne, a classics student at Sydney University, is swept off her feet by the sophisticated Gil Grey, a New York art dealer. Leaving behind an intense three-way friendship with her cousin Ralph, who loves her unrequitedly, and Julia, a restless law student, Ingrid marries Grey and goes to live in New York with him and his daughter Fleur, a precociously talented teenage artist.

Ingrid disappears on September 11 2001, presumed dead in the disaster. Julia travels to New York to find out about her life with Grey and Fleur, and stumbles on a mystery whose unanswered questions compel her towards the truth with ever greater urgency.

With an almost stereotypical self-destructive streak, Julia drinks too much (‘I wondered if the last glass of wine had been a mistake. I looked around for another’) and has made poor romantic choices overshadowed by her own unrequited love for the bisexual Ralph. Prior to her trip alone to New York she has reached a stage of ‘purposelessness’. Her journey is an attempt at an emotional coming of age: in seeking knowledge on the fate of Ingrid she is also in search of herself.

To learn what she has to learn, let go of childhood patterns and discover what she really wants to do with her life, Julia must be willing to remain in uncertainty, Keats’s ‘negative capability’. She must also do this if she wants to discover the truth about Ingrid’s fate. It is this process of submitting to the flow of life and letting go of destructive patterns that Tranter demonstrates so powerfully, with a minimum of self-analysis on Julia’s part.

The Legacy abounds in what’s fashionably known as ‘intertextuality’, with its diverse antecedents indicating its genre-crossing ambitions. Tranter has said that Ingrid is a transplanted, modernised version of the unfortunate Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, and that the ailing Ralph is also taken from Portrait. In contrast, the novel’s heroine, Julia, is based on a minor character in Raymond Chandler’s murder mystery The Big Sleep.

It’s not necessary to have read either of these books to appreciate the novel. Nor does the style echo that of James, although it does to some extent take up the theme of the Old and New Worlds that James deals with, the US now playing the more established culture that seduces a younger, more innocent Australia.

Rather, Tranter has adopted something of Chandler’s bald, cinematic prose. The novel treads a challenging line between grunge realism and the emotionally detached tone of a hardboiled murder mystery. It’s quite filmic; many of the scenes would be apt in a feminist version of film noir:

I was all rush and wanting to go faster; he let me for a minute and smiled at me. Then he pinned my wrists above my head against the bed and gave me a cool, hungry look.

The intertextuality, though, goes further than a transplanting of characters and a particular tone. With the university backdrop, the three main characters use filmic and literary references to understand and reflect on their own lives; for example, Ralph quotes from the film version of The Big Sleep when meeting Julia for the first time. Tranter seems sublimely aware of the impossibility of separating life from art: the two endlessly inform each other.

The narrative is powered by Julia’s emotional detachment, limited point of view and instinctive search for emotional and factual knowledge. Because of the emotional journey she must undergo, the action proceeds slowly, consistent with its realist style; for example, the youthful, idealistic friendships that are central to the novel change gradually in a series of phases rather than abruptly through a conventional climax.

Despite Tranter’s skill with plot, there was one point in this long novel where I felt the emotional journey slowed the action down and was getting in the way of the mystery story. Julia is called back to Sydney for personal reasons, yet, on the cusp of new knowledge about Ingrid, feels compelled to return once more to New York. The time just before she leaves the action felt too slow, and I was frustrated with her seeming torpor: having acquired some disturbing clues, wasn’t it clearly time to do some serious sleuthing? The novel regains this lost momentum once she returns to New York a second time.

Because the novel unfolds from Julia’s perspective, and because of the requirements of the mystery genre, Ingrid remains a remote character. This is deliberate and serves to make her exotic, the obscure object of desire, which is the role she plays for Ralph; but eventually our not knowing who she really is makes her less exciting. (Ironically, she becomes more three-dimensional as Julia scouts for information about her in New York, echoing the heroine’s own journey of self-discovery.)

The character of Ralph, too, takes a while to coagulate; eventually he becomes sympathetic, although he also remains opaque. Grey, Ingrid’s husband, is arresting but also a bit thin, fulfilling to perfection his role as the ‘baddie’.

It is the emotional resonances of the friendship between Julia, Ralph and Ingrid that Tranter chiefly explores through this expansive story. Idealistic university-based friendship in early adulthood isn’t new – think of Brideshead Revisited – but it gets a fresh treatment here. For Tranter, the hero worship and sexual overtones that such friendships can involve complicate as much as they enable emotional maturity.

To this end, she vividly conveys the intensity and intellectual urgency of Julia’s feelings for Ralph and Ingrid, as well as her emotional fragility. For a time the three friends meet daily at the university bar to drink and play games and the mundanity of this routine, and of Julia’s jobs at a video store and then a secondhand bookshop, is a pleasing contrast to the complex forces that will tear the threesome apart.

The book also strongly critiques an art world that is portrayed as being ruthlessly exploitative of investors’ endless quest for cultural capital and novelty. In a world where artists and art are both fetishised, Ingrid becomes for Grey just another object that he acquires.

***Plot elements end***

The detached tone of the novel offers some distinct pleasures. Don’t expect long, involved metaphors; instead there’s a focus on tiny details that possesses almost a quality of the haiku even as they are a tribute to Raymond Chandler.

Julia sometimes focuses on these details as an indirect way of indicating her emotional state, or as a means of coping with the enormity of tragedy and loss. But they also often act as adjuncts to the plot and as guides to the inner lives of the other characters. Notice the small aspects of life, Tranter seems to be advising, and you will understand the large ones. This is evident in the description of Grey’s apartment after the loss of Ingrid:

The proportions of the room and windows had a classical, balanced aspect: tall ceilings and tall windows hung with long, fine curtains, the one aspect of excess in the room. They fell from their high rail like the pleats in Ingrid’s wedding dress and hit the floor in a tumble …

Given this focus, it’s perhaps no wonder that the story becomes more vivid and richer in detail when Julia travels alone to New York after September 11, seeking to find out about the fate of Ingrid on Ralph’s behalf. The city and its endless range of tiny bars, minute stores crammed with goods, haughty galleries, doughnut shops, mob-filled streets and stately, graceful public buildings provide an infinity of novelty and fascination both for Julia and the reader.

Tranter lived in New York for eight years and her love of and familiarity with this city is evident. Its takeaway culture – endless coffees and bagels and Thai food and hardly a home-cooked meal in sight – is part of this ambience, and beautifully serves the detached, sometimes Chandleresque style.

The Legacy plays around with, as much as it celebrates, the mystery genre. Tranter inserts some stock characters – there’s an elderly fortune teller and a male femme fatale – and sets up a contrast between the glamorous and the sleazy (with both, in the best tradition, being ultimately connected).

In particular she has fun contrasting the casual elegance of Ralph’s family home in Kirribilli with the grime of a modern megalopolis and the slightly seamy lifestyle of university students at the turn of the century, with their casual indulgence in drugs, alcohol and sex:

I loved the sense of discontinuity between the frantic, late-night urban world we moved through – winding inner-city streets strewn with garbage and seedy interiors and neon light – and the high-class opulence of Ralph’s house at Kirribilli.

Don’t commence this book expecting to be immediately swept up by breathless prose, and don’t be fooled by its seeming straightforwardness. Instead, enjoy the ambience and let Julia’s recollections slowly reveal their complex undercurrents.

For more recent book and film reviews, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!

Film review: The Eclipse

2010-04-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

(Note: I'm so sick of my old template, I had to make a change. I'm not sure about this one but I'll try it for a while and see if it 'takes'.)

As a lover of thrillers and horror movies – not slasher movies, but the kind that dole out steady doses of heart-thumping suspense – I look forward to a good ghost story.

Every aficionado of thrillers or horror knows that at some point you’ll be plunged into a parallel world of fear or terror that there’s no escaping from until the end of the movie. A strong back story is vital to the believability of that world, but it must ultimately be secondary to the sometimes sadistic display of evil or supernatural forces, which must also have their own logic. Wolf Creek is one of the finest examples of a strong initial back story adding to the horror that awaits.

Yet watching a thriller or horror film is a bit like getting on a roller coaster. Once you’ve paid your money, you want to keep riding until the end. Occasional uphill chugs are a relief, but you don’t want to keep getting off for rest breaks.

The Eclipse promises a ghost story entwined with a love story. Ireland is an obvious setting for both, and the film is set in the storybook, rainy romanticism of the coastal town of Cobh in County Cork, amid the not-so-rarefied atmosphere of a provincial literary festival.

But the attempt to weave the two genres together doesn’t work, and detracts from both plot lines. In this film, the ghost story is the back story, and not only is it weak, but it lacks strong connections to the romantic plot. Unfortunately, this overshadows (eclipses?) what is good about the film.

The Eclipse has its antecedents in the brilliant Sixth Sense, and it also reminded me of the creepy Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia) with Mia Farrow, an underrated ghost/horror film made in the late 1970s that sadly isn’t available on DVD. While the elements of realism in these films are essential to their spookiness, The Eclipse can’t hold a candle (despite a surfeit of candles in the film’s imagery) to either of them.

*****Plot elements given below*****

Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds) is a burly, laconic woodwork teacher, heavily burdened with a grief he can’t let himself feel following the recent death from cancer of his wife. He is a volunteer at the annual Cobh literary festival and himself a secret scribbler. He seems remote from his two children and his father-in-law, who lives in a nursing home.

Michael is assigned to pick up one of the festival guests, Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a successful writer of books on the paranormal. Looking for all the world like a young Julie Walters, she is blonde, lithe, intense, and skittish about romantic involvement. Michael thinks he may have been seeing ghosts, and the two begin to develop a bond as they share their supernatural experiences.

Also at the festival is Nicholas (Aidan Quinn), a narcissistic best-selling author with a burgeoning alcohol problem. Being married doesn’t stop Nicholas from pursuing Lena, with whom he’s had a one-night stand in the past. The stage is set for a love triangle, with Lena at the apex.

*****Plot elements end*****

The mode to expect here is the British version of realism seen in, for example, Billy Elliot or The Crying Game. It’s not grunge, but it doesn’t have the excessive clean-ness of mainstream Hollywood movies. The colour palette is muted, the dulled light creating a sense of otherworldliness, of remoteness from the present. While it might abound in cliches, the camerawork succeeds in revealing the continuing presence of an older, more spiritual Ireland that exists as a substrate of the globalised present.

The acting is similarly low-key, character based rather than star-making. This enables some strong drama and lovely touches of finely honed Irish humour, even if the target is mainly the arrogance and vanity of Nicholas.

The presence of the ghosts signals another layer to life that we confront at powerful times, when experiencing grief for example. The aim of the film, I think, is to show how these two layers of experience, although separate, are entwined with each other – that encountering the ghostly layer can help guide us through the emotional mazes of everyday reality.

There are constant visual and verbal references to the past, the dead, and spookiness in general. Candles are lit by women dressed in period costume in preparation for a literary lunch; characters exchange words while shown in silhouette or are seen from the back as they stalk down tenebrous Irish corridors; Lena and Michael stroll companionably through a cliche-ridden graveyard on an inevitably overcast day.

These touches are inoffensive in themselves, but they promise a supernatural element that, while it pops up occasionally, never actually coalesces into a coherent narrative within the main one. There’s also one particular spooky manifestation towards the end of the movie that seems absurd, but again it doesn’t really go anywhere. And there are two attempts at schlock-horror, which, while they might provide short-term thrills, detract from the overall theme – an attempt to assert the validity of the supernatural as just another aspect of life.

Much more annoying, however, is that whenever things are getting a bit profound in the action of the film, or indeed when a particular, serious event occurs that Michael has been forewarned about, soulful choir music overwhelms the soundtrack. The effect is simply gauche; any genuine ambiance is ruined, because the viewer is being told that that they are now to lift their minds heavenward.

The two ghosts in the film don’t really have enough of their own narrative, and neither of them is connected strongly enough to the main narrative. There’s not even any obvious connection between the two hauntings, although in ‘real life’ the ghosts are related to each other. The traumatic event that occurs seems to be somehow peripheral to Michael’s life, its seeming main purpose to illustrate something about the supernatural. As a result, the culmination of the ghostly aspects of the film is something of an anti-climax.

The film handles its setting much better than its subplot. If it wants to create ambience while reminding us of how complex and unknown the world is, the town and landscape of the picturesque Cobh offer a convincing enough argument. Views of tall, brightly painted historic tenements seen from a ferry, and a stunningly luminous deep blue shore that Michael and Lena contemplate at dead of night, add a layer of authenticity to the film that some of the visual cliches can’t.

*****Plot elements given below*****

Having said all this, there is a scene towards the beginning of the movie which suggests how good it might have been. The household is asleep. Michael hears noises downstairs and goes to investigate. The dog wimps out with childish yelping. What Michael thinks he sees for a matter of seconds as he stands on the landing in the dim half-light is wispish-ly chilling in the way that blood-spattered corpses will never be.

*****Plot elements end*****

Ciarán Hinds is effective as Michael, even if you sense that he’s perhaps played too many similarly deep but inarticulate men in the past. A little bit ubiquitous in historical dramas, his turn as the repressed Captain Wentworth in the 1995 film Persuasion puts Colin Firth’s Darcy to shame.

Aiden Quinn has perfect comic timing as the champagne-soaked Nicholas. His presence is not only a foil for Michael’s character, but enables a gentle send-up of literary festivals and literary stars in general. While this send-up doesn’t go very far, Nicholas’s character continues to add much-needed drama and humour even as the ghost subplot fails to deliver. Iben Hjejle offers a poised, understated Lena, although we never know the source of her excessive reserve.

My criticisms about this film suggest the difficulty of bringing any work of fiction to the screen. Director Conor McPherson is also an internationally celebrated playwright, and he cowrote the screenplay with Billy Roche. The screenplay, in turn, is loosely based on a short story by Roche. I haven’t read the story, but I wonder if, rather than adding necessary extensions to the original plot, the screenwriters relied on inserting excessive ‘atmosphere’ to pad it out.

Having said all that, The Eclipse’s main story, while it’s fairly understated, does have its strengths; there's some powerful drama, and many of the interactions between the characters sparkle with sly Irish humour. Just don’t expect much more from the ghosts than a few unexpected jolts.

Exhibition: Ron Mueck, National Gallery of Victoria

2010-03-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

An Australian artist who has received astounding international acclaim for his lifelike fibreglass sculptures is currently exhibiting in his home town, Melbourne.

Ron Mueck is a stunningly successful sculptor who now lives and works in the UK. Using materials such as fibreglass, polyester resin, silicone and polyurethane, he creates sculptures of mostly human, often naked forms that are scarily lifelike, yet either smaller or larger than life. Mueck’s current show at the National Gallery of Victoria in the largest exhibition of his work ever staged in Australia.

Mueck challenges the boundary between art and the real, even as the scale of his works reinforces it, yet the hyperrealism is anything but simplistic. While his work shares similarities with Patricia Piccinini’s playfully dark visions of hybridised life forms, its aims couldn’t be more different.

It struck me as I wandered through this exhibition that I should be focusing on the viewers as much as the works themselves. The large Sunday afternoon crowd were delighted and intrigued, laughing, gazing, waving cameras around and pointing out details to each other. The excited comments I overheard seemed to be mainly about how realistic the sculptures were. Children revelled in the verisimilitude and asked pointed questions.

As the crowd revealed to me, the exhibition can be experienced on many levels. Humans are naturally curious about the people we see in the street, but from an early age we’re told it’s not polite to stare. This exhibition invites us to stare at these apparent examples of our species – to marvel at the various markings on human skin, to study the expression of a figure so lost in its own world it can acknowledge no watcher. Various angles offer different facial expressions and bodily details. But the pieces are always open ended: as viewers, we’re asked to bring our own interpretations to these works.

Mueck’s extreme attention to detail invites us to wonder at the intricacies of the human animal. The skins of his subjects bear all the imperfections and gradations of colour and texture of the real thing: pale pink blotches that indicate underlying capillaries; loose folds; ghostly tracks of blue veins; moles and freckles; pimples; hair follicles, and hairs that have been individually inserted.

Despite the hyperrealism, there seem to be occasional small distortions in the proportions in order to make a point about the subject. While the figures are often naked, the clothes and appendages that some of them wear are rendered with the same loving detail that Mueck brings to the nude.

Before his career as a sculptor Mueck worked in puppetry and model making in film and television, first in Australia and then in London; he was involved in Jim Henson’s film The Labyrinth. In 1997 his sculpture ‘Dead Dad’ appeared in the group exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, held at London’s Royal Academy. The work caught the eyes of critics and shot Mueck to fame; since his stunning debut, visitors have flocked to see his sculptures, which are now included in a number of Australian, US and European collections.

Mueck unashamedly uses size to shock us into viewing his subjects with fresh eyes. ‘A girl’ 2006 is one of the exhibition’s more confronting pieces. A huge newborn baby girl, 5 metres long, lies on her side. Part of the umbilical cord is still attached to her navel, and traces of blood and amniotic fluid are strewn over parts of her skin.

Her face has the squashed ugliness of the newborn, a testament to the ordeal of birth she’s just been through. Her head has been bent back as if she’s been placed in an uncomfortable position or is protesting about her removal from the womb. One eye is partially open but her expression registers little but a kind of blind angst.

Her hugeness suggests the enormity of her neediness, the responsibility that her existence, her advent, imposes on her parents, the undeniable change she will necessitate. But, seen out of the context of a typical loving triad, she looks grotesque and alien, even monstrous, not yet fully humanised. We fear and feel sorry for her simultaneously.

This work contrasts with the first sculpture in the exhibition, ‘Dead Dad’, which depicts the corpse of Mueck’s own father. This sculpture has been placed in its own, dimly lit room. It depicts a man who is about two-thirds smaller than life size, totally naked, laid out on his back with his hands turned upwards. His skin has a grey-greenish pallor. His face still bears the marks of recent suffering but also resignation.

He seems recently dead and therefore close to life, as if death and life co-existed in the sculpture. There’s a sense here that Mueck is demystifying death at the same time as he presents it in all its starkness. The sculpture’s diminutiveness suggests the loss of the human presence in death, but also that the father has lost Oedipal power: not only has been demoted to ‘Dad’, but he is smaller rather than larger than life as an oedipalised parent figure might be. There’s also a sad elegiac beauty inherent in the figure. He’s a kind of hybrid: both medical specimen (laid out too neatly) and loved father.

Most of Mueck’s subjects in this exhibition inhabit inner worlds, lost in their own subjectivity. Four of them directly reference the extreme inwardness of either sleep, being in bed or both.

‘Old woman in bed’ 2002 is a particularly poignant example. An elderly woman lies in a bed, her head nestled into a pillow, her grey hair tousled behind her. A crisp sheet and neatly folded cream blanket cover her, the lack of colour evoking a nursing home or hospital. She lies on her side, suggesting a foetal position. Her eyes are half-closed and her mouth hangs slightly open.

Here is a woman long past caring about the appearance she presents to a hypersexualised world. Instead, one hand loosely fingers the sheet as if craving the security of childhood. She is vulnerable, seemingly utterly exhausted by life, yet there’s also a sense in which she has abandoned herself to the peace that sleep and the bed offer her.

‘In bed’ 2005 (pictured) is also fascinating: a giant-sized woman, somewhere between youth and middle age, lies in bed with her knees drawn up under carefully draped sheets, head propped up by pillows, one oversized hand touching her mouth and cheek. It’s impossible to read her emotional state definitively but the possibilities are endless: she could be facing some health crisis; pondering an intractable problem; or simply watching television. Much as she confronts us with her huge proximity, her inner world is closed to us. The body reveals and hides simultaneously.

‘Wild man’ 2005 is fascinating on many levels, and was attracting a huge amount of attention on the afternoon of my visit. This sculpture, almost 3 metres tall, depicts a naked man sitting terrified on a wooden stool, clutching its sides, his legs drawn together in self-protection. He stares sideways, afraid to meet our gaze. His hair and beard are wild and woolly but his body is pale and conventionally toned. There is a disconcerting contradiction between his huge size and his evident fear, although that fear is emphasised by the vulnerability of his nakedness.

This creature is a focus of curiosity on two levels: as a giant realistic sculpture, and as a supposedly uncivilised man who is perhaps being exposed to nineteenth-century style medical objectification with its implications of the freak show. He seems to quail in our gaze, involuntarily stuck in the cages of his own terror and the discourses that might seek to name and ‘civilise’ him. We’re forced to study him in an objectifying way; but at the same time we’re studying a version of ourselves, and therefore also confronting the primeval fears that may lurk within us.

One disappointment was the exclusion of ‘Pregnant woman’ from the exhibition, which is surprising given that it’s already in Australia, having been purchased by the National Gallery of Australia. This magnificent sculpture of a woman nearing the end of pregnancy is a testament to female strength, agency and endurance. As if to compensate, the show contains four sculptures that have never previously been exhibited.

‘Drift’ 2009 is one of these. It shows a man who continues to revel in the trappings of civilisation even as he disavows the work ethic that such trappings suggest. This middle-aged holidaymaker lies back on his li-lo, arms loosely out to his sides as if his hands are resting in water, seeming to drift along with not a care in the world. His attitude indicates utter vacancy, as if he has temporarily left his life behind. But while he may be carefree, everything about him suggests his context: the expensive-looking designer watch, the surfie-style board shorts, the sunnies, the tanned, well-maintained middle-aged body.

He should be horizontal but he’s vertical so we can easily view him, and the downward angle of his loosely outstretched arms curiously suggests a crucifixion: perhaps Mueck is gently mocking Christian iconography and suggesting that the pursuit of pleasure is now the official religion.

A very different kind of crucifixion is suggested by the only non-human sculptural form in the exhibition. ‘Still life’ 2009 depicts a plucked dead chicken with its neck cut open, trussed and hung upside down, its wings hanging at angles from its sides. The inner flesh from the large cut in the side of the chicken’s neck is clearly delineated. This work, with its discomforting portrayal of human objectification of animals, reminded me of Ivan Durrant’s fibreglass butcher shop window.

Ron Mueck’s works will be on show at the National Gallery of Victoria until April 18. The exhibition will then be shown at the Queensland Art Gallery from 8 May to 1 August, followed by Christchurch Art Gallery from 30 September until 23 January 2011.

Book review: Reunion by Andrea Goldsmith

2010-03-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

The internet has supposedly created an eternal present, but this phrase is tailor made to describe the experience of middle age. It’s a time of reckoning, when you suddenly find that you’re living the future your younger self so excitedly anticipated.

In her novel Reunion, Andrea Goldsmith introduces five close friends welded together by emotional, sexual and intellectual bonds. Despite their closeness, each must grapple alone with the dilemmas that beset them at this stage of life.

**Plot elements given below**
Jack, Helen, Ava and Conrad (‘Connie’), form a tightknit group at Melbourne University in the late 1970s and go on to study at Oxford, where they meet Harry, a rich boy from Adelaide. Their careers scatter them to different parts of the world and when they reunite as a group for the first time in two decades, some time ‘early in the new millennium’, they must re-establish and renegotiate their relationships with each other, as well as their own lives.

Jack is a scholar of comparative religion whose steady career slide is the result of his unrequited passion for the beautiful Ava, a successful novelist. Connie, a decade older than the others, is an ambitious philosopher and serial adulterer, while Helen is a globe-trotting research scientist determined to find a vaccine for a deadly bacteria.

Harry is the outsider in the group, an honorary member because he’s married to Ava. A ‘squat chest-of drawers sort of man’ who collects ‘corkscrews and barbed wire’, Harry is nevertheless practical and worldly. He has formed the Melbourne-based think-tank Network of Global Australians, and Jack, Helen and Connie have returned to Melbourne to take up the inaugural NOGA fellowships Harry has dealt out to them.

Reunion deals with the forgotten generation between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, ‘the post-Vietnam generation, wise to authority but not stymied by cynicism’. The four younger group members have been part of Australia’s golden age of free tertiary education, when university became ‘a promised land where anything seemed possible’, where for the first time at conservative Melbourne University, mature-aged students mixed with ‘throngs of people from Melbourne’s multicultural heart’.

But despite having discovered ‘a secret intellectual city’ in ostensibly dull Melbourne, Jack, Helen, Ava and Connie have been all too keen to leave Australia for the intellectual heartland of Europe. The globalised Melbourne to which they return two decades on is not the city they left behind.
**Plot elements end**

Reunion is long and ambitious in scope; the story is a bit slow to start but gathers pace. The novel employs a narrative structure that in some ways resembles that of Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game and Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap. As in those novels, both also set in post-millennium Melbourne, the reader sees the world through the eyes of each of its main characters in turn, with the story moving forward as characters shift in and out of focus. However, the maturing friendship between Ava and Jack forms the novel’s emotional core.

Goldsmith uses these individual viewpoints to provide flashbacks to the past, sometimes the characters’ shared past and sometimes their individual experiences. Events in the characters’ early lives and thus the reader's knowledge of those events unfold gradually: as the characters travel forward in the present, they revisit various scenes from the past, using such ruminations to make sense of their current dilemmas.

Goldsmith is not a particularly lyrical writer. There’s a brisk quality to her prose; like Tsiolkas she’s driven by the urge to tell the story and create strong characters. You won’t get the taut conciseness of Helen Garner’s sentences here or the poetic lilt of Sonya Hartnett.

What Goldsmith does specialise in, however, is a particularly rich brand of irony. While she stays close to her characters, she seems at times to be viewing them with one eyebrow raised. The novel is Jamesian to the extent that Goldsmith explores the inner lives of her characters in great detail, affording their emotional responses the status of plot. The novel is also rich with punchy metaphors and telling aphorisms: ‘the future was like fiction … a ream of blank pages waiting to be filled’; ‘nothing was relative any more: getting a new job was in the same category as getting new shoes’; ‘this man and this woman who had spent years in a fine frenzied feasting on each other’.

**Plot elements given below**
Reunion is very much a novel of ideas. One of its major preoccupations is the shattering of illusions that must occur before emotional maturity can take place. The characters endure many losses, but loss of their illusions is surely a major one. Jack has carried on an intense, mostly epistolary relationship with Ava for the last two decades, maintaining the ideal of a perfect sublimated love between them. Now he must face the reality of Ava’s reliance on the practical Harry.

Meanwhile, Helen, who has always viewed the scientific endeavour as a force for good, must confront the fact that her funding comes from military sources that could use her research to advance biological warfare. And Ava is forced to face reality far more harshly than are her friends, as well as the realisation that they cannot offer her the help that their loyalty demands.

The protagonists are the offspring of globalisation, having worked, lived and holidayed on different continents, but they are also the children of the post-war welfare state. This has diminished the role of class to the extent that Ava has been able to ‘transform herself from an hereditary shopgirl with a confined future to a university student and woman of the world’. Yet, having largely left their families of origin behind and forged strong familial bonds based on the life of the mind, it's perhaps no wonder that the friends view themselves as self-created; but this assumption may prove to be just another illusion. It is the non-intellectual Harry, a perfect fit for the times, who has brought them back together; and Harry – in a role that unsettlingly echoes that of the novelist – seems all too keen to control the efforts of his beneficiaries.

Goldsmith cleverly entwines this theme with the issue of creative endeavour and its sources, particularly passion and love. Jack’s career has stalled because of his preoccupation with Ava; but for another of the characters, an obsessional affair has led to a frenzy of creativity, even as it destroyed peace: ‘A bad love is very demanding. You’ll twist yourself so out of character in an attempt to get it right that the misshapen scrap you present to friends and family is hardly recognisable’. In some cases illusion can fuel creativity, but the death of illusion can produce its own breakthroughs.

For Goldsmith, the intellectual life can assist in the slow groping towards personal change that occurs when illusions dissolve, even though it is no substitute for that change. The novel is full of quotes from and references to an array of writers such as Rilke, Yeats, Wharton, Auden and Frost, as well as artists such as Picasso. Yet Goldsmith’s characters move through life, like all of us, partially blindfolded.

Overarching her thematic concerns is Goldsmith’s contention that civilisation and barbarism are not polar opposites, that to participate in one is to be implicated in the other. Goldsmith finds the modern world especially illustrative of this idea, and she threads the notion through her explorations of quotidian life and of contemporary issues like the so-called war on terror and the militarism that accompanies it.

To this end she ably constructs believable scenarios that reflect the complex structures characterising globalised life in the West. The trappings of the fictional NOGA are described with a fine ironic touch, its convenient ideological muddiness perfectly contemporary: what matters to Harry is not whether it is a force for good but that it is influential. The war on terror revives Jack’s career even as it threatens Helen’s; yet at a US conference, feeling conflicted about continuing her research, Helen revels in the civilised downtime her intellectual colleagues offer her, replete with the strains of classical music.
**Plot elements end**

Like The Slap and The Danger Game, Reunion is a novel that celebrates Melbourne, particularly the inner city so beloved of baby boomers and the generations following them. We shadow the characters as they stroll through the Melbourne Cemetery, loiter in the grounds of Melbourne University, get swept up in the lunchtime crowds of the city centre’s thriving laneways, catch trams along a St Kilda Road that was once majestic rather than commercial, or hunker down at an inner suburban beach on one of the oppressively hot evenings of a typical Melbourne summer.

The novel was marred but not spoiled for me by frequent minor lapses in diction and grammar. This could have been fixed with a good copy edit and Goldsmith has been let down by her publishers, Fourth Estate, in this regard.

Goldsmith refuses to tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; while there is a powerful climax it does not offer complete resolution any more than life does. Jack, Connie and Ava find greater clarity, while Helen and Harry seem to become more bogged down in illusion and contradiction. Although some of these five friends ultimately act more bravely than others, none is a hero in the traditional sense; instead, all remain painfully human.

Film review: The Road

2010-02-03T00:19:00.000-08:00

I've been away from this blog for much longer than I expected – it's good to be back. I'll be continuing with my sporadic, overly long reviews for 2010 (or what's left of it!). I'm having trouble with comments at the moment and not getting much help from Blogger, so apologise if I have deleted and/or not responded to comments in the last few months – I'm working on the problem.

Despite its title, The Road is the antithesis of any conventional road movie you've ever seen. Australian audiences have had to wait a long time to see this much-applauded film, which has garnered a long list of award nominations and may yet snare Oscars for its cast and makers.

*****Plot elements given below******

A Man and a Boy, his young son, trudge across a derelict, sunless, post-industrial wasteland, recognisable as a devastated North America. The man pushes a shopping trolley packed with supplies and shabby bedding. Both are dressed in filthy, worn-out layers of clothing and wear the haunted, weary faces of the long-term homeless. This is the central image of The Road: a tiny family's struggle for survival in a world slowly dying in the wake of apocalypse.

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. What director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and screenwriter Joe Penhall have achieved is an almost perfect realisation of this haunting, elemental, superbly written story. Much of their success is owed to the rigorous evocation of this future world.

It's a world totally devoid of animal and most plant life. It's freezing cold because of what is possibly a nuclear winter. Gangs of cannibals like born-again Hells Angels drive the highways in huge trucks, touting machine guns. Father and son travel through this horror towards the southern coast, their journey punctuated by desperate searches for supplies in a series of abandoned, derelict buildings.

Basic resources become infinitely precious, like a cigarette lighter for making fire. Death in the form of blackened corpses is everywhere. The feminine principle has gone, evidenced in the absence of the Man's wife and the fact that there are few women in the film.

This grim scenario is leavened by two sets of flashbacks: brief, light-drenched scenes of joyful times shared by the Man and his young wife before the catastrophe; and longer flashbacks of the time-limited, straitened existence the family led in hiding while the apocalypse raged outside their door.

The dull struggle endured by the Man and Boy in the film's present is punctuated by adrenalin-pumping episodes when they encounter what the Man calls the 'bad guys'; a split-second decision can mean the difference between life and death. These crises provide much of the film's drama, but they cannot shift the overall sombre mood.

Occasionally, though, there is dark humour – like the time the Man miraculously finds a faded can of Coke and hands it over to the Boy for a treat, eagerly awaiting his response. Or the joy with which he yells the word 'shampoo' as he vigorously washes the Boy's hair for the first time in months, perhaps years.

The Man sees his job as two-fold: he's there to safeguard his son and keep them both going with food and fuel; and he must instil in him the values and skills that will keep the son safe after he himself has died (he calls himself and the Boy the 'good guys'). At the same time he's convinced that his son is some kind of messiah figure, that he himself is in fact carrying God. Is he deeply deluded, or are we to take on board this semi-reverence?

These circumstances make for a form of extreme parenting; it's no wonder the film has been called a love story. The intense, symbiotic bond between father and son is the film's emotional core. It's been forced on them by the never-ending danger of the surrounds: in a world where it's impossible to trust anybody, no other roles are available. It represents life and love stripped down to their very barest essentials.

*****Plot elements end******

The supreme strength of The Road is that it looks and feels nothing like a typical disaster movie. Director of photography Javier Aguirresarobe (The Others) has made no attempt to sex up the landscape, to give us cheap CGI-based visual thrills. The dreary, grey-green, sunless terrain with its eerie lack of birdsong, its mix of fire-wracked mountains, swampy woods with leafless black-trunked trees and crumbling rubbish-strewn buildings, dwarfs the characters.

This world is alien and confronting yet feels all too real, and it's no surprise to learn that the film was shot in abandoned mine sites and industrial wastelands, many in Pennsylvania. The eye, used to a blaze of colour on the cinema screen, must adjust to this constant dreariness.

The same attention to detail and realism has gone into the costumes and general look of all the characters – their clothes and belongings have been intricately adapted to make them look like the desperate scavengers they are. And McCarthy and the filmmakers have cleverly avoided direct mention of the cause of the cataclysmic collapse, ensuring the film is never reduced to being a stern environmental lesson.

*****Plot elements given below******

However, The Road's underlying assumptions may yet seem heavy-handed to some. True to the book, the film allegorises the Old and New Testament; the Man focuses on survival each microsecond, and occasionally indulges in an eye-for-an-eye version of morality, while the Boy practises a 'do as you would be done by' approach. This demarcation shouldn't be taken too literally; the son teaches the father a measure of generosity. Survival and self-defence are not enough to form human civilisation; they must be tempered with human compassion.

The strength of the book and the film is that they both succeed as much because of this mythic dimension as despite it; indeed, this dimension partly explains the book's original broad appeal. The only time it irritates in the film is in the words of the blind old man, played by Robert Duvall, whom the duo encounter. His rather bombastic speech belongs to an outdated Hollywood tradition.

*****Plot elements end******

Yet there is something jarring about a post-apocalyptic world that can only be saved by a combination of frontier survival know-how and New Testament values. Surely the dichotomies of human and non-human, us and them, savage and civilised, helped to get us into this mess in the first place? Many will say that a reliance on the Bible has caused far more problems that it can solve.

Darwinian philosophers might warn us that, as a culture, it's the West's inability to face up to the fact that we are the 'bad guys' that's the problem. At no time does the film stray into such disturbing territory – audience members are with the civilised and the victims of the brutalised all the way.

Having said that, the film isn't totally human-centric. The blighted earth, still dying, is almost another character in the film. Pillaged, desecrated and traumatised, it no longer nurtures but poses mortal danger. The film dares to ask the questions: How can anyone expect to stay alive in a world that is itself in its death throes? And why would they want to?

As usual, Viggo Mortensen, who plays the Man, becomes a pure vessel for his character. Mortensen's much more than the thinking woman's crumpet – he's a consummate artist devoted to his craft and an intellectual sophisticate who just happens to have Hollywood good looks. Usually it's a rare treat to see this man naked but here he's sick, bowed down, silver eyes burning in a grim, wasted, deeply grooved face.

Kodi Smit-McPhee's performance is at times just a bit too minimalist, as if he's trying too hard to avoid being the over-emotional child star. But there's an underlying strength here, and a willingness to harbour feeling rather than display it overtly – often, too, his character is simply in a stupor of fear. Charlize Theron is a solid actress but she's not quite right here – especially in the flashbacks with her young son, she looks too smooth-cheeked and glamorous. Guy Pearce is unrecognisable in a cameo role.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis created the soundtrack, so you might reasonably expect some 'sturm und drang'. But it's very unobtrusive, although occasionally some surprisingly conventional notes creep in during the most tender scenes.

Some critics have attacked the ending of The Road with as much vigour as they have lauded the bulk of it. I thought the ending was reasonably true to the novel, but there's a particular element that appears in one of the film's final shots that seemed ludicrous, even laughable; I snorted when I saw it. Yet it was almost light relief after a film whose grim resonances will haunt me for weeks to come.

Book review: The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville

2009-12-06T18:24:00.000-08:00

The Lieutenant is a classic, moving tale of a man discovering his selfhood and destiny through his encounter with another race at the dawn of modernity. It offers nothing less than a new template for Indigenous and non-Indigenous interaction in Australia.

Kate Grenville’s spectacularly successful previous novel, The Secret River, dealt with the involvement of an emancipated convict – a character based on one of her own ancestors – in a ruthless massacre of Indigenous people in early New South Wales.

The Secret River was famously criticised by Inga Clendinnen and other historians for masquerading as history, a charge Grenville strongly refuted. She covers a similar theme in The Lieutenant and here again her modus operandi – combining the fiction writer’s imaginative leap with painstaking historical research – pays off handsomely.

The Lieutenant is loosely based on the life of William Dawes, who was the First Fleet’s astronomer as well as a mathematician and linguist. Centuries ahead of his time, he left notebooks of his stay in New South Wales that paint a beguiling picture of his attempts to communicate with the local Cadigal people and learn the structures and lineaments of their complex language. He seems to have been helped in this by what was, as far as the written account suggests, a non-sexual friendship with a young Indigenous girl, Patyegarang.

*******Plot elements given below*******
Daniel Rooke is a gifted boy from a background of genteel impoverishment in the new scientific age. A talented misfit at the Portsmouth Naval Academy, he is fascinated by the stars, languages and mathematics, and the promise of unknown worlds they seem to offer. He dreams there is a place ‘somewhere in the world, for the person he was’.

When he goes to sea as a marine to fight the American rebels in the War of Independence, Rooke receives a brutal education in the harsh realities of naval life. But his real education begins when he sails to New South Wales as astronomer with the First Fleet, bound for Australia’s east coast where a white convict settlement is to be created.

What pulls Rooke towards New South Wales is a yearning for intellectual adventure, one that he will eventually be able to embrace with his heart as well as his mind. New and familiar shores abound in the novel, presaging and symbolising the lure of the strange and the human instinct for novelty. Portsmouth, Rooke’s childhood home, offers a harbour where he dreams of the unknown and this dream seems to come true when he arrives at the exotic New South Wales coast.

There, in the first days of the young colony, Rooke encounters the local Cadigal people and forms a unique bond with a lively young girl, Tagaran. But relations with the local people and the settlers slowly disintegrate, and Rooke must choose between loyalty to the King and to his own emerging moral and emotional universe.

Rooke is a creature of the enlightenment, a true renaissance man. Yet in his role as lieutenant in the marines he finds himself repeatedly facing a dilemma that is, albeit in much more subtle forms, still inescapable today for some: being caught in a ruthlessly murderous machine that is aimed at material gain and also aided by the science and technology he adores. The horrors of unfettered capitalism interlock with the feudal structure in which Rooke is enmeshed to create an insouciant attitude to human life that renders Rooke himself vulnerable. The evil underbelly of empire is painfully exposed here.
*******Plot elements end*******

This is a work of huge imaginative power and grace. Grenville has a distinctive, authoritative take on the historical novel; rather than overburdening the reader with realms of historical fact, she wears her obviously considerable research extremely lightly. Historical details unfold as they are needed for the momentum of the narrative.

Subtle phrases such as ‘neighbour woman’ and ‘pinny pocket’ and a formality of tone in the dialogue suggest the past, but the language never strains to be authentic for the sake of it. Above all, Grenville wants to humanise her characters.

Nor does she attempt to give a panoramic view. Given that Rooke is part of the historic First Fleet and its first contact with the local people, this must have been a huge temptation. In fact the entire novel is told from Rooke’s viewpoint.

This works partly because, by the time he gets to New South Wales, Rooke is streets ahead of his fellow officers in emotional intelligence. But it’s equally effective when the more sinister machinations of empire are whirring away while Rooke is obliviously scanning the heavens for a comet. His belated understanding of the reality of his position catapults him further into the journey towards selfhood that he has already begun.

In this regard, Grenville’s eye resembles Rooke’s beloved telescope, homing in on the particular. This attention to detail is beautifully contrasted with the infinity of the universe that the night sky represents for Rooke, and that he returns his gaze to again and again, not just for scientific knowledge but for inspiration and reflection.

From Rooke’s perspective, Grenville slyly goes underneath the human skin of history, suggesting the drollery and range of motivations that would have lurked beneath the rituals of daily life. Scenes of the officers at dinner or on expeditions in the surrounding bushland are threaded with the kinds of human responses, sometimes so subtle that they would hardly have been visible, that history alone cannot offer.

Similarly, Grenville imagines how the strange new bushland environment would have affected not just human minds but human bodies: ‘unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding’.

In these imagined reactions Grenville gives us what the history of public events cannot – the breathing emotions of real bodies, stuck in hierarchies of power and skill, yet displaying their individuality within those constraints. We also get glimpses of, and must imagine from a distance, what it must have been like for the labouring and sometimes raucous prisoners.

A similar distancing occurs in Grenville’s respectful treatment of the Cadigal people. She’s extremely careful not to try to present the narrative from their point of view, but the poise of the novel allows her to act as a kind of silent, benign witness of their complex reactions to this dramatic incursion into their lives.

Like Rooke, she can only guess at what some aspects of their behaviour – so different to Western responses – might have meant, but her guess is underpinned by a deep sense of their humanity. And in the character of Tagaran and the kin who surround her Grenville conveys a strong sense of a vibrant, functional society that is perfectly attuned to its environment.

While Grenville’s research does not draw attention to itself, it’s evident everywhere, from her descriptions of the workings of a musket to her detailed evocations of the ritual of shaving in the new colony. This also extends to the natural environment: you get the impression that she’s walked carefully through the modern incarnations of the various landscapes she describes, trying to imagine how they would have appeared at the time.

Critics have praised Grenville for the quietness of tone she achieves in this novel. There’s an attentiveness that is maintained even throughout scenes involving emblematic and sometimes tragic historical events. For example, the description of first contact between the First Fleet crew and a group of Indigenous men is imbued with a rich and almost sad irony:

The shield was a solid thing … but the ball had gone clean through it and left a ragged hole and a long split top to bottom. The old man picked it up. In his hands it fell into two pieces and he fitted them back together and touched with long fingers at where the ball had burst through the wood.

There’s plenty of drama in the confrontation of two starkly different cultures. But for Grenville, the drama must come from the emotional resonance of the moment, and she must wait, and the reader must wait, for it to reveal itself.

Yet this isn’t to suggest that the language is in any way slack – quite the opposite. We are always at the quiet heart of the action, seeing what needs to be shown and nothing else. There is not a superfluous word in the entire book.

In the novel’s mixture of humility and power, Grenville dramatises first contact as never before, conveying the excitement of encountering the other – for both sides. This human reaction to difference so often gets deleted from history, obscured by the economically convenient racism that usually followed initial contact.

Grenville quietly shows non-Indigenous readers the sense of creative opportunity and adventure with which we could be approaching Indigenous cultures. In particular, the emerging friendship between Tagaran and Rooke offers a template for a national conversation that could become a national adventure, and is partly what makes the book such a joy to read. The lively Tagaran herself, as well as the multi-layered relationship that develops between her and Rooke, provides the basis for this template:

It was more than intelligence, though Tagaran’s understanding was like quicksilver. It was more than assertiveness, though he watched her rapping out orders to the other children. It was a quality of fearless engagement with the world.

But the novel also suggests how a focus on economic and technological progress might obscure the primacy of the human story that is the basis of history. Technology certainly has a sacred place for the Westerners in the novel – the daily winding of the timekeeper on Rooke’s Australia-bound ship is nothing less than a religious ritual. However, human relations must also be attended to.

For example, following the First Fleet’s arrival, one of Governor Gilbert’s main priorities is to make contact with the Indigenous people and bring them ‘on side’. The importance of this rapprochement to a new colony with no knowledge of the terrain cannot be overemphasised. Similarly, Grenville’s descriptions of the Cadigal indicate their respect for and attentiveness to human culture and interactions, and how secure in their humanity these people seem to have been.

The book, then, is deeply political but in no way is it politically correct. Nor should it be seen as a substitute for history: hopefully it will send scurrying to the history books those interested readers searching for more background information. What it can do is bring alive to us a sense of the past as being no less visceral, chaotic and productive of human dilemmas than today’s complex world.

Film review: Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-11-16T21:32:00.000-08:00

If their effects weren’t so tragic, the antics of Wall Street and the US Treasury over the last couple of years would belong in a circus.

It was inevitable that sooner or later veteran documentary maker Mike Moore would get stuck into the people who brought us the Global Financial Crisis. In Capitalism: A Love Story he produces his own unique interpretation of what they actually did, and why the whole capitalist bandwagon is, well, stuffed.

Mike Moore’s political documentaries have been lauded for their irony and sense of the absurd, and his critique of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the highest grossing documentary ever. However, in recent years he’s been criticised for deliberately presenting mistruths, showing baddies out of context, and exaggerating.

But this is Moore’s moment. It’s as if everything he’s been warning the American public about has come to pass. There’s no need to exaggerate or distort. The truth of US capitalism today is that, in its blatant enticement to greed and contempt for the average person, it’s simply unbelievable.

I haven’t checked all the facts Moore presents us with here, and, given his record, it’s likely that this movie contains at least one or two misrepresentations. Still, there’s something very direct about it, as if Moore himself can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

In the wake of the GFC, more than 15 million Americans are out of work, while a house is foreclosed in the US every 7.5 seconds. Moore sets about finding out how this meltdown came to pass. He recalls a time when capitalism seemed a beneficent system, bestowing prosperity on all and creating a middle class by redistributing the wealth through fair, progressive taxation. He contends that greed – always a vital part of the system – gradually took over and invaded the political process.

For Moore, the rot started with Reaganism, which cut taxes to the rich and deregulated the financial system. The US now resembles the Roman Empire, and the middle class is being destroyed: one of the movie’s beleaguered subjects complains that increasingly there are only the super rich and the very poor, and no-one in between.

We don't just get to smirk at the now-familiar Wall Street villains in this movie. Far more disturbing than their obvious greed is the evidence Moore produces of the contemptuous attitude of a range of rich and powerful companies towards the average employee, citizen and towards democracy in general.

The movie does not stray from the familiar Moore formula – a simplistic but well crafted narrative arc; shots of and interviews with baddies and goodies; punchy popular culture footage to keep the humour and irony humming along; dramatic scenes of average Americans suffering at the hands of the ruthless; and stunts in which Moore confronts the baddies.

Although it isn’t as funny as Fahrenheit 9/11 – Bush, a focus of that film, is a natural buffoon – arguably the formula works even better than usual. Moore’s work is itself propaganda, yet we get plenty of archival footage of pro-capitalist propaganda that beautifully illustrates his point.

As with all good narratives, there’s a dramatic climax. I won’t give it away here, but Moore’s conclusions about the behaviour of Treasury in the wake of the crash are pretty disturbing.

Critics have claimed that Moore’s stunts are now getting hackneyed. In fact, Capitalism: A Love Story has fewer stunts than some of Moore’s other films, and while the ones in this film are fairly low key and not that dramatic, they have a certain moral authority.

As he’s been doing since his first film, Roger and Me, Moore brings some of his personal experience and history into the movie. Roger and Me was an exploration of the economic decline of the town Moore grew up in – Flint, Michigan – following the shift to Mexico of the General Motors plant that was the town’s economic lifeblood. Moore returns to that territory here, bringing his aged father to the industrial dump that was once the thriving plant, and describing the idyllic standard of living his blue-collar family enjoyed in the age of unionism. This personal footage helps brings the larger story of Reaganism alive.

All Moore’s films are aimed at addressing the American public and inciting them to change. Given the enormous power of evangelical Christianity in the US, Moore prudently focuses on the teachings of Jesus, humorously asking whether he would have been a capitalist. A Catholic himself, he tears aside the redneck stereotype of a religion whose radical social justice teachings are little known, interviewing some Catholic priests with startling things to say about capitalism.

Although Moore ultimately concludes that capitalism has failed, predictably he doesn’t offer any detailed options for the future, and many will find his conclusions too simplistic.

Don’t see this film if you want a detailed description of the actual economic crash. Do see it if you want to see some rays of hope amidst the wreckage: retrenched workers fighting back; victims of a mortgage foreclosure refusing to leave; renegade congressmen and women attacking the government’s bailout of the banks; and one amazing congresswoman inciting Americans to civil disobedience.

When it comes to documentaries, many people prefer to wait for the DVD rather than see them at the cinema because they’re not considered cinematic enough. But Capitalism: A Love Story deserves to be seen now because it is cinematic, and because it dramatises the horrors of the economic crash, and because Australians need to be perpetually warned about the dangers of embracing, even more than we already have, US-style capitalism. There but for the grace of God go we.

Exhibition: The Dwelling

2009-10-29T19:43:00.000-07:00

The delicious shiver of anticipation I savoured on the Ghost Train as a ten-year-old at Luna Park came back to me at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s current exhibition for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, The Dwelling.

Disembodied voices, record players that turn themselves on, the sounds of gun shot and the crunch of angry footsteps are just some of the discomforting effects you’ll experience at this exhibition, curated by ACCA’s artistic director Juliana Engberg and organised by Hannah Matthews.

The home in Western culture is supposed to be a place of security and comfort, but crime statistics and the thriller genre suggest otherwise. The ghostly or monstrous can be as frightening as the humans who might want to harm us. The psyche, too, can be a terrifying, unpredictable place to dwell.

The non-living are particularly disturbing because they confound the opposites of presence and absence. If a house is said to be haunted, we talk about the possibility of a 'non-human' presence, but ghosts themselves were once human. Is any place ever really empty? And aren’t we all haunted, in a way, by our immersion in popular culture, our personal and family histories, and our own imaginations? Fairy tales, too, which most of us grow up with, echo the dark themes of sexual taboo and the fear of annihilation that structure the psyche.

These contradictory ideas and questions swirl about the exhibition, which can be enjoyed on both superficial and more profound levels.

Sofia Hulten’s ‘Familiars’ 2007 is a series of DVDs shown on small video screens throughout the exhibition space. They depict humans creating what seem to be ‘ghostly’ or uncanny sabotages of the normal domestic environment. Six glasses balance precariously on a stove top; a stain in a patterned carpet ruins the aesthetics; smoke oozes slowly and evocatively from a wooden chair.

These domestic objects bear the marks of human intervention, perhaps conflating the uncanny with the idea of humans leaving their marks on the material world. There’s also the question of whether conventional ‘scariness’ is compatible with the Western middle class ideal of domesticity, as well as a possible, gentle send-up of a middle class obsession with domestic rituals.

Crime and absence are both explored by Callum Morton in ‘International style’ 1999. Peering inside Morton’s large model of a ghostly white modernist home, with its huge, platform-like verandah and shifting disco-inspired lighting, reveals that it’s populated only by electrical apparatus.

These cords and boxes, themselves betraying human intervention, produce the soundtrack of a happy crowd of partygoers – the house, with its large uncurtained windows, is trapped in a time-warped modernist dream. Surely it must have wanted the lives of its inhabitants to be visible to the outside world in all their post-war consumerist perfection – indeed, the urge to look inside is invited, although it is rebuffed by this familiarly banal technology.

But the modernist dream has a dystopian outcome, dramatised by the disturbing soundtrack (make sure you stick around to the ‘end’). And that in turn evokes a thousand American 50s and 60s B-movies with subtextual critiques of modern life.
Modernism, with its obsession with the future, now becomes a receptacle of past, not-quite-buried societal and economic dreams. There are many different kinds of hauntings going on here.

Finnish filmmaker and artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s ‘The house’ speaks to a very different notion of the dwelling. I first saw this striking video installation at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004 and I was just as impressed the second time around. The work operates so well on a visceral level that the complicated ideas it deals with seep effortlessly into the unconscious.

The installation plays out on three huge screens adjacent to each other. It appears to represent the testimony of a sufferer of psychosis, and has its basis in interviews Ahtila conducted with female sufferers. The subtitled text, which is a soundtrack rather than being spoken by the central character, offers a first-person account of a young woman whose internal reality is dissolving with terrifying speed. Vivid images of the character in her house, in a peaceful rural setting, map her disintegration.

The house begins as a receptacle of safety and domestic routine but then everyday sounds become disengaged from their sources and the external world begins to invade, such as when a cow casually wanders inside. Eventually, nothing is separate from anything else: ‘The ship you see on the horizon is the same ship as all the other ships, and this ship is full of the refugees who come to every shore’.

The house can be seen as a metaphor for the psyche invaded by mental illness, with its frightening and surreal sensations. This is augmented by the strong colours and clear and arresting images, all somehow heightened by the fact that it’s happening in broad daylight. This same contradictory brightness and the character’s release into flight suggest there are mystical experiences for the sufferer and ultimately a sense of oneness that is liberating. Ahtila’s work goes beyond the experience of mental illness to consider the breakdown of the boundary between the internal and the external in the areas of ideas, representation, and subjectivity.

‘Opera for a small room’ 2005, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, crystallises and condenses the feeling of uncanny absence that Callum Morton’s work plays with. The ‘opera’ plays out in a life-size wooden structure with several window squares the viewer can peer through. The sense of decay, age and abandonment is powerful: what has this room been, with its dated suitcases, stacks of old records and shaky chandelier?

While there are traces of the loungeroom or even a radio broadcast booth, the room’s suggested past domesticity is subsumed among the clumsy apparatus. Five old record players turn on and off as if by magic to produce a static-y spoken narrative by a disturbed-sounding male against the strains of Puccini. Sudden lighting changes and creepy sound effects unsettle the viewer even as they propel the narrative forward. Surrounded by darkness, we are compelled to attempt to make sense of the mise en scène, the work corralling our own susceptibilities and imaginations.

Domestic horror is suggested by another installation by Cardiff and Bures Miller, ‘Cabin fever’, 2004. Again, the viewer peeks inside a wooden structure, this one smaller and offering only a single view of a diorama: a sparsely wooded foreground fronting a rural cabin with lit windows.

Here, lighting and sound tell a chilling narrative that is always playing both off stage and in our imaginations. Wearing earphones, the viewer is asked to provide much of the imaginative fuel, but braking cars, the sinister crunch of heavy footsteps and the muffled sound of a telephone ringing suggest that some rural version of Raymond Chandler is about to be played out!

An American dystopia appears in a different guise in David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s ‘House II: The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania’, 2003. It’s a DVD projection featuring a gothic-looking house that made me think of the famous one in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Water gushes out of this grey, rather ghostly looking double storey and floods the foreground. The blown-up nature of the image made me think of Howard Arkley’s airbrushed effects.

The exhibition also features a video work by David Noonan and Simon Tevaks, and a 1983 hour-long film by Chantal Akerman, The Man with the Valise. I only caught the end of this because it was screening at particular times rather than on an endless loop – contact ACCA for screening times.

The Dwelling is showing at ACCA, 111 Sturt Street Southbank, until 29 November.

Film review: Mao’s Last Dancer

2009-09-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

The ballet pic and the biopic come together in a new Australian film that celebrates a tall poppy that this country can now claim as its own.

Mao’s Last Dancer combines several classic myths – rags to riches, the blossoming of an amazing talent against great odds, and the quest for love. But the results are ultimately disappointing.

The film is based on the extraordinary autobiography of acclaimed ballet dancer Li Cunxin, who escaped bitter impoverishment in rural China when he was selected to train with Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy during the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s second escape came when, dancing with the Houston Ballet on a cultural exchange, he was offered a contract and made a dramatic defection to the West, causing a diplomatic crisis and media frenzy. Li now lives in Melbourne with his Australian-born wife and family. The book, first released in 2003, has become a worldwide bestseller with more than 400 000 copies sold.

The film brings to life the decades after the fateful day when communist officials arrived at Li's village school in the north-east province of Shandong and made the last-minute choice that would whisk the 11-year-old away from his large, close family to train in Beijing.

It’s almost saved by the strength of the story itself. Li’s tale has a strong emotional trajectory and is spiked with conflict, pathos and triumph. His astonishing career, the drama of his defection and his continuing loyalty to his beloved parents (beautifully played by Joan Chen and Wang Shuang Bao) keep the plot barrelling along. They also allow the audience to engage emotionally with the story.

The intersections of Chinese history with Li's personal story are as disturbing as they are novel. There's an anachronistic element to the early scenes: we see Li's peasant parents toiling in the fields; Li and his six brothers in their tiny, smoky stone hut; and the chilly village schoolroom with its framed picture of Mao in pride of place. These scenes have an air of authenticity, with cinematographer Peter James creating a grainy, washed-out look that suggests a vanished, little-known world.

This atmosphere also prevails in Li’s early life at the Academy, where indoctrination and military-style discipline prevail amid stark interiors. It’s shockingly harsh and militaristic, the emphasis on gymnastic ability and technique rather than artistic expression, with teachers arguing over whether Chinese dancers should learn from Western styles or ignore them.

The stranglehold the Chinese Government had on its citizens is dramatised in appearances from the doctrinaire Madame Mao. And even when the young Li first gets to the US on a cultural exchange he’s subject to the Chinese consulate-general’s warnings about the dangers of Western women.

The film fits neatly into the ballet film genre. The ghost of the great Baryshnikov, who defected from Russia to Canada in 1974 and has supplemented his successful dancing career with acting, is never far away.

Indeed, the dancing in the film is its great strength, with choreography by Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon, former artistic directors of the Sydney Ballet Company. (This goes for the studio scenes as well as the huge set pieces.) Highlights include some extravagant communist kitsch at the Beijing Academy that’s great fun to watch; excerpts from an Australian Ballet production of Swan Lake; and a beautiful dance scene featuring Li and Mary McKendry (Camilla Vergotis) with not a point in sight.

Shot in China, Australia and Houston, Mao’s Last Dancer features, both in major roles and as extras, a huge array of actual dancers. These include Chinese dancers, as well as former and current members of the Australian Ballet and the Sydney Dance Company; watch out for Camilla Vergotis, Madeleine Eastoe and Stephen Heathcote in supporting or cameo performances.

The decision to cast dancers in the lead roles mainly pays off. Three actors play Li at various stages of his life, and given that the youngest is a gymnast and the other two dancers, they deserve congratulations.

First time actor Chi Cao plays the adult Li. He’s a versatile leading man – handsome, lithe, and a superb artist with a strong screen presence. In real life a principal with the Royal Birmingham Ballet, his agile grace ignites the ballet scenes, and when Li fills in at the last moment to play a Don Quixote pas de deux, learning the moves in three hours, it’s an absolute highlight.

Chi succeeds in conveying Li’s culture shock as he arrives in the seemingly decadent West and is confronted with ATMs, blenders, and outrageous sums being spent on clothes. His innocence and naivety in a blossoming relationship with dancer Liz Mackey is delicately handled. But the innocent, bewildered persona becomes laboured after a while, as does the joke of Li’s being lured by the capitalist evils of 1980s Houston.

Unfortunately dancer and actor Amanda Schull, who plays Liz – a pivotal role – isn’t quite up to scratch, and she's out of her depth in the scenes that require heavy emotion.

But the acting is not the main problem here. A major issue is that there’s rarely enough complexity to distinguish the characters from the generic. For example, veteran Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood does his best in the role of Ben Stevenson, artistic director of the Houston Ballet and a vital mentor for Li; his ease and gracefulness make you believe he’s a born ballet teacher. But there’s simply no depth to the role, nothing to distinguish him from a thousand dedicated teachers.

This may or may not be a result of the film's origins. Without having read the book, I can’t comment on whether or not it is limited in its ability to convey the complexities of the main players, including Li himself. But the film at least fails to bring the characters fully to life.

Thematically it also lacks originality. The narrative of an individual striving tirelessly for artistic excellence is now hackneyed, and it demanded a more original treatment here. The young Li supplements his luck and talent with a penchant for gruelling practice – we see him toiling after hours in the studio to perfect his split jumps, and hopping up stairs with sandbags around his ankles to strengthen his muscles.

Of course it’s interesting to contemplate how the real-life Li has combined the discipline and technique he learned in China with the artistic freedom and idea of individual achievement that the West must have offered him. But in many ways this is simply a rehashing of the tale in which the individual fulfils the American Dream. Indeed, the film sometimes resembles a propaganda piece for Western values and the freedom and opportunities of the American way of life.

There’s no doubt Mao’s Last Dancer comes to us from a prize-winning team. Producer Jane Scott was behind the award-winning Shine and director Bruce Beresford has achieved international fame with films such as Black Robe and Paradise Road. The screenplay is by the venerable Jan Sardi, who wrote the screenplay of Shine.

But although it offers constant drama and some suspense, ‘light entertainment’ is perhaps the best description of Mao’s Last Dancer. With more sophisticated characterisation and exploration of its themes it could have been much more.

A last note: veteran Australian actor Penne Hackforth-Jones plays a supporting role as Cynthia Dodds and it’s inexplicable that she’s not in the cast list on the film’s official website.

Verdict: dramatic, visually strong at times, but ultimately undemanding

Book review: The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton (Sleepers)

2009-09-12T18:19:00.000-07:00

In The Danger Game, first-time novelist Kalinda Ashton provides a critique of postmodern society that is bruising, sophisticated and trenchant.

In its strong engagement with the politics of disadvantage, the novel might be offering itself as the fictional complement to The Land of Plenty by Mark Davis, a recent plea for the transformation of Australia’s stymied body politic.

The Danger Game succeeds in nailing the foreclosing and separating effects of economic rationalism in a far more subtle way than, say, Three Dollars, whose characters were not only helpless victims of the Kennett government but of the novel’s crusading author, Elliot Perlman. The book’s also a welcome change from the relentlessly upper middle class milieus of so many of our beloved baby boomer authors.

At the heart of The Danger Game is a tragedy that explodes into the lives of a struggling family and leaves them stunned and emotionally stunted for years to come.

******Plot elements discussed below******
It’s 1991. Alice Reilly and her younger siblings, twins Louise and Jeremy, live with their parents in a ‘housing commission’ area in a ‘fibro-cement townhouse … with a tacked-on brick porch out the front and a scrap of garden for a backyard’. Alice’s family is rent by conflict between her bitter, alcoholic father and angry, overworked mother. Louise courts danger and seeks to live on the edge while quiet, studious Jeremy is prey to school bullies and seeks solace in the mysteries of science and the natural world.

But Jeremy’s attempt to gain entry to an academic school sets off a series of events that lead to the family home going up in flames. The tragedy that ensues tears this fragile family apart.

Years later, each family member struggles alone with the aftermath of the tragedy. Alice has turned her back on the past by pursuing a teaching career in a struggling secondary college and is now embroiled in a non-committal affair with a married man, Jon. But with a desperate Louise knocking on her door and seeking answers about the past, she’s forced to confront the mystery of what really happened on the night of the fire.
******Plot elements end******

The Danger Game is concerned with the insidious violences of class, in a world in which the very concept is supposedly anachronistic. The novel seeks to reveal the straitened, subtle, myriad effects of poverty and disadvantage on family life. For Ashton, disadvantage hasn’t lessened with the refinement of the welfare state; it’s just as entrenched in 2009 as it was in 1991, when the first part of the novel is set.

It’s no surprise, then, that The Danger Game has been touted as a realist novel. Its purposes certainly fit snugly within the social realist tradition, but it combines this literary style with a good dose of grunge, and its plot structure is anything but remorselessly linear. The reader swings between three points of view: Jeremy in 1991, in the time leading up to the fire; Louise in the present; and Alice in the present.

In each case the reader enters the world of the character and has a sense of looking out from under their skin, of feeling, seeing and experiencing what they do. This is most evident in the sections on Louise; because she’s emotionally on the run, there’s an unending momentum here, a constant sense of both scenery and sensation slipping by:

You walk along the scratchy sand near the sea, the luxurious silence in tree-lined streets that whisper words of money and comfort, then the rubbish-trailed streets where men shuffle into boarding houses and women’s legs are puckered with goose pimples beneath short dresses, their hips swinging as they pace up and down the block.

Ashton has been compared to novelist Christos Tsiolkas, which is understandable given the latter’s recent and stunningly successful exposé of modern relationships, The Slap. Ashton’s detailed evocations of the badlands of Melbourne and Sydney sometimes recall Tsiolkas’s ruthless dissection of inner suburban family life. But she’s a more lyrical writer than Tsiolkas, and her approach to sexuality is more nuanced.

Ashton’s characters spring to life through her unfailing, meticulous observations. Alice, Louise and Jeremy are very real, always earthed, and constantly shadowed by the material detritus that helps delineate them. There is no waftiness here, no sentimentality: at times the realism becomes almost documentary-like, and the novel attains a cinematic brightness, like a series of close-up shots: ‘The waitress thumped two glasses of water onto the table. Her hair, tucked firmly behind her ears, was the colour of muddy honey’; ‘when I started teaching I saw an earnest girl with intricate braids lean over to one of the shy girls who sat next to the door and say, “I’m going to set you on fire” ’.

At some points the clarity of the imagery reminded me of the brilliant Sonya Hartnett, but Ashton is less concerned than Hartnett with the stunning metaphor, instead building up images through accumulations of telling details. The scenes of Alice visiting her near-derelict father are painfully vivid; there’s so much compassionate but unremitting observation here, not just of defeat and marginalisation but of the continuation of some form of order and routine:

… he would have become used to the tiny calculations that made life possible: using teabags twice; checking your change; doing the divisions for the meal, the day, the week. Black and Gold butter, reading the newspaper at the library, the bargain trolleys at the supermarket.

The relationships are also richly imagined and as complex as they are straitened. Alice’s interactions with Louise and with her lover, Jon, are effortlessly naturalistic and full of emotional shorthand. The changes that take place in Alice’s emotional landscape are unanticipated, much like real life; we don’t really know what’s going to happen any more than Alice does, and the ending reveals an unexpected twist.

The persistence of trauma, the way past trauma grasps its victims and plays with them in different ways, is everywhere in this novel. For Ashton, public policies contribute to private traumas in complex ways, and trauma leads to personal dysfunction.

But Ashton wants us to understand that the urge to come to terms with the past is not an indulgent, middle-class illusion. Against a culture of forgetting, she wants to convince us that the past constantly invades the present unless its worst possibilities are faced: ‘the past is gone even while it bites at your skin and bleeds in your eyes’. Louise’s frantic attempts to find the truth seem to arise from a sudden realisation that her very existence in the future may depend on it.

But if, for the working class at least, the tragedies of the past are entwined with the subtle workings of capitalism, their social and economic underpinnings also bleed into the present. Alice has tried to let the past go and become middle class, but her unsatisfactory relationship with Jon, and a crisis that erupts at her college, force her to admit that she’s been stymied both emotionally and professionally:

I had learned to read clever books and wear smart clothes and argue about Freud with a man who already had a wife. Now I was hopeless at reaching the students I taught, distanced by my authority and their willingness to see through my forced optimism.

It’s a strength of the novel that none of the characters has a shred of self-pity, despite the poverty and discord they’ve experienced (although there’s plenty of self-sabotage going on). So while the story is a damning critique of social injustice, the characters never lose their agency.

My main beef with the novel is that it sometimes overdoes the attention to detail. Ashton occasionally relies too much on her talent for intricate observation and needs to make the odd sweeping Garner-esque statement. At one point I got a bit bored with the characters’ relentless focus on what had actually occurred on the night of the fire, for example.

And the plot moved too slowly at times: some sections were too long and seemed to be mainly there as set-ups for later sections. For example, the crisis at Alice’s school results in the involvement of the teacher’s union. The delineation of the crisis and the likely outcomes, told through a conversation between Alice and the union representative, is simply too detailed for the average reader, and the novel veers too close to trying to educate readers about the intricacies of union politics. These problems could have been fixed with a ruthless structural edit.

Despite my criticisms this is a strong, vivid, fully realised tale that will be read for its own sake, and not for what Ashton might be capable of in the future. Although we can expect to hear more from her, with The Danger Game Ashton has already achieved much.

This book is only the third novel to be published by Sleepers, an independent publishing company that thrives on hard work, dedication and grants from the Australia Council. (Its last foray, Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam, has just won the Age Book of the Year Award, a huge coup.)

Sleepers deserves congratulations for nurturing the literary culture of Australia, and indeed Melbourne, and for bringing us talented novelists such as Ashton who might otherwise be overlooked in the current economic climate.

Film review: Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly

2009-08-13T14:31:00.000-07:00

The film reviewed below is based on actual events, events that have been germinal to Australian politics and Australia’s relationships with its Asian neighbours.

For this reason and because of my own interest in the story, I’ve claimed ‘blogger’s privilege’ for this entry and the review is unashamedly partisan – it should really be seen as a combination of review and comment. Because of the importance of the events dealt with in the film I’ve also included far more plot and factual background than I normally would in a review. Apologies if too much is given away.

In October 1975, in the last weeks of the reformist Whitlam government, five young Australia-based newsmen went missing in the garrison town of Balibo in what was then known as Portuguese Timor.

With the Portuguese colonialists gone, this tiny country was trying to build an independent government through its Fretilin forces. But the world powers had other plans – a looming invasion by Indonesia that had been sanctioned by the USA and the UK and encouraged by Whitlam himself.

And while refugees and journalists were starting to flee the fighting in fear of their lives, the five journos and cameramen – Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart from Channel Seven, and Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie from Channel Nine – were determined to discover the truth, and to send images of the invasion out to the world.

The Balibo Five were executed by the Indonesian military soon after filming the advance of the infantry troops into Balibo. They died because they were journalists relaying vital information. And in December, as the Indonesians swarmed the capital, Dili, an Australian freelance journalist who set out to discover the truth of their disappearance, Roger East, was also brutally killed.

The ghastly fate of the Balibo Five has been a national wound for the past 34 years, with the Australian Government remorselessly covering up its knowledge of the way they died to maintain its friendship with Indonesia. Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly (The Bank, Three Dollars) vividly dramatises the chain of events that led to their untimely deaths, while also shedding light on the death of the lesser-known East. But it does much more than that.

Balibo is a political thriller that unfolds in a semi-documentary style. Almost two hours long, it nevertheless moves at a brisk, efficient, near-perfect pace. The masterful hand of playwright David Williamson, who cowrote the script along with Connolly, is evident, but Connolly and Williamson parted ways when it became clear to the director that the Timorese, and not just the fate of the Balibo Five, needed to be the focus of the film.

This emphasis comes through in the film’s structure, which comprises two framing devices, one within the other. The first is an encounter between the nine-year-old Juliana Da Costa, a fictional composite of the hundreds of witnesses to the bloodthirsty invasion of Dili in December 1975, and veteran journo Roger East. Juliana meets and befriends East in the weeks after his arrival in Dili, and later witnesses his bloody execution on Dili Wharf. (Anamaria Barreto is an understated stand-out in this role.) The film opens with the adult Da Costa relating this traumatic event to the Timor-Leste Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.

Cut to shots of Roger East in 1975, before his trip to Timor, in a cushy public relations job in Darwin. A young José Ramos-Horta, a Fretilin leader, insistently offers him a job as head of a Timorese official news agency, to bring the truth of the struggle to the world. East finds out about the five missing newsmen and the impending Indonesian invasion, and he’s sold.

Another cut, to a few weeks earlier and the chaotic summoning of the five newsmen to an exciting assignment in Timor that will make their careers. As East and Horta travel south-west to Balibo through the Timorese mountains to find out the fate of the newsmen, this second set of flashbacks dramatise the newsmen’s doomed journey to the invading army and the emotional heart of Timor.

The odyssey of the newsmen and their unhappy end is signalled by grainy colour footage and camera angles reminiscent of aged television footage from the period. This has the obvious advantage of clearly signalling the flashback scenes, but it’s also a tribute to the journos and cameramen, their dedication to their vocation, their determination to get the story out no matter what. And it deftly turns these often torturous scenes into ‘news’ that should have been shown but wasn’t, ‘news’ that was covered up for too long.

Much of the main action of the film was shot in Timor-Leste, which adds further to the documentary feel. It’s especially poignant and powerful that the murder of the Five was largely shot at the small house, dubbed the Australia House, in which they were killed.

The character of Horta, a firebrand with brains, pervades the film. Looking like an Asian Che Guevara, Oscar Isaac gives Horta a combination of sexiness, impish charm and iron-willed certainty about his cause and the rights of his people.

Horta’s freshness and optimism are a counter to the jadedness of Anthony LaPaglia’s Roger East. LaPaglia, who specialises in world-weary characters, plays the 52-year-old East in a way that is predictably satisfying. His East is driven by a stubborn, obsessive determination, and a commitment to the truth that eventually becomes all-encompassing.

As East and Horta journey south-west to Balibo on foot in a quest to discover the truth about the newsmen’s disappearance, East becomes a stand-in for the white members of the audience and a symbol of an older, now wiser Australia, led by the Timorese in a discovery of this tiny country, so geographically close to us and so unforgivably forgotten. Horta, in turn, becomes a symbol for all countries trying to emerge from a colonial past.

The film’s own neocolonial urges are beautifully dramatised and countered by a fight between East and Horta in a swimming pool at an abandoned mission school. As they tussle in the water, Horta’s viewpoint – that the pending massacres of Timorese are what matters now – literally tussles with the film’s own urge to tell us the story of the Balibo Five while keeping the suffering of the Timorese as exotic background.

This anti-imperialist turn is repeated throughout the film. As East journeys further into the Timorese hinterland and confronts the ruthless military incursions already taking place, his awakening is reflected in the growing understanding of the five newsmen, just weeks earlier, of the rightness of the Fretilin struggle and the shocking indifference of the world.

The film continues to enact its own encounter with Timorese culture and aspirations. From the start it’s Timorese songs we hear on the soundtrack, political and military anthems that are sometimes sung by children. These are seamlessly combined with an original score by Australian Lisa Gerrard, as well as additional music by Marcello De Francisci and Sam Petty.

The camera embraces the beauty of the Timorese countryside, with sweeping scenes of picturesque mountain vistas and coastlines sometimes marred by Indonesian violence. More importantly, it uses close-ups to dramatise the humanity of the Timorese people – of women mourning as they bury the massacred; faces marred by shock and terror as the Indonesians swoop on Dili; Timorese children in wrapt silence as elders tell ancient creation stories. Connolly’s commitment to consulting with the Timorese and using Timorese actors, including as extras in the crowd scenes, pays off handsomely here.

In fact, one of my fears about the film before seeing it – which is not to do with the story itself but its representation – was that it would wallow in national congratulation of our eternal mythic figure, the larrikin. Thankfully it doesn’t. Of course, the larrikin turns up in the characters of the Balibo Five, despite the fact that only two were Australian; it’s impossible not to be charmed by the equal ability of these twenty-somethings to have a beer, muck around with the local kids, and thoughtlessly put themselves in harm’s way to get their story.

Yet rather than the larrikin ideal taking over, the newsmen’s casual but committed approach brings into full relief the tragedy of the slow death of journalism in Australia since the 1970s. Although there’s a joke between the journos about the relevance of Channel 9 – as early as 1975! – it’s simply impossible to estimate the loss of news values on commercial television between then and now.

The scene of the journalists’ unfortunate deaths is full of tension and sadness. It’s extremely moving, but to those who have known the story for years it might also be cathartic. I don’t mean this in any trivial way; knowing something evil has happened is very different from seeing the reality of it fully re-enacted in front of your eyes. This is the beauty of film: it brings significant stories into the public realm, and makes them part of the national story. Like psychotherapy, a re-enactment such as this can help to heal what has become a hidden national trauma for Australia.

There’s not a false beat in the film. The slow burn of the invasion, with the re-creation of warships lurking silently on the coastline, is chilling and the eruptions of planned violence and organised cruelty don’t spare the viewer.

One drawback of the documentary style, though, is that we don’t actually get to know the main characters very well. So even though the deaths of the six newsmen are shocking and confronting, we know next to nothing about their families and loved ones, the wider webs of their lives. This lessens the overall emotional impact of the film somewhat, although not the urgency of the story.

For it’s a classic tale that’s being played out here: the narrow practice of Realpolitik, which considers a country’s strategic interests only, pitted against the Western ideal of human rights. The idea of Timor-Leste as a new and emerging future nation also pulses through the film, giving a sense of hope that only the most idealistic participants of the time could have felt; the young Horta shows a touching prescience when he decides to go into exile to advocate for his young country.

The narrative arc of the film, and therefore the factual information at the end, is concerned with Timor’s eventual achievement of independence, so it can only hint at the horrific events that followed for years afterwards. Some reviewers have also rightfully complained about the film’s lack of information about the collusion of the Australian Government with Indonesia, a significant omission given the likely ignorance of an international audience about Australia’s role.

What the Australian Government ended up sanctioning was not only a military invasion but the brutal subjugation of a people. It’s estimated that about 200,000 Timorese people died in the three years following the invasion, and there was widespread, officially sanctioned rape, including that of young girls; sadistic torture and killing methods; attempted genocide through interbreeding; imprisonment, starvation and disease; and chemical destruction of forests, crops and livestock.

It’s important to note that despite the documentary feel, many scenes in the film are reconstructions that did not occur literally but represent a larger truth. The Balibo in Depth website has excellent information about the ways in which the actual events and the action of the film variously match and diverge.

At the heart of this film is a searing question about the moral basis of Australian democracy, and in particular the credentials of two leaders – Whitlam and Fraser – whom history has lauded for their common interest in social justice. The film ultimately questions the biggest myth of all – that Australia is a land that worships the fair go and champions the underdog –and exposes it as a load of old bulldust.

Exhibition: Presentation/representation: photography from Germany, Monash Gallery of Art

2009-08-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

Specker, Heidi
D’Elsi – Elsi 1, 2007
85 x 56 cm
Pigment Print
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007
Courtesy Fiedler Contemporary, Köln
Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany, 2007

If you missed the recent Andreas Gursky exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, don’t despair. Now’s your chance to look at what the next generation of German photographers are up to – and it’s well worth a trip along the hilly, gumtree-lined streets of Mount Waverley.

Presentation/representation: photography from Germany, at the Monash Gallery of Art, showcases the work of ten leading contemporary German photographers. They’re part of the generation that followed Gursky and his fellow practitioners Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, who were taught by Bernd Becher at the famous Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. This exhibition has been curated by Thomas Weski, who also curated the Gursky survey at the NGV.

Technological developments such as digital processing and CGI threaten to destroy the concept of photography as a separate category of artistic practice. They’ve also helped to kill the notion that its role is to provide an authentic, neutral record of ‘real life’. Some artists, of course, combine photography with other media to produce work that is totally uninterested in the idea of an ‘original’.

The work of these younger artists suggests that such changes have only served to expand the category of photography, enabling them, as Weski puts it, to ‘explore its limits, or try out new possibilities of artistic creation’. These photographers have by and large embraced the new technologies, accepting that the photographic image is always a construct, thereby blurring the distinctions between photography and other more obviously artificial art forms.

Although it’s impossible to isolate an underlying theme in these ten disparate artists, there is often a willingness to embrace the realities of modern urban life without unnecessarily uglifying or abjecting them.

It’s pleasantly surprising to find that this kind of survey is still able to offer an experience of visual discovery, a certain delight in the novelty of unfamiliar if sometimes mundane worlds beyond the tourist trail, not necessarily in Germany. Surely this was one of the aims of Wiebke Loeper in her series An die Schwestern des Carl Möglin (To the sisters of Carl Möglin).

This series is a fictional response to ancestors of Loeper’s who migrated to Melbourne from their home town of Wismar in former East Germany in the nineteenth century. The two sisters kept in touch with their Wismar relatives by sending back descriptive letters and gifts from their new home, artefacts that have been largely preserved in Wismar, a town that has suffered economically since the reunification of Germany.

Loeper’s visual response, a series of colour photographs depicting modern Wismar, is accompanied by a poignant letter that offers these works as gifts to the sisters and inform them of the fortunes of their home town, which ‘has not prospered’. Loeper seems determined to preserve some documentary function for photography, even if she does not believe that objective reality is possible or even desirable. Her pictures also acknowledge intergenerational debts and communication, as well as the idea of change, itself in some ways under threat in a world increasingly stuck in an eternal present.

Medium, then, becomes not something to be commented on for its own sake but a means to preserve links with the past, to acknowledge its humanity and our debt to it, and to stress the continuity between past struggles and those that continue. The pictures depict street and suburban scenes often devoid of people, with flashes of colour that signal a necessary optimism in the face of economic decline.

There’s a single-gabled roof that seems to peer over a high fence onto two empty disabled parking spaces; half-built mass-produced housing; a steep road in a denuded landscape on which cars are parked desultorily; an overly cheery orange door set in the front wall of a terrace house and framed by a wonderful climbing rose. It’s fitting that these photographs are being shown in Melbourne – ‘I am sending you a few pictures and with them come my best wishes’, writes Loeper.

The subject matter of Laurenz Berges’s large, imposing prints, redolent of absence and lost social and work formations, seems allied to that of Tacita Dean, who recently exhibited at ACCA in Melbourne. Like some of Dean’s work, Berges’s pictures show the interiors (and sometimes exteriors) of abandoned, formerly functional buildings – in this case, houses in Etzweiler and Garzweiler, German towns that were depopulated when their major industry, coal strip mining, was shut down.

But Berges, unlike Dean, embraces artificiality: dramatic light and shadow, and what appears to be digital enhancement, give a quasi-beauty to these spaces. For instance, in both versions of ‘Gesolai’, 2001 (there are two works with this title), the flecks of textured wallpaper seem almost painterly. And the soft light in ‘Etzweiler’, 2000 gives even the cigarette butts and pieces of fluff and detritus a degree of order and patterning.

This kind of valorisation of the real – where everyday objects become beautiful because they’re drenched with extra effect – is used to create very different moods in a series that embraces nature, D’Elsi, 2007 by Heidi Specker.

The series, not all of which appears here, comprises a mostly displaced portrait of Elsi, a woman Specker met on a visit to Davos in Switzerland. Specker became fascinated with Elsi and her unconventional lifestyle, and she expresses this fascination through large colour shots of Elsi’s surroundings, the Alpine landscape, and Elsi herself that together form a narrative of her life.

These pictures are very carefully composed, presenting nature in a way that makes no attempt to be ‘natural’, but rather perhaps is an essay on how we see things in new ways when we see them through the eyes of others. There are some truly stunning pictures here – swathes of thickly set pine tree branches with small bright red berries (‘D’Elsi, Pass 4’, 2007); close-ups of brown fungal-looking mushrooms (‘D’Elsi, Mushroom 1’ and ‘D’Elsi, Mushroom 2’, 2007); a close-up shot of carefully stacked logs against a door, the colours and textures warm and solid looking (‘D’Elsi, Hut’, 2007).

The picture of Elsi shows her from a side view, her face invisible behind a curtain of long, dark, shiny hair. She seems elemental – we don’t need to see her face because the other pictures express what she is. There’s an undeniable sexual aspect to these works, not so much indicating individualised desire, but rather suggesting that the force of Elsi gives a heightened meaning and richness to a world that is always inevitably subjective.

The idea of the fetish is not entirely absent but I don’t think that’s the point here. So drenched with hyperreal colour and minute, microscopic detail are these stunning scenes that nature becomes not so much artificial as aesthetically indistinguishable from the constructed world.

That world is very much the focus of Uschi Huber’s series Fronten 2006, a collection of colour prints showing shops in the German town of Cologne that have been boarded up with timber planks in preparation for the annual procession on Carnival Monday. The photographs appear to have been taken in a bright morning light that shows them off to their best effect.

The accompanying text explains that the buildings ‘lose their identities and become simple sculptural forms’. I wasn’t so aware of this initially: the boarding-up process had been done very neatly, but it did not render more than a few the buildings sculptural in my eyes. However, it certainly stripped them of their commercial identities and rendered them strangely anonymous.

Pictures of boarded-up shops in, say, a US downtown might evoke notions of civil unrest or loss of civil space due to economic downturn or the advent of malls. In contrast, these photographs suggest a certain kind of tolerance for the non-commercial and a mode of preparation for the carnivalesque that is not over the top, a kind of accommodation to the civic and possibly non-commercial aspects of life. Perhaps I’m wrong – the procession is obviously boisterous and to some extent lawless – but these works hint at a kind of commerce that does not obliterate, one that can live alongside other aspects of life.

Of course, there is never just one simple theme when a photographer considers ‘urban life’. Take Forward Motion 2005 by Nicola Meitzner, a series of black-and-white shots of the megalopolis of Tokyo, taken in 2005. Shots of the many elements of what might seem a typical urban jungle – layers of electrical cables, rows of parked cars, billboards, vending machines, a monorail, a huge terminal – are interspersed with close-up portraits of four Japanese people, three of whom look young and either optimistic or wistful, and one who shows the early signs of jadedness. The series is perhaps a comment on the complexities of Japanese society and ontology rather than some kind of treatise on urban alienation.

I was struck by how neat, if relatively harsh and uncomfortable, so much of the environment was, as if the famous Japanese love of order and communality overlaid the harshness of late capitalism. The tension between the human scale and the overly large was everywhere but seemed to be held in check. There was little that was obviously traditional about the streetscapes but there was also none of the chaos of a similarly large city such as New York.

The individual portraits seemed a plea against a view of Tokyo that might combine a knowledge of its communal aspects and its hugeness with an underlying racism – ‘they’re all the same’ – although they were also a contrast to the plainness (rather than ugliness) of the environment.

Albrecht Fuchs’s portraits of artists, which move away from this urban theme, are a definite highlight. Although to non-Europeans many, if not all, of these faces may be unfamiliar (I didn’t know any of them) this didn’t diminish their power for me.

These colour portraits, relatively modest in size, have a power that comes from an obsession with composition. The colours of the backgrounds and the subjects’ clothes, the setting, the stance and expression of the subjects – all appear to be ‘just right’, every element in order, as if no other composition would have ‘worked’. And yet the settings (which appear to be the home environments of the subjects) and in many cases the stances are quite informal, as if the photographer wanted such a smooth look as to suggest he himself had been erased.

Yet of course he is everywhere, and in a funny way the portraits represent him, because they depict the artists he most admires. Certainly all the subjects stare quite intently at the viewer, which has the odd effect of giving the portraits a strange kind of uniformity, despite the varied faces, poses and settings. The faces of the subjects also suggest the kind of strong but intangible inner life that makes these photographs so successful.

There is lots more to savour here – among others, the work of Matthias Koch, who offers new perspectives on historically significant sites in Germany (Koch was a guest of the MGA for a short time, during which he conducted artist talks, student tutorials and a workshop and field trip). And Karin Geiger’s large-format photographs offer intriguing scenarios that may or may not be staged, in settings where the urban and the rural meet.

Presentation/representation can be seen at the Monash Gallery of Art, 860 Ferntree Gully Road Wheelers Hill, until 30 August.

Book review: Valley of Grace by Marion Halligan (Allen & Unwin)

2009-07-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

Warning: plot elements appear throughout this piece.

An antiquarian bookshop in the Latin Quarter, a painstakingly restored eighteenth-century apartment with cherubs on the ceiling dome, a sprawling manor house that hides an appalling secret, a cobblestoned village with its own castle and ancient underground water supply – these are some of the locales in which the action of Marion Halligan’s latest novel, set entirely in France, takes place.

Valley of Grace centres round Fanny and Gérard, a Parisian couple who seem classic in conception rather than beings of the early twenty-first century. Their conventional tale of love and marriage is connected to the lives of myriad other characters with their own experiences of love, desire and, in many cases, loss.

Fanny and Gérard’s romance seems to preclude the complications of sexual politics. But sexual politics are paramount in a parallel tale that, while it appears to disappear, rivals this one in its centrality to the novel.

Sabine is the wife of Jean-Marie, a celebrated professor of philosophy. She tends to his every need, deftly ensuring that their smooth bourgeois existence rolls along perfectly, allowing him a serene environment in which he is able to think great (but surely disembodied) thoughts. This scenario promises plot developments full of rich irony.

When Gérard, a builder who lovingly restores old buildings, decides to buy a rundown manor house in the suburbs, he makes a chilling discovery that reverberates through the lives of both couples.

Halligan, a distinguished Canberra novelist who is also an essayist, short-story writer and critic, clearly adores France. She is obviously familiar with Paris and the setting enables her to explore themes that might have played out less vividly in an Australian locale. It also lends the story something of a fairytale quality.

Halligan’s Paris is one of grace and historical continuity, of elegant shops that refuse the garishness of their Australian counterparts, of open air food markets from which can be bought the freshest goats cheese and finest foie gras, of streets through which medieval pilgrims have walked, of crisp champagne and neighbourhood bistros. She’s also fascinated by the traditional architecture of French villages and the histories they sometimes hide and sometimes display.

Halligan’s Paris is comfortably white and bourgeois, with little of the economic discord conveyed by news reports about this overcrowded city. The internet, raunch culture and iPods are all absent. But change is still evident, though subtle: Luc, the owner of the bookshop in which Fanny works, lives with his boyfriend, Julien; their lesbian friends Claude and Agnès want to conceive a child. Fanny and Gérard are themselves trying to conceive, and at one point consider IVF.

If France is almost a character in this novel, its main theme could be the rights and wrongs of the bourgeois life that this country epitomises so well – what has made it possible, what keeps it going, what appears to threaten it.

In Halligan’s France, bourgeois culture is valued and handed down through the generations, and the past is honoured. The simple love story of Fanny and Gérard that opens the novel, in which an only child is seen off to a prosperous marriage by her doting parents, calls to mind the end of one of Shakespeare’s comedies with its essential rightness: ‘Don’t they make a lovely couple, said everybody at the wedding, and indeed they do, he so dark and vigorous and glowing with sun-browned health, she so slender and fair and radiant’.

It’s significant that Gérard makes his money by lovingly restoring old buildings; the carved cherubs he finds on the ceiling as he renovates his own apartment seem to symbolise this effortless continuity. And while his more prosaic father-in-law, André, knocks buildings down and builds new ones, even he has retained, in the block of the modern apartment he lives in with his wife, Cathérine, a patch of garden that is a symbolic trace of the old.

But Halligan is wary of over-valorising bourgeois life. For a start, civilisation itself is often built on a past that was anything but civilised. Fanny and her mother decide to revisit the village of Cathérine’s childhood as the daughter of a French Resistance member. Here, Halligan is alive to the force and weight of history: the horrors of the German occupation and the life-and-death decisions made by collaborators and resistance fighters are still very real for Cathérine. Yet she’s also clearly a beneficiary of the post-war prosperity that has enabled French culture to once more flourish.

Moreover, the character of Jean-Marie is a chilling demonstration of the kinds of sacrifices that might be necessary for a traditional sense of order to prevail. Sabine is required to run the household so smoothly it does not even hum; instead, it’s ‘like an animal organism whose gentle breathing you might hear as a kind of comforting rhythm if you listened quietly’. Jean-Marie’s sexual use of women rivals the males in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in its egregious misogyny.

In fact, Halligan uses the character of Jean-Marie to mercilessly send up the world and worldview of the male French intellectual (one wonders if there’s an intended resemblance to any real-life philosophers). He’s an ethical and psychological nightmare, an anachronistic figure who uses women to undergird and maintain the material basis of his existence in a way that is chillingly reminiscent of Luce Irigaray’s critique of male subjectivity.

Nor is Halligan unaware of the mundane forces that enable the leisurely lifestyles of her comfortably-off characters – Luc’s bookshop is bankrolled by his rich father’s chain of pharmacies.

And even prosperity has its dangers: if civilisation becomes too concerned with outward form, it loses its right to name itself as such. The discovery of a long-ago crime in the suburbs reveals the lengths a supposedly civilised couple have been willing to go to in order to hide a socially embarrassing event.

For Halligan, the perfect imperfection of children is the key to avoiding these dangers of civilisation and providing renewal, both in a personal and a societal sense. The inalienable ‘rightness’ of children and the desire for them are bursting out of this novel:

Taking an angry or maybe anguished baby and changing it from a stiff protesting awkward bundle into a relaxed kitten-like creature seems to Fanny as important a thing as anybody could ever do.

The contradictions that the advent of children produce breathe life into the novel. Children are a source of hope and optimism and everything that makes life worthwhile. But they are also disruptive of the serenity and order that a masculinist version of the bourgeois life might strive for; at one point, the formerly elegant Sabine appears with ‘a half-naked baby under her arm and smudges of white powder on her brown cashmere jumper’.

Yet even here, bourgeois culture falters. There are damaged children in this novel, and in theory, the family unit should be able to love them into life and happiness. But the truth is more discomforting, and French society as the novel sees it cannot absorb these children into itself.

Fans of Halligan will find here her usual careful attention to the sensuous and aesthetic delights that life offers. Food’s an obvious one of course – Halligan has won awards for her gastronomic writing, and France enables her to go to town, so to speak. We read of foie gras pan-fried with caramelised apples, of quince preserves, hand-made chocolates and baby lamb cutlets. There’s even an appalling French restaurant meal that Halligan has fun with, a travesty of the real thing, with Cathérine anticipating a version of a French cake traditionally cooked on a spit: ‘The cake at La Table de Aveyron is industrial. She wonders how you make it in a factory but you clearly can’.

The novel is also replete with baroque architecture, musty old leatherbound books, beautifully hand-stitched children’s wear and myriad French gardens, both the ramshackle and the quietly ordered. Halligan evokes all the senses to bring these aspects of the world of the novel alive. This accumulation of detail is one of her skills, and the book is feminist to the extent that Halligan insists on the role of food and domesticity in general as expressions of a society’s priorities.

But many of the characters seem to be sketched: slightly vague figures who sometimes reveal information about their pasts at moments that seem convenient for the novel but belated or unnecessary in real life. It’s as if they are still in Halligan’s head and voicing her concerns rather than being allowed lives of their own.

We don’t know, for example, why Sabine has been so compliant over the years; we don’t know why Cathérine leaves it so late to tell her daughter, Fanny, about her past. At one point, she tells the thirty-year-old Fanny: ‘As for the house … Grandfather had other children, I suppose they got it. Or their heirs’. This seems an oddly distant way to speak about one’s aunts and uncles. Fanny and Gérard seemed a bit generic to me, a kind of Eros and Psyche; I kept waiting for the conflict that would bring them both into sharper focus.

These factors will not bother every reader. In some ways, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch could have been accused of forcing her characters to live out her own philosophical concerns. Murdoch’s characters are chaotic and unpredictable, sometimes making dramatic, sweeping changes to their lives that seem to have been dreamed up by the author for the sake of effect, but this has never been a problem for her many fans.

An earlier novel of Halligan’s that I’ve read, The Fog Garden, was essentially a meditation on grief. It was a particularly personal exploration and didn’t follow the traditional form of the novel, and I remember thinking as I read it that it would be interesting to see what Halligan would do with a more conventional approach. But in Valley of Grace, Halligan also plays around with convention, particularly in relation to plotting.

The novel has been described as a set of linked short stories, although this is not quite accurate – there’s just too much linkage between the seven sections. Unfortunately, the result is that many plot threads start promisingly and don’t so much cease as fade into the background; or they do return too briefly to the foreground, much later.

I should temper my criticism here, though: Halligan’s aims in relation to the plot are clear enough. There’s something nineteenth-century about it, in that Halligan’s priority is to show us a lot of different human situations and contexts. And given the structure, it would be unfair to expect the same events to be foregrounded in each of them.

But the effect is that just as the reader is getting intrigued about where a plot thread is going, the scenery changes, and the lost thread never quite regains its former prominence. Perhaps the novel isn’t ambitious enough; perhaps it should have been larger in scope, with sufficient time to take the reader more thoroughly through the travails of the main characters.

One last criticism is that the time scheme seems a bit confused. The novel doesn’t seem to be imprinted with the zeitgeist of any particular era and this is of course the advantage of setting it in France, a country that prides itself on retaining its traditions. But there are no signals to suggest that it is set clearly in, say, the 1980s rather than the present, and if it is set in the present, Cathérine seems too young to have been a child during the Second World War. The dark story of the manor house also seems a bit anachronistic, but in this case the French setting muddies the waters a bit.

This isn’t to say that Valley of Grace fails, or that it’s not worth reading. Halligan’s observations about life are often sharp and fresh – she’s great at providing the telling detail. And she deftly explores grand themes through the quotidian, while the unexpected shifts enable her to reveal a variety of human dilemmas. If you read this book without expecting to fall in love with the characters, or as a literary escape from some of the grittier edges and conflicts of contemporary reality, there is much to be gleaned.

Exhibition: Other side art: Trevor Nickolls, a survey of paintings and drawings 1972–2007, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Carlton

2009-07-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

Caption: Mother Earth and Father Space (Stealing a kiss during the war against humanity), 2004
© Courtesy Trevor Nickolls

Trevor Nickolls’s work often hits you like you a punch in the face. It also offers bold, original visions of Australia – visions of how it is now, but also of how it might be.

Nickolls might well see himself as representing the ‘other side’ – too often rendered invisible or misrepresented – in the conflict between European and Indigenous societies and worldviews. His paintings and drawings dramatically foreground the collision between white and Indigenous cultures and the violent effects of white guns, jails and land grabs on Indigenous lives and Dreamings.

According to exhibition curator Michael O’Ferrall, Nickolls is one of the pioneers of a generation of Indigenous artists who struggled to create a place for themselves within the cultural mainstream – this during an era of unprecedented flowering of Indigenous protest and expression. Nickolls’s ‘dreamtime machinetime’ imagery depicted the Indigenous experience of white colonialism in new ways, forging a path for later artists.

Nickolls, who lives in Adelaide and is a Nunga man on his mother’s side, now enjoys a respected place in Australian art. His works appear in most state art collections and in 1990 he represented Australia in the Venice Biennale alongside the celebrated Kimberley painter Rover Thomas. He has been called the ‘father of urban Indigenous art’, a title that the visual complexity and unique symbology of his practice clearly justify. This survey exhibition at the Ian Potter brings together more than 50 paintings and drawings and cements his status as an artist of great note over a 35-year time span.

Yet in his long career he has not always received the widespread mainstream recognition he deserves. He has complained that the prices of his work went down after the Biennale, while the work of Thomas, painting in a more traditional mode, became ever more popular. This may have had something to do with the confronting aspects of Nickolls’s work, which portray the effects of white culture on Indigenous life as crudely destructive.

Viewing the work, it’s tempting to suggest that Nickolls might have been at ease in any artistic milieu – as a traditional Indigenous man; a medieval creator of frescoes; a designer in the bloom of French art nouveau; a cubist in the manner of Picasso; a surrealist; or a creator of street art during the angry sixties and seventies. He utilises all these genres and worldviews, and more.

Of course, Nickolls might respond that his art is of its time, and that to transpose his artistic provenance onto other milieus is an attempt to co-opt it – he’s using a variety of traditions to turn white culture on its head.

Nickolls’s work is neither overly serious nor academic. It’s visually compelling, positively pulsates with life and movement, and includes much sly humour. There’s also an extremely strong technical facility in disparate areas. The colour palette is satisfying to the eye, the use of line sure and inspired, and there are complex, sometimes decorative patternings that might have pleased William Morris. Nickolls has studied the techniques of Papunya artists and his use of dot painting and related techniques adds to the richness of his work.

Part of the power of Nickolls’s work is the energy that emerges from figures and objects deliberately flattened on the plane. While the figuration evokes many art traditions it’s often inspired by comic book and graffiti art, as well as traditional Indigenous figuration.

Nickolls is a symbolist as well as a conceptual artist – symbols frequently invade all parts of the canvas and often include traditional Indigenous motifs such as the emu and the snake. Many of the associations will remain obscure to non-Indigenous viewers but this does not lessen the power of the paintings.

The vibrancy of Nickolls’s canvases expresses not so much optimism but a force that simply cannot be eradicated even in the face of terrible loss and wrongdoing. Nickolls shows that Indigenous Australians and their cultures are damaged by Western culture, but that Indigenous cultures are still infinitely powerful. This power comes not from some Western notion of military superiority or individual ego but from black peoples’ strong associations with the earth and skies, with the natural world.

‘Deaths in custody’ 1990 is a complex, confronting painting. It depicts a strong young Indigenous man in prison, the palms of his hands foregrounded as he clutches at the bars of his tiny cell. Surrounded by totemic images, some of which may represent his life and Dreaming, he is at once immensely powerful and helpless in the face of an institutionalised brutality, emphasised by the claustrophobic domination of the cell walls’ clinker bricks.

The man’s strength is in his body and his embodied spirituality, and it has not left him: but it is also, somehow, a threat to him in this hostile environment, something he may use against himself. And there is another, related threat to this man: white representations of him as an Indigenous male prisoner. Behind him is a disturbing image of an Indigenous man who has been hung, set against the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flag, and to his right a television camera. He’s as much imprisoned by white images of Indigenous people as he is by the ‘justice’ system – the picture itself was taken from a photograph of an Indigenous prisoner that appeared in a Brisbane newspaper.

For Nickolls the violences of mainstream culture demand a holistic response, demand that the artist open himself up and expose himself to the world through his art. Many works have strong psychological associations, graphically depicting the effects of the culture clash on Indigenous minds, hearts and bodies. These are complex works that suggest multiple meanings. Often present is a sense of visual overload, replicating the pressures and contradictions of living as an Indigenous person in a predominantly white Australian culture.

‘Inside looking out 2’ 1998 is dominated by a light-coloured mask with Indigenous patternings and no face behind it. Instead, the mask is bounded by three walls, suggesting white modes of living or the prison yard, while the holes in the mask evoke sadistic capture and enclosure. The sense of spiritual and cultural loss here is stark, but the violences of assimilation go beyond a living death to death itself – the mask in some way resembles a skull, and inside or behind the mask two fingers clutch a cigarette.

‘A man with the blues’ recalls Picasso, but the man’s body is infused with Indigenous symbolism, and to the right of the brightly painted red-and-green fire are snake and emu motifs. There’s a very free use of colour here in a beautifully formal design.

Symbols of Western society appear frequently and suggest lifelessness, militarism, the pursuit of money, industrial processes and chaos (the last an interesting inversion in itself, given the West's obsession with order and efficiency). They’re often painted in dolorous greys, for example in ‘State bank dreamings’ 1993 and ‘Urban scream’ 1993.

But Nickolls never gets so caught up in the conflict that he can’t witness the beauty and power of the life force sustaining Indigenous cultures. A later work, ‘Mother Earth and Father Space (Stealing a kiss during the war against humanity)’ 2004, with its dense and complex patternings and symbols, celebrates and foregrounds the forces of life while quietly asserting Indigenous ownership of the land of plenty, depicting Australia as a potential paradise.

Much earlier works, ‘River and hills’ c1984, ‘River landscape’ 1984 and ‘Billabong’ 1985, all use curved and straight lines (and sometimes dots) to map out serene Australian landscapes. In these paintings sparse trees add to the serenity. Especially in ‘River and hills’, the boundary between the symbolic and the ‘real’ is never firm. The colours used in these calm paintings combine with the strong lines to soothe the viewer into appreciating the beauty and harmony of the land.

Nickolls seems to have become more playful in the 1990s, with his ironic use of Indigenous ancestral figures placed in modern consumer contexts in works such as ‘Family in blue Holden’ 1998 and ‘Spirit 98’ 1998. As with so much of his art, the irony is fuelled by the huge gulf between the two worldviews that white colonialism has forced into confrontation with each other. Nickolls could be suggesting here that the ‘Dreaming’ has been stolen and commercialised by non-Indigenous Australians. At the same time, whites want Indigenous Australians to be just like them, a variant on white consumers – only then, perhaps, will Indigenous cultures become part of Australia’s myth-making about itself.

There is a lot of humour in this group of works, and I was struck by their daring: would some Indigenous peoples object to the use of such imagery in the same way a Catholic might object to ‘Piss Christ’?

A collection of Nickolls’s drawings that span 1973 to 2006 are also included in the exhibition, and they too show a wide variety of styles and influences. The elaborate patterning in ‘Trees, from the Bethesda series' 1987 is particularly striking.

Nickolls’s work has continued to evolve, and later pieces seem to suggest a return to land. The stunning colour palettes in these works recall but are not confined to traditional colours and media. ‘Kimberley under the stars’ 2002 features rock-like land forms painted in a brilliant red with orange patternings. They’re set against a dramatic black sky in which stars float in white, floral-like patterns.

If Nickolls portrays the world from the ‘other side’ in this exhibition, in another way he wants to show both sides, that of white and black, but from an Indigenous standpoint. Nickolls has said that he wants his work to bridge the gap between the Western and traditional art traditions. In so doing it offers blistering insights into the damage visited on Indigenous people on multiple levels – material, psychological, spiritual. Because of this forensic skill, Nickolls's work could be seen as a possible starting point for a healing process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures.

The exhibition is on at the Ian Potter, Swanston St Carlton (between Faraday and Elgin streets), until 2 August, and will then tour Victoria, the Northern Territory, the ACT and South Australia.

Verdict: Stunning and confronting work

For more recent arts coverage, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!

Film review: Lucky Country

2009-06-25T22:45:00.000-07:00

Stark, grim and unrelenting, this tragic tale, for all its shortcomings, makes trenchant statements about the histories that have made Australians who we are.

It’s 1902, the year after Federation, when the Australian colonies joined together to become a nation. The ideal of a young country where the ‘working man’ gets a fair go is strong, and the mischievous but basically kind bush larrikin is a potent figure.

Things between widower Nat and his two children, Tom and Sarah, are becoming strained. They struggle to find the next meal while living in a cramped, gloomy hut on their tiny selection in the South Australian bush. The teenage Sarah believes her father’s experiment in living off the land has failed and she’s desperate to leave. But Nat is determined to succeed, although he’s a schoolteacher by trade and totally unskilled as a farmer.

Nat is one of the small landowners that colonial selection Acts were supposed to turn into successful farmers. But Connolly, the local squatter, has sold marginal land to the selectors, and he’s now buying it back at a pittance and building a railway.

With the arrival of three strangers on horseback – ex-soldiers who may be friends or foes – the film quickly adopts a thriller atmosphere.

The mood is dour and oppressive. Director of photography Jules O’Loughlin has leached much of the colour out of the South Australian landscape. It’s unyielding, with little variation in sun and shade. The characters are shown in grim close-ups, looking swarthy or unnaturally pale, their Edwardian clothes at odds with the muddy bushland. This creates a feeling of claustrophobia, no mean feat in the wide open spaces of the Australian bush. It works well in the outdoor scenes, but the darkness of the bush hut interior means it’s sometimes hard to see what’s going on in the indoor scenes.

From the start, the film refuses to create a romanticised past for the viewer to savour. Instead, it wants us to understand that the past had its own myths as well as its ineffable realities. In this way it directly challenges films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock. While the Australian landscape held a threat and menace in Picnic, it was also a place of romance and mysterious charm, a contrast to the laced-in sexuality of Edwardian schoolgirls.

Here, the bush is menacing for a different reason. Refusing to nurture and support, to nourish and replenish, it becomes the backdrop as well as the source of a grim battle for survival. The bleached grey-greens of tall gums recall Hans Heysen and Tom Roberts; the land withholds, gives nothing away. But in contrast to Picnic, the bush is always secondary to the action, not a character in its own right. Instead, human evil, in particular greed, is the major threat.

Competing myths abound in this isolated place threatened by modernity. The selection Acts, and the idea of a federated Australia, were based on the myth of creating a ‘working man’s paradise’. Nat clings to the fanatical belief that it is God’s plan for him to work the land and succeed in taming it.

Henry Lawson’s stories of small landholders had dramatically exposed the harsh realities of rural life. But they also perpetuated their own myths of Australian resourcefulness, suggesting that the quintessential Australian lived in the bush although the majority already lived in cities.

Of course, another important myth had only recently been replaced – for some at least, the biblical God was now dead, and Darwin’s survival of the fittest had taken on convenient meanings. And the promise of untold riches on the goldfields still held sway.

It’s not hard to see how earlier Australian films that viewed the past in new and interesting ways have paved the way for this one. The themes may be different, but the universal, elemental nature of the narrative in Rolf de Heer’s Tracker comes to mind. The welcome shock of The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, which almost revelled in depicting the low-level misery of nineteenth-century rural Australia, is an obvious predecessor, as is The Proposition, with its bloodthirsty Australian take on the western. Even the ghost of The Piano, with its stark portrayal of cruelty and violence, can be glimpsed.

My problem with the film is that once the dramatic temperature goes up, it stays up, unremittingly. There’s no relief and no leavening humour. At one point, towards the end of the film, the thriller/chase elements become overly neat plot devices. With so much violence on screen, there’s the risk that the viewer will become immured and almost indifferent to it. The many plot twists help to maintain audience interest but may be overly challenging to some.

The thriller element also leads to occasional over-stylisation. The character of Sarah has many possibilities; yet despite some interesting sexual politics, her actions never fulfil the promise of her character and ultimately become slave to the plot machinations.

The film’s resonances are sometimes richer and more powerful than the narrative itself. Despite its initial appeal to realism, it works well as an allegory of economic rationalism, Australia’s reliance on natural resources, and the materialism, greed and xenophobia unleashed by the Howard government. The film also evokes the opposing narrative of the ubiquitous but elusive Australian dream of home ownership, now threatened by ruthless banks, desperate governments and greedy real estate agents.

Aden Young’s extraordinary performance gives the film credibility. For most of the film everything revolves around Nat’s fanatical determination, and Young inhabits this frail but iron-willed man completely. As the story progresses Tom slowly becomes the focal point, and Toby Wallace is natural and convincing in this challenging role, his work here presaging a lasting talent.

Hanna Mangan-Lawrence, who plays Sarah, is a talented actress, but she’s too theatrical here and needed stronger direction; her quizzical, frightened glances are at times almost melodramatic, adding to the impression that the script was originally that of a play.

The score, by Tom Schutzinger, is unobtrusive, only occasionally and very subtly suggesting the menace on screen. Unlike the music in some thrillers, it never descends to a mad signalling to the audience that they’re supposed to feel scared.

Director Kriv Stenders already has three feature films to his credit, including the low-budget Blacktown and Boxing Day, both praised by critics. The scale of his ambition is clear here: he’s chosen a story of epic themes. If the execution is sometimes flawed, the attempt is interesting and resonant.

Verdict: thematically powerful, mainly strong performances, but loses its way when the thriller genre takes over

Film Review: My Year Without Sex

2009-05-26T22:03:00.001-07:00

Every few years a film comes along that perfectly captures an aspect of that elusive beast the Australian zeitgeist. My Year without Sex, written and directed by Sara Watt, is such a film. Watt, who won an AFI award for Look Both Ways, her first feature, has created a witty, honest, endearing portrait of Australian family life in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

*****Plot elements given below*****
The travails of an archetypal suburban family are the basis of the film. Ross and Natalie live with their two children, Louis and Portia, in a small, overpriced weatherboard in Melbourne’s inner west that they are bursting out of. Typical of anyone wanting to live in a built-up part of this city, they have a huge mortgage. Ross works in a community radio station as a sound engineer and Natalie has a part time job as a nurse's aid in an old people’s home.

Their best friends couldn’t be more different. Greg and Winona live in a minimally furnished McMansion with their blended family. Winona is much younger than Greg and is his third wife. The global economic crisis is yet to strike and the canny Greg is up to his ears in complex investments that even he doesn’t understand.

Ross and Natalie are neither clearly left or right wing; they complain about wanting to be in the middle of the middle rather than the lower part of it; like so much of ‘middle Australia’, they’re struggling to get by. Then Natalie suffers a life-threatening aneurysm and emerges from an emergency operation with a swollen face, mild brain damage and a list of things she must avoid to ensure she escapes a second aneurysm. One of these things is sex.

In a search for meaning, Natalie forms a friendship with Margaret, an unconventional female minister. Meanwhile, Natalie’s illness and its financial aftermath place her relationship with Ross under strain. Can this couple navigate the new, difficult territory they are encountering or will their marriage be a second casualty?
*****Plot elements end*****

From the outset Ross and Natalie appear to be battling not so much a system but an invisible, omniscient network of forces that militate against the unity of their family. In one beautifully photographed night-time scene, Ross gazes at the house over the road, which is a mass of garish Christmas lights. The back of his head is clearly delineated as the lights go out of focus, and they seem to symbolise his dilemma: no matter how hard you try in this society you will always be bested.

Sexualisation of daily life is ubiquitous, especially in the opening frames, and adds to the general sense of busyness and clutter. There is something deeply rotten in this society, with Ross and Natalie constantly being dragged down by the pressure to keep up with the Joneses and buy ever more goods.

The colour scheme is a slightly disconcerting but appropriate mixture of garish colours and moodily lit faces. This increases the sense of claustrophobia caused by the overabundance of ‘stuff’. It’s as if the stuff is stifling the characters, the lack of space in the family home a metaphor for a society trapped by consumerism and impossibly perfect body images.

Watt does a number of interesting things with this scenario, while avoiding some potential traps. First, she never gives up on her small family, refusing to present them as totally helpless, sinking in the quicksand of late capitalism. While they are helpless in an existential sense – floundering around in the way humans always have done because we can never know what the future holds – they don’t lose their humanity.

Their weapon – and that of the film – is humour. The many aspects of daily life presented here are all fodder for Watt’s sardonic, sly but gentle wit. Nothing is sacred, and there are some truly wonderful lines that deserve to become Australian sayings in the tradition of some of the dialogue in The Castle or Kath and Kim. The humour works because it is so authentic, so intrinsic to the situations the characters find themselves in.

Second – and this is where Watt especially excels – the visual aspects of family consumerism, the junk objects that the middle classes accumulate, are never simply utilitarian or irritating. Even – and especially – in their garishness they’re visually compelling as well as funny, never clearly distinguishable from the human urge to create, to turn life into art.

The bedrooms of the two children will look familiar to many, Portia’s riddled with junk in every shade of pink and Louis’s a shrine to the AFL (there is something delightfully whimsical in the sheer number of footy pictures he’s managed to cram onto his small wall). Here and elsewhere Watt displays the artistry that makes her animation so lively, pumping up the visual volume just enough so it’s barely nudging the surreal, not going as far as Baz Luhrmann might but in that general direction.

As well as the excessive competitiveness of modern life and the sexualisation of young girls, the film manages to tackle a huge number of themes, none of them heavy handedly: the helplessness of parents to avoid over-indulging their kids at Easter and Christmas; the question of whether genuine belief in God is possible; inhuman workplaces and job insecurity; private school versus public; huge mortgages; the sexual attractions that can so easily flare up in a work situation; the faux cheeriness of Christmas, itself so depression-inducing.

But the major concern of My Year without Sex is the randomness with which life doles out good and bad luck, in no particular order and with a total indifference to the recipients’ goodness or otherwise. Chance rules all and the film is permeated with images of lotteries, raffles and gambling, actual and metaphorical. Watt has said that she’s a glass half-full kind of person; she seems to conclude here that the only sane way to live is to ride the wave of good fortune while it lasts and appreciate what you have, because you’ll never control the mysterious workings of fate.

The film’s narrative drive is not as strong as that of Look Both Ways, which was a beautifully structured film. There are progression and plot development as Natalie negotiates the after effects of her aneurysm, but Watt is also concerned with the cyclical nature of life. The film is divided into segments based on the months of the year, each segment introduced by colourful graphics and humorous visuals. In this world, things are born and they die, there are loss and gain, and the only constant is change.

*****Plot elements given below******
There is one element in the film that lessens the sense of contemporary authenticity, and that’s the position of Margaret, the female minister who befriends Natalie. Watt seems to have sacrificed Australian religious realities in favour of plot simplicity here. A progressive-seeming female minister would be more likely to belong to the left-leaning Uniting Church than to be spouting the kind of fundamentalism that Margaret holds to, especially in what appears to be a mainstream church. But a less simplistic version of God wouldn’t have advanced the plot in the same way.
****Plot elements end*****

In some ways this film reminded me of Little Miss Sunshine in its subversive take on family life. In both films late capitalism is a disruptive force that the characters must struggle against as a family. The two films differ, though, in that the characters in Little Miss Sunshine don’t have as much irony at their disposal: although we sympathise with them, until the end we are often laughing at them rather than laughing with them.

Sacha Horler as Natalie is as strong and accomplished an actress as ever and her performance begs the question of why she doesn’t have a higher profile in this country. She could so easily have gone overboard in what is a very dramatic role but she never overdoes it, and the minimalist approach works beautifully here: we sympathise with Natalie but never to the point of schmaltz.

When he was young the huge-eyed Matt Day, who plays Ross, relied too much on his trademark ‘confused stare’ for comic purposes. In recent years he’s had a successful acting career in the UK, and in this film has been allowed to show his maturity as an actor and play a nuanced role. His slight frame and air of uncertainty never let us forget that here is an everyman who is constantly being exposed, confronted and tested, a man who must struggle with the emotional complexities of daily life.

Maude Davey, who plays Margaret, has been quietly building up a CV in warm, wise yet slightly sardonic screen characters; she’s true to form here and deserves to be more of a fixture on both the small and large screen. And Fred Whitlock as Greg sends up the ocker version of middle class greed and competitiveness for all he’s worth.

The children, Jonathan Seget as Louis and Portia Bradley as Ruby, are both excellent. Jonathan Seget is especially effective for his deadpan ordinariness; there is a familiar unadorned blandness about his laconic, single-minded obsession with football, his every emotion mediated through the fortunes of his beloved team.

And look for William McInnes, who makes a surprise cameo appearance that is both at odds with his usual screen image and a nod to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Ultimately this film is a kind of tribute to a traditional institution – the family – but one that never seeks to conventionalise or conservatise it. Watt reveals the haphazard beauty in the chaos of family life. If this film had a thesis, it would be that any attempt to impose order on family life, indeed on life itself, is doomed, because chaos is its defining element. While at times the film made me want to enter a Buddhist monastery, I can’t help but agree.

Verdict: constant low-key humour that avoids an overdose of the 'feel good' factor.

Book review: Butterfly by Sonya Hartnett (Hamish Hamilton)

2009-05-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

Australian novelist Sonya Hartnett has long suffered from a lack of due recognition because the majority of her novels are either aimed at the young, or span the gap between young adult and adult fiction. Critic Peter Craven has been one of her long-time champions, naming her ‘a novelist of genius’.

It’s wonderful that such a sterling writer is able to bring to such glittering life the complex, deeply felt experiences of young people. But just as youth is wasted on the young, it would be a sin if Hartnett’s audience was confined to the under-16s.

Hartnett’s work has won a swag of awards since she published her first novel at the astonishing age of 15. Now, fresh from winning the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, worth a cool $A880,000, Hartnett has published Butterfly, aimed once more at a hybrid market.

It’s an apt title. The novel has the delicacy and complex patterning of a butterfly’s wings. But given its sometimes grim subject matter, the title presages a kind of optimism.

We’re in a sleepy Melbourne suburb somewhere in the late 1970s. Abba, shag pile and Holden cars reign. Plum Coyle is 13 going on 14, emerging from the safety of childhood into the ‘anguished infancy of teenagerhood’, with its social horrors and crippling narcissism. She sometimes feels herself evil and inhuman, hates her face and body, adores her two much older brothers, Justin and Cydar, and tolerates her mild, eccentric parents.

Lowest on the pecking order in her group of friends and feeling misunderstood by her family, Plum is drawn into the world of her glamorous next door neighbour, Maureen. Perhaps Maureen will be able to help Plum in her attempts to gain some status in her friendship group, attempts which appear only to lead further into humiliation?

Hartnett’s many skills are in full play in this beautifully crafted novel. There are secrets in this quiet suburban world, secrets the characters keep from each other for fear of losing everything they value most. These secrets fuel the momentum of the narrative that Hartnett so carefully builds, keeping the surprises coming.

Indeed, there’s almost a thriller element to the novel: until the very end we don’t know exactly what will happen. At one point towards the close Hartnett plays with this mounting sense of dread, keeping us guessing as to whether she’ll choose a conventional melodramatic device or a more nuanced resolution.

Hartnett’s writing shows us the inner worlds of her main characters in close-up, as if we’re lurking somewhere behind their eyes. These worlds are full of both sensual immediacy and psychological nuance; there is much to see, hear, feel, touch and taste:

… the sky beyond is purple, as if it’s suffered a horizon’s-worth of blows. … there are midges bouncing on the air, and underground a cricket is tuning its saws and pins. She looks back to Maureen and asks, ‘Will you come to my party? Even for a little while?’

As is also evident in the above quote, Hartnett has a talent for casually placing apt, highly economical metaphors in the text that conjure up vivid images: ‘Her friends stare in post-nuclear silence’; ‘he has bumped through life like a brightly coloured ball’; ‘Maureen stands out against the lawn like an orchid, all lankiness and waxen beauty’.

Hartnett has set herself a challenge by placing this vividly imagined world in the seemingly far-off 1970s. Yet the material details are rendered as casually and faithfully as if the novel was set in 2009.

There is no sense of a period piece; we are parachuted back into the everydayness of the past, never merely gazing at it through some soft-focus lens. And this is what memory is like, too: when we recall the past, however bizarre the clothes or daggy the furnishings, such details stubbornly continue to make sense in the context.

Indeed, there’s a sense in which this foreign but, to older readers, familiar world is every bit as materialistic as our own. Objects in the novel have a huge and sometimes negative force, often standing in for everything that is emotionally absent or awry.

Plum hates her parents’ love for daggy antiques, yearning for a renovated house that will impress her friends. Meanwhile, Maureen is trapped within a suburban nightmare that is reflected in the furnishings: ‘her gaze moves over the sideboard, the drinks cabinet, the archway, returns to him’.

The exotic fish that Cydar rears in tanks and sells for profit are living creatures objectified, parts of himself that he cannot fully own and one reason why he sleeps and studies in a bungalow in the backyard, to some extent physically separate from his family. And Plum finds hope and an almost spiritual sustenance in the small precious objects she collects and keeps hidden in a case under her bed.

The predominance of objects is intimately bound up with the distance from which Plum surveys her loved family, particularly her parents. This doesn’t mean that they don’t love Plum, and when a crisis erupts in her life, the whole family mourns with her. However, they seem afflicted with a total inability to help. Hartnett is keen to demonstrate that family life, however benign, can never fully insulate us from the world – and that the internet age alone cannot be blamed for this inability. Perhaps she’s also suggesting that this distance is at least no worse than the suffocating parenting that is criticised so often today.

Hartnett’s masterly portrayal of the darker side of adolescence is both frank and humorous. She sympathetically depicts the hapless role of parents from an adolescent’s viewpoint. Mums and Fa are never fully fledged characters and they’re not supposed to be. Plum’s often appalling behaviour towards her mother in particular, as well as Mums’s tolerance of it, is amusing, touching and irritating at the same time:

She slams downstairs to take her frustrations out on her mother … Blissfully, a scandal: ‘I told you chicken vol-au-vents! No one in the world likes tuna!’

Clearly, Mums can’t win, and we feel for her. Both parents hover around the edges of this novel, their inability to change their lives for the better a point of sadness and a kind of warning. They seem to maintain an uneasy emotional balance, neither totally fulfilled nor devastatingly unhappy.

Hartnett’s view of adolescence is often bleak, no more so than in the excruciating descriptions of Plum’s desperate attempts to impress her friends. Hartnett forces into our gaze the psychological sophistication of the scapegoating that adolescents engage in, their ability to back each other into semantic corners with a couple of well-chosen words.

This is a forensic cruelty that relies totally on the insecurity of its recipients. Hartnett is almost fatalistic, perhaps too much so, in her seeming insistence that this kind of behaviour is inevitable and possibly unchangeable in the young.

You’ll have to read this intricately imagined novel to find out whether Plum’s attempts to negotiate the long and difficult process of individuation are ultimately successful. But the process of finding out is rich in writerly rewards.

Verdict: a novel to savour

Film review: The Baader Meinhof Complex

2009-05-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

Film has the unique ability to re-create periods of history – and the stories of individuals caught up in them – that the mainstream too often forgets.

A tumultuous decade in German and indeed world history is vividly replayed in The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel. The film is based on the book of the same name by journalist Stefan Aust, who also cowrote the script. Its cowriter and producer is Bernd Eichinger, who produced the controversial film The Downfall.

The bloody, ruthless stalemate between the IRA and the Unionists in Northern Ireland is still strong in the collective memory. But the decade after 1967 in West Germany, when radical leftists carried out bomb attacks and bank robberies, planted car bombs and assassinated public officials has all but faded outside of that country, perhaps paling into insignificance against the darker shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust, not to mention the rise of East Germany.

The Baader Meinhof Complex covers the events leading up to and stemming from the trials of three of the ring leaders of the instigators of this violence, the Red Army Faction. This militant left-wing group of ‘urban guerillas’ believed armed resistance was the only way to stop what it perceived as a repressive German state supporting aggressive US imperialism.

The film has caused controversy in Germany but was the country’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in this year’s Academy Awards.

The period of 1967-68 was one of instability and revolt worldwide. The Six Day War had further dispossessed Palestinians; all over Europe and in parts of South America students were protesting against government repression; in the US, opposition to the Vietnam War was intensifying as the war escalated. Young people everywhere were terrified of the prospect of nuclear war.

In West Germany, many Nazi sympathisers still held jobs in the universities and the government, leading to conservatism and repression. A radical student movement erupted throughout Germany, demanding government change and university reforms. Students were incensed by the role of the US in the Vietnam War and their country’s hosting of US bases. It was from the mass actions of this movement that the seeds of the RAF sprang.

Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck of Mostly Martha and The Lives of Others) is a left-wing columnist living a sixties lifestyle in Hamburg with her husband and two children. As the Shah of Iran and his wife prepare to make a state visit to West Germany, she writes an open letter to the Shah’s wife, protesting about mass poverty in Iran.

Soon afterwards, at a student protest against the visit of the Shah in Berlin, police and pro-Shah forces respond with brutal violence, sparking a series of events that will rock Germany for a decade.

In the wake of the student unrest that follows the protest, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and her bad-boy lover Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu of Run Lola Run and Munich) decide that direct action is the only effective way to end US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Their extreme actions put them on a collision course with the police, and Meinhof meets Ensslin when she interviews her in jail. Meinhof finds herself becoming convinced that her left-wing journalism maintains the status quo and she flees her husband to join the group in Berlin.

Her decision to join forces with Ensslin and Baader will change the course of West German, and indeed world, history.

The film records the downward moral trajectory of the RAF once it commits to violence, starting with burning buildings and, as a second and third generation more ruthlessly murderous than the first take up the struggle, progressing to a reckless lack of concern for the lives of civilians.

A hell of a lot happens: this economical film takes us from graphic scenes of a burning department store and a bank hold-up, to the 1977 hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger plane to force the release of RAF prisoners. The film is important for the patience and attention to detail with which it builds the story of this extraordinary time. It’s a graphically violent film, but the violence is there to underline the effects of the RAF’s tactics. It also reveals the roots of current terrorist actions.

These events are still an emotional and political minefield for German victims and the society as a whole, and the filmmakers have tried to be objective. The film plays out in semi-documentary style with a large amount of historical detail, with the violence ramping up to the point where catastrophe is piled on catastrophe.

In such a setting the attempt to offer psychological explanations for the motivations of the protagonists doesn’t always work. Bleibtreu’s character is the most successful; he plays Andreas as the childish, impulsive egocentric he seems to have been, prone to tantrums and as much masculinist rebel without a cause as he is committed revolutionary. Ensslin might appear a tad two-dimensional, but the film suggests that her rock-solid certainties come at least partly from the influence of her pastor father, who was as committed to human rights as he was to God.

Ulrike Meinhof is a more complex character and the film strains to make us understand how, with a solid career and a more settled life, she so quickly makes the switch from objective journalist to oddly disengaged participant. Although Gedeck skilfully portrays a woman who seems to have been opaque anyway, there wasn’t quite enough material for me to fully understand her motivations.

In some ways the film reminded me of Good Morning, Night, about the communist Red Brigades in Italy and their 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, president of the conservative Christian Democratic Party. But the aims of each film couldn’t be more different. Good Morning, Night doesn’t attempt to achieve historical objectivity; it’s much more interested in imagining the inner lives of the terrorists.

But my comparison may be superficial for other reasons. Both films conjure up another era that is seductive to us in both its similarities to and differences from our own. The Baader Meinhof Complex is impressive for its evocation of 1960s and 70s insouciance and rebel chic. The film deftly contrasts images, fashions, pop culture and superficially bohemian lifestyles of this time with the deadly conflicts being played out.

The presence of veteran actor Bruno Ganz as the police chief who seeks to understand the motivations of the terrorists conventionalises the film somewhat, bringing it towards a more sophisticated version of the good-versus-evil crime film genre. But he’s also there to humanise officialdom, and here it becomes rather odd and ironic that this kindly faced man played Hitler in The Downfall: we are still human beings, the film seems to be saying, no matter the evil we do.

Indeed the film maps out the genuine and sometimes extraordinary softening of officialdom and politics that occurred in the 1970s in many parts of the Western world. This was a time when governments negotiated with terrorists and some of the community even supported them: amazingly, at one point, one in four young people supported the RAF. And when left-winger Willy Brandt became chancellor of West Germany he acceded to some of the demands of the disaffected students.

This is also pertinent to the treatment of the RAF members once they were caught, both in prison and at their trial. We witness extremes of physical privation and comfort – they firstly suffer brutal force feeding and solitary confinement in cells where fluorescent lights are on all the time but, in the wake of their demands and community outrage, are allowed to mingle and visit each other’s large, comfortable cells as they prepare for their trial. Like other films that deal with the 1970s, I’m struck by how brief the swing to genuine permissiveness was, and how far the pendulum’s swung back.

Although you don’t need a full understanding of the era to appreciate the film, the sheer scale of events leaves many questions unanswered. I wanted to know more about the assassination victims: were some of them Nazi sympathisers? Were they the organs of a repressive state, or trying to uphold the institutions of a fragile democracy? Why did the advent of 1970s radical feminism, with its calls to separatism and non-violent direct action, appear to have had no impact on the RAF women?

But I think I’m being picky. The larger sweep of the film is about the unleashing of evil. Evil begets evil, no matter what your intentions. When you choose violent means, the cycle continues – this applies to the state, of course, as well as individuals. And indeed, the ultimate result of the RAF violence was to make West Germany a more repressive state in the name of national security.

The dramatic first scene, where well meaning protesters are cruelly bashed by police and Shah sympathisers, conjures up Russell Crowe in Gladiator as he prepares to lead Roman cavalry down a hill to defeat the waiting barbarians. ‘Unleash hell!’ he roars to his men.

And they do.

Verdict: an essential film for anyone interested in the recent history of the West

Exhibition: Shared Sky, NGV Australia at Federation Square

2009-04-23T01:41:00.001-07:00

Unknown
active in Australia (1940s)
Mankokkarrng (The Southern Cross) 1948
earth pigments on paper on cardboard
45.5 x 58.5 cm (Image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Presented by the Commonwealth Government, 1956

With its infinite nature, changeability and great beauty, the sky is the medium onto which we project our dreams, nightmares and the powerful myths and stories that carry our cultures forward.

It’s a work of art in itself, an eternal, protean installation that is available whenever we wish, engaging our minds as well as our imaginations. It takes us beyond our own world, speaking of other universes, of celestial bodies huger and older and in multitudes far greater than the mind can encompass, as well as the endless possibilities of human striving.

But, while it represents the infinite it has also been instrumental in marking the seasons and guiding the rhythms of daily life, for example the best times to plant or gather certain foods. And it has been vital in guiding navigation and therefore travel for both Indigenous and Western cultures.

Our view of the sky, not to mention our entire planet, is under threat – you only need to think of the obscuring smog during the Beijing Olympics – but even when we see only a haze of smog and cloud a clearer sky exists in our imaginations.

How to interpret such as an all-encompassing influence? How to ‘sing’ it?

Shared Sky, celebrating the International Year of Astronomy, brings together painting, sculpture, photography, prints and drawings to explore varied cultural understandings of the (mainly) night sky over Australia.

All of the works in this exhibition – even those that seek to reproduce ‘objective’ rather than interpretative views of the stars and planets – show us the ways that people from many cultures have sought to know and understand the visible universe, and by so doing to understand themselves and their place in that universe.

Like many works of art today, these pieces confound the boundary between art and nature, confirming that the natural world itself is inherently artistic.

Indigenous peoples are well represented. One of the first things to catch the eye when you enter is an arresting group of Morning Star poles, beautifully decorated structures that feature in the ceremonies of some Yolngu clans. These ceremonies take place a year after the death of a relative to ensure that the diseased reaches Burralku, the land of the dead, located where Venus (the ‘morning star’) rises in the east.

These poles are highly individualised despite their functionality, suggesting the continuing life that the diseased will enjoy. Their feathers, seed pods and brightly coloured pigments all have potent symbolic value – for example, the seedpods are to sustain the diseased while they make their journey.

A myth that features strongly in the exhibition and occurs in various forms across a number of Indigenous cultures is that of the Seven Sisters, based on a group of stars also known as the Pleiades. In Gulumbu Yunupingu’s ‘Gan’yu’, which suggests this myth, small white star shapes and dots have been painted on stringybark in a density that strikingly evokes the richness of the evening sky.

Dennis Nona’s intricately patterned linocut ‘Baidam – shark constellation’ interprets this same star group quite differently, in line with the traditions and culture of Badu Island in the Torres Strait, where he grew up.

For Nona these stars represent the shark, a figure much admired for its hunting skill. In ‘Baidam – shark constellation’ a number of densely packed motifs, many of them curvilinear, surround the figure of the shark, also densely patterned, with floral-like emblems representing the position of the stars as they mark out the shark’s position. Here the disparate elements of sea and sky are united with cultural knowledges.

Like the Indigenous artists, many of the Western artists in the exhibition represent the complexity of the sky in an abstract or semi-abstract fashion. Andrew Browne’s stunning ‘Phenomena’ uses light and contrast to create graceful forms that refer to the artistry of nature.

Offering a completely different mood, Janet Dawson’s lithograph ‘Dream of the sun (Rêve du soleil)’ could have been inspired by Miro, with an exuberance and originality of shape and colour that suggests the ways in which the sun influences our unconscious.

This is an exhibition of intricate treasures. The day I was there I noticed a visitor standing close to and peering at one of the works, Louise Rippert’s ‘Glossary defining time and space’. This is a highly intellectual work that references mandalas as well as the astronomical tables of Copernicus, but its delicate stitchings and textures are irresistible.

It’s equally essential to see Durer’s ‘Celestial map of the southern sky’, first published in 1515. This work drew on contemporary as well as ancient astronomy and was created at a time when astronomers still believed that the Sun moved around the Earth.

The map is a wonderful combination of east and west (it follows the Islamic tradition of showing the constellation from the viewpoint of space rather than Earth) and the scientific and mythic (the map includes mythic figures associated with particular constellations).

Many of the works are in black and white, highlighting the elemental nature of the night sky. Seeming simplicity becomes incredibly profound in ‘Sunrise’, a linocut by Kumanjayi Cherel, of the Gooniyandi clan in the Kimberley.

Here, strong diagonal lines in the centre mark off a radiant rising sun over sloping land, the sun on one side represented by concentric half circles, the earth by a series of diagnonal lines on the other.

Tim Jones’s wood engraving ‘Tree with shooting star’ shows the seemingly disparate elements of nature in unified motion, contrasting but also somehow linking the glowing white of the shooting star with earthbound nature in a treacherous, chaotic mood.

Don’t miss Peter Booth’s comet, or Ludwig Becker's watercolour of the meteor that he witnessed at the Darling River while on the fatal Burke and Wills expedition. He died tragically not long afterwards.

Two series in the exhibition are noteworthy for their reproductions of astral bodies. A group of lithographs derives from Joseph Turner’s highly detailed drawings of the southern nebulae, with the images made visible by the Great Melbourne Telescope.

The Melbourne Telescope, acquired in the late 1860s primarily to advance astronomy for the benefit of Britain, could not photograph deep space, so its images had to be drawn. Turner, with only three and a half hours a night at his disposal, managed to sketch the Nebula Argus and its stars in one month. ‘Nebula Argus’ from the series, produced in 1875, has a quiet, mystical beauty.

Three photographs from the NASA Apollo missions, including one by William Anders that misleadingly showed the Earth appearing to rise over a lunar landscape, evoke the wonder that the early astronauts felt as they observed the Earth from a distance and the Moon from close up.

This is a well-thought out, clearly themed exhibition that succeeds in presenting a huge range of perspectives. After viewing it, you may never see the sky in quite the same way again.

The exhibition runs until 2 August.

Verdict: rich in ideas, historical detail and powerful images

Film review: Camino, directed by Javier Fesser

2009-04-11T20:27:00.001-07:00

A sinister Catholic organisation, serious illness and the sweetness of first love: these disparate ingredients make for a potent mix in the exuberant Spanish film Camino.

It’s a shamelessly populist and emotionally manipulative film with a message that only gradually reveals itself. The film’s bitter, angry undertones start off subtly but become strident and even overdone towards the end. If you don’t enjoy sitting in the cinema with tears streaming down your face, it's probably not for you.

The film has garnered a huge slew of awards in Spain, but has fared less well on the international festival circuit. Earlier this year it won six Goyas, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director, best original screenplay, best new actress and best lead actress.

Despite its weaknesses Camino is worth watching for the little-known, sinister world it uncovers and the strong performances.

Camino is a pretty, vibrant 11-year-old growing up in a staunchly Catholic household in Madrid. She attends an all-girl Catholic school and has an obsession with the Virgin Mary and a close, loving relationship with her parents, Gloria and Jose.

Almost from the beginning we see her suffering from sudden, unexplained neck pain, but apart from that things seem rosy enough. The family’s Catholicism bonds its members together and Camino’s vitality seems all of a piece with her immersion in the iconography and rituals of Spanish Catholicism. In one scene she dances joyfully around the house, long hair swinging wildly, as she tells the plumber that her mother’s away on a religious retreat.

But the picture soon darkens. We learn that the family, in particular Gloria, are staunch members of the rigidly prescriptive Catholic lay organisation Opus Dei. Camino’s sister, Nuria, is a celibate who lives in an Opus Dei centre and sees little of her family. And Gloria’s calm acceptance of her daughter’s fear of injections, as the search for the source of her pain begins, starts to seem disturbingly sanguine, even heartless.

Meanwhile, Camino’s hormones are going haywire. She attends a drama group and is lovestruck by the cute boy slated to play Prince Charming in the group’s production of Cinderella. With ironic heavy-handedness his name happens to be Jesus (not unusual in a society as influenced by Catholicism as that of Spain): the spiritual and earthy aspects of Camino’s life seem to be coming together beautifully.

But Camino and her pious mother don’t see drama group the same way. And the shadow of illness is creeping over all her dreams of adolescent bliss with her beloved.

As we grow up, we make use of stories – both those we are given and those we search out ourselves – to help us understand our lives and who we are. Camino must find new stories and characters to explain her emerging sexual feelings and these come into conflict with the characters of Catholic lore she’s grown up with.

The film’s cinematography boldly dramatises the conflict. Compelling, brightly coloured fantasy sequences that suggest magical realism as well as sixties bohemia dramatise Camino’s psychic struggles. But they also reveal a fundamental inability of Catholicism, at least as it is practised in Opus Dei, to deal with the complexities of being human.

These scenes contrast with the dolorous, muted colours of the churchy interiors in which Camino lives much of her life.

The film was inspired by the story of a young Spanish girl, Alexia Gonzalez-Barros, who died in 1985 and is in the process of being beatified (a pretext for eventual sainthood).

It suggests that the memory of Alexia, and others like her, has been sullied by the distortions of Opus Dei’s brand of Catholicism. In the film, Opus Dei’s approach leads to a contempt for human feeling and a preoccupation with suffering as a virtue in itself. (The Spanish priest and creator of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva, named the foundational text he wrote for the movement Camino, or The Way).

The anger about this takes a while to make itself known, which neatly echoes Camino’s dawning sexuality and urge to individuate.

Opus Dei controls every aspect of the life of Camino’s family. Nuria has no mind of her own but rejoices in becoming ever more obedient to the demands of her ruthless spiritual supervisor, Ines. In one scene she puts tiny stones in her shoes, illustrating the mortification of the flesh that is still openly practised by Opus Dei members.

The film, then, clearly has its own agenda: to ensure Camino’s essential girlishness and indeed humanity are not neatly incised in the interests of religious propaganda.

At first glance, this means that the central dichotomy can seem simplistic – a bohemian sexual utopia set against the iron repression of the church. Such a sanguine view of human sexuality is itself suspect; Freud, for example, insists that sexuality is always the outcome of psychic conflict.

But I think the film’s more sophisticated than that. Ultimately it manages to collapse the dichotomy altogether in the overarching theme of spirituality. Camino is a young girl of extraordinary spiritual power, and ironically she’s inherited this mystical bent from her religious upbringing. It's this spiritual force that enables her to transfer her childish love for the Virgin to an adoration for the more human Jesus.

And it is the strength of this force that makes Camino’s love for Jesus so ennobling even as she becomes sicker – ironically, its very strength leads the Opus Dei elders, so quick to frame everything within the rubric of piety, to mistake it for religious zeal. But where spirituality is concerned, all love is divine.

Nor does the film let secularism off the hook. A sexuality, and indeed a society that is devoid of spirituality may be just as clueless as Opus Dei: the chaos of the drama group’s performance of Cinderella hints at the dangers of an unalloyed secularism. Camino’s rival for the affections of Jesus in the drama group is an empty-headed young girl who struggles to deal with the world outside of her own concerns.

One of the film’s strengths is the affection and respect with which it treats its adolescent characters. They’re full of vitality, even when acting up, amusing to watch in their gawkiness but never figures of derision.

Camino is played by the luminous Nerea Camacho, who is saccharine without being painfully so. Only gradually do we realise that the Disney-like qualities are deliberate – Camino’s seeming purity and childish innocence make her vulnerable to misrepresentation: the church has a fate in store for Camino that her own heart disputes.

Carme Elias is beautifully controlled as Camino’s mother, Gloria, a seemingly warm woman with a view of suffering – not just her own, but that of her loved ones – as a priceless opportunity to increase sanctity. The lengths she will go to to achieve such sanctity are chilling and also help to embed the film in fairy tale.

Mariano Venancio plays Camino’s more indulgent and less religiously zealous father. At times he is called on to be overly sentimental but otherwise acts with perfect emotional tone.

The shots of the operations Camino undergoes are not for the squeamish. It’s difficult not to see the hospital as just another impersonal institution with no real regard for Camino’s individuality. These shots reminded me of the crucifixion of Jesus and subtly suggested a bloodthirstiness at the heart of religiosity that was extremely disturbing.

The soundtrack is awful, with swelling violins at the first hint of pathos – and therefore all too frequently. This is a shame, because there is a kernel of emotional honesty about the film that deserves a more subtle treatment. I was reminded of The Sea Inside, another Spanish drama, which dealt maturely with suffering and the church in a very different context but was also hindered by a soundtrack that tried to tell the audience when to cry.

Camino is a conventionally plotted film with constant action, although it’s overly long and sags towards the end. But it’s worth hanging around for the denouement: in the end Camino’s humanity wins out in a way that is powerfully touching, despite the orchestral overkill.

Verdict: original in tone and subject matter; often intense and engaging

Camino is playing exclusively in Melbourne at the Nova Cinema.

Exhibition: NEW09, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

2009-03-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

I was innocently contemplating footage projected onto the ceiling at NEW09, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s annual exposé of new young talent, when I got a fright.

I won’t say what caused it because that would spoil the surprise.

The work that made me jump suddenly was one example of the adventurous way the artists in this exhibition engage with the gallery space. There’s not one piece that doesn’t in some way use the space to frame and extend its own meanings.

These works set out to challenge our expectations and move us out of our comfort zones. Some of them question the very gallery system that's instantiated them, as well as the functionalism of our Western lifestyle.

But such commonalities reveal themselves gradually. New technologies and the complexities of contemporary life have spawned a huge, disparate range of practices among our younger artists. In an information-soaked world the word original seems hopelessly inappropriate, but these artists are bold, brave and not afraid to experiment with materials, modes and technologies.

The first work to confront the viewer is Justine Khamara’s ‘Dilated concentrations (Simon) (me)’. Two photographic faces, one of the artist herself and one of her brother, have been rendered as huge sculptures, blown up to many times normal size and extending out from two perpendicular walls.

These sculptures of laser-cut stainless steel appear from a distance to be startlingly lifelike but are always creatures of technology. One has its eyes squeezed tight as if comically refusing the stare of the viewer; the other’s eyes are open but seem to stare past, oblivious.

Khamara has ironically taken a two-dimensional photographic image of a three-dimensional face and rendered it three-dimensional once more. The removal of the rest of the body from these ‘portraits’ renders them other and what one critic has called ‘monstrous’. The results playfully exploit our fascination with the human face while subverting conventional expectations of the face in portraiture. Although we’re drawn to these huge faces, it’s impossible to identify with them.

In a room next to this a completely different dynamic is in play. Pat Foster and Jen Berean’s ‘Untitled from the series The doing and undoing of things’ is an installation dominated by a sculpture, suspended from the ceiling, that consists of industrialised aluminium frames. These could reference window frames or any industrialised structure or building material. Some of the frames include glass panes and some of these panes are broken.

Entrance to this room from the gallery's front entrance is blocked by two clumsily placed benches and a clear screen; meanwhile the room is also visible but inaccessible from an adjoining gallery space. I was discombobulated by this arrangement: what was I supposed to do? Was I ‘allowed’ to enter the space from the front entrance or not?

This work literally turns functionality on its side: once in the room, we look up through the frames to the ceiling and can’t help but contemplate how the industrialised built environment frames whatever we see within it. As one critic has pointed out, the status of this ‘site’ is deliberately uncertain – is it in the process of being finished, or is it already detritus? The work, it’s said, becomes a site of mourning for a more humanistic architecture and lifestyle. If so, there is an unworldly beauty here – stripped of its use function, the mass produced almost transcends its limitations.

A very different kind of challenge is enacted by Matthew Griffin’s ‘Common sense’. On three video screens arranged in a semicircle on the floor, the same interview, between the artist and the philosopher Peter Singer, is shown simultaneously (there are also interviews with other high profile figures, not seen by this reviewer).

Singer is a moral philosopher who has questioned the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s decision to buy a $45 000 000 renaissance painting while millions starve. Griffin’s work seems a straightforward attempt to deploy a public gallery in a useful way – to question the morality of spending money on art when human suffering is enormous.

But is it that straightforward? The process of following the video is uncomfortable: you have to crouch down and listen carefully above the surrounding din, while trying to watch the same interview on the three screens is at first confusing.

This disorientation has its advantages: the three screens give you different views of the same process. You become a privileged spectator, honing in on small details and expressions, reading the changing body language. You start to ponder the relation between Griffin and Singer: the artist is doing most of the talking – is he nervous? What is Singer really thinking?

It’s not so much that Griffin is downplaying the problems Singer highlights, but more that he doesn’t want his work to be mere propaganda, and he doesn’t want us, as viewers, to give up our role in the exchange between artist and viewer. He forces us to ‘work’ at experiencing the artwork apart from receiving its obvious message.

The most organic work in this exhibition – perhaps ‘fluid’ is too cliched a word – is Benjamin Armstrong’s ‘Hold everything dear I’ and ‘Hold everything dear II’, sinuous sculptures of blown glass, wax and wood. Pale, wax-covered branch shapes twine around organic glass forms, some with sexual connotations, one resembling a brain.

These are complex works that deliberately resist interpretation, and the fact that they’re aesthetically pleasing doesn’t lessen their complexity: you need time to drink them in. The delicate-looking wax forms are redolent of coral shapes and bones as well as branches, while one of the glass forms resembles a condom – another, possibly the rounded abdomen of pregnancy. Life and its origins intertwined with death perhaps, with life and death embracing each other, both part of the same process?

Marco Fusinato tries to steal the show with his huge, imposing structure, ‘Aetheric plexus’. In the tradition of artworks influenced by the movements of those viewing them, it reacts to the proximity of viewers with the effect I mentioned earlier.

Fusinato has strung up diagonal rows of spotlights on a support structure of beams in a way that references the lighting for a concert or theatrical event. But these lights demand to be the main attraction rather than playing the supporting role they normally would. They impress with an ephemeral show of strength that somehow diminishes the viewer, momentarily scaring us into a submissive stance.

Brodie Ellis’s ‘Noosphere’ features film footage projected onto the ceiling in a darkened room with an accompanying, soporific soundtrack. Shot in Burketown on the Gulf of Carpentaria in Queensland’s Far North, the footage features the beautiful Morning Glory cloud, an atmospheric phenomenon that takes place in the transition from the dry season to the wet season. The constantly shifting cloud formations are mesmerising and otherworldly.

Some of this exhibition doesn’t even stay in one place: be warned that Simon Yates has created two life-sized, animated robots, one male and one female, that roam freely around the gallery.

NEW09 is the latest of an annual exhibition series that ACCA holds to showcase new artists, with ACCA providing the resources for the selected artists to create and exhibit new work. It’s a great idea because it shows us what the younger generation – not always well represented by commercial galleries – is up to, and offers more adventurous and unexpected experiences than these galleries can sometimes provide.

Go along to this exhibition by all means – but perhaps leave younger kids at home!

NEW09 is on at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street Southbank, until 17 May.

Photograph: ‘Hold everything dear I’ and ‘Hold everything dear II’ by Benjamin Armstrong

Book review: Dog Boy by Eva Hornung (Text Publishing)

2009-03-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Books exploring the unique interactions between dogs and humans are flying off bookstore shelves – one of the most popular, Marley and Me, has become a Hollywood film starring a couple of A-listers. If aerobics was the craze of the eighties, renovating and celebrity cooking the obsessions of the nineties, then dog owning and loving would have to be the social trend of the noughties.

But most accounts focus on the ways in which dogs are little heroes who support our own struggles and help us to understand better our human selves and world. Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy is a whole other beast. While its central theme is the mutual dependence of human and dog, it explores this more profoundly than most books in the genre by asking the question: what if a human were to adapt to the world of dogs and not the other way around?

And it does so in a strong, suspense-filled narrative of many dimensions, one that creates touchable, smellable, visceral worlds that we explore through the eyes of both child and beast.

Four-year-old Romochka waits for his family in a condemned apartment in Moscow at the beginning of winter. Starving and cold, he finally leaves and walks the shabby indifferent streets. In the nick of time he meets the gentle, wise Mamochka, who leads him to her lair and adopts him into her clan.

In the gloomy, filthy basement of a ruined church he becomes one of her puppies, suckling at her teats and learning to speak an intricate language based on visual, aural and sensory cues. But even as he learns to track and mark trails and bemoans his tiny teeth and immobile ears, the human world of the nearby shanty town exerts on him an increasing fascination.

One of Hornung’s strengths here is the ease with which she blends narrative and theme. Romochka aches for some aspects of the human civilisation he has lost, but in some ways is closer to his own humanity as a member of a canine family.

Forced to live in survival mode, his human instincts and dexterity develop to a preternatural degree. And knowledge of the seasons is central to that survival: nature is never a site for contemplation but a beautiful landscape whose constant shifts must be endlessly renegotiated, and from whom Romochka is never detached:

Romochka stood in the empty lane in front of their lair and held his hands up to the white spring sky, pointing his fingers the way first leaves sprout from the buds.

Hornung shows us how human civilisation mutes our instincts. In doing this she makes a strong plea for our animal selves, as well as for the dignity and intrinsic worth of so-called animals. The novel aims to avoid sentimentalising Momochka and her family, and to sharpen our awareness of the animal world and its complex cultures: the dogs are clearly individuals with their own highly developed personalities. Hornung has said that when the human elements of the story come into play she wants them to jar – and they do.

The book is in many ways a clear-eyed account of appalling social injustice, posing an uncomfortable critique of that civilisation. In Hornung’s Moscow obscene poverty and homelessness are so institutionalised that the ‘bomzhi’ are abjected, regularly hauled off like so much rubbish by the compassion-free militzia, their shanty towns destroyed, to keep the streets ‘clean’.

The contemptuous attitudes of officials to both homeless adults and what is a lost generation of children might in other hands read like didacticism, and Hornung has actively protested the plight of refugees in Australia, as well as dealt with the theme in her work. But here she is a recording angel, refusing to condemn. However, it’s impossible not to contrast this social disintegration with the unstinting love of Mamochka, who rules her lair with an iron paw in a hairy glove, and at a crucial time provides a priceless gift for her adopted son.

Another of Hornung’s strengths is the deftness with which she handles the fantasy elements of the novel. Hornung has said that the initial idea came from a true story of a boy in Moscow living with dogs for two years, and she has also drawn on the myth of Romulus and Remus. For this reader at least, traces of other fairytales waft lightly through the narrative.

But these elements rarely take over its trenchant realism; instead, Hornung deepens our understanding of reality by asking us to incorporate the mythic and fantastic into it. Her two scientist characters, Natalya and Dmitry, while well-meaning, are stymied by their scientific training in their attempts to understand Romochka.

Indeed the book’s realism has been acclaimed by critics, and rightly so. Hornung’s Moscow is vividly realised, a place where the metro system’s vast underground caverns are stashed with the city's multitudes, where ruthless begging rings impose their own hierarchies and feral children fiercely guard their territories. Hornung learned Russian and visited Moscow in order to fully enter the world she was creating, and this intimate knowledge is evident in the grittiness of the writing.

The book is also packed with narrative drive, all the more dexterous given that there is very little dialogue in the first half. Hornung skillfully describes the intricacies of wordless communication, and the regimented, precarious, ever-changing nature of life as a clan dog in the city. Romochka has countless adventures and misadventures that provide insights into the underground social structures of a post-communist megalopolis.

The novel is solidly grounded in research on dog and human behaviour, but Hornung ably demonstrates how important imagination is in reaching another kind of truth. The interactions she imagines between Romochka and his adopted family are always beautifully embodied, earthed in Romochka’s need for warmth, food and love:

After a while his hands warmed up and he reached for her damp belly and stroked her with his fingers as he drank … She sighed and laid down her head.

And indeed, if were to use our imaginations more, wouldn’t we feel greater compassion for both humans and animals?

The questions Hornung asks in this novel are not meant to comfort but to prod. Does our abjection of animals enable our oppression of other humans? Are we really more savage than the beasts? What have we lost in forming our identities against our conceptions of the animal world? And how might the world change if we chose to engage in that liminal space that so fascinates Hornung, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’?

Exhibition: Sweet Spot

2009-03-09T15:23:00.001-07:00

Elizabeth Pulie
Untitled (2 Massive flowers) 2008
synthetic polymer paint, oil stick on canvas
120 x 100 cm
© Courtesy the artist

To go to an exhibition of modern art is to inevitably encounter works that comment about art and its purposes. It's also a commonplace that artists these days talk to other artists rather than to a broader audience. But these trends are not a bad thing at all if the conversation is interesting enough to eavesdrop on.

Sweet Spot, an exhibition currently at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Parkville, reveals the work of six artists concerned with the meanings and aesthestics of ornamentation. All the artists are interested in how art looks and feels, enabling the viewer to experience their work on different levels.

Elizabeth Pulie uses ornamentation to confound the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative, the 'real' and the imagined. The shapes and patterns in her work are hugely vibrant yet they draw on motifs recognisable from the domestic world of sewing and embroidery, as well as patterns of dots sometimes reminiscent of Indigenous art. Her works provide a sensory experience that is above all enjoyable.

The fluid, sometimes floral shapes are often not recognisable as 'nature' yet they pulse with life and movement. The works play with shape and perspective, and the use of colour is adventurous, in pleasing combinations that hint at 'vintage' colour schemes.

'Show', for example, rendered in gouache and pencil, includes eye motifs that remind the viewer of buttons and lace patterns, but the overall image suggests a kaleidoscopic view that is constantly shifting.

'Signature painting' is reminiscent of a sophisticated, avant-garde patchwork quilt. Shapes with floral patterns could be pieces of material while other markings reference stitching. The floral shapes are marked out by curved lines, one of them with markings that suggest a tape measure. The pale colour scheme is soothing and the overall effect one of aesthetic pleasure.

In a very different way, Canberra artist Marie Hegarty's work also plays with the border between the abstract and the figurative. Her large canvases are dominated by huge, cartoon-like forms that loosely suggest body parts and are defined with bold fields of flat colour, particularly black, shades of red and pastel colours. These organic forms also create the illusion that the work is three dimensional. They're visually very striking, suggesting that they are still becoming, yet to fully define themselves.

The work of the late Neil Roberts offers unadulterated pleasure. In a series of five sculptures that could be seen as a nod to Art Nouveau, he uses leadlight to uncover an unexpected grace and beauty in the movements of two competing boxers devoid of faces, the movement of their bodies marking out an ever-changing space between them.

The leadlight's black against the gallery's white wall creates a lacelike delicacy and beauty. This contrasts with the subject and the pugilistic titles of these works, for example 'Crossguard to the left', 'A foul pivot' and 'Left hand blow for the head'.

Opulence, excess and sexual desire are all evoked in the oversized jewellery sculptures of Melbourne artist Kevin Maritz. Giant necklaces made from aluminium, timber and steel hang from 'hooks' made of, in one case, decorative bowls that resemble breasts and in others coils that suggest genitalia, evoking the bodies that jewellery such as this is supposed to adorn. The seductiveness of these pieces hints at the way in which human sexuality festishises objects -- the association between the object and the body may seem contingent, yet it's nevertheless evident in the languid luxuriousness of these 'necklaces'.

Peter Kennedy's gumtrees, using watercolour, gouache, charcoal and pastel on paper, take the tree out of art history and into the present, removing it from its expected context and rendering it astonishing. Each of the works features one tree in black and white that suggests a photographic negative. The trees are surrounded by wild brushstrokes in unexpected colours, further defamiliarising them. This technique highlights the inherent beauty of their twisted limbs and their individual differences.

The works of Adrienne Gaha, a Sydney artist who lives in London, are the only in the exhibition that directly eschew beauty. Gaha comments on the Rococo tradition by superimposing figures from modern popular culture on images from the work of Francois Boucher, a celebrated Rococo artist whose works present idyllic, highly idealised scenes that have been described as superficial.

I didn't warm to these works but perhaps I wasn't supposed to. The disruption of 'high art' beauty by 'low art' popular culture questions the greater worth attributed to the former -- perhaps the sometimes ugly modern images are psychologically more cognisant of the range of human emotions and motivations than is the limited elegance of Boucher's work. Gaha suggests that some forms of aestheticism may come at a cost!

In a less overtly disruptive way, Tony Clark re-imagines classical and renaissance figuration, rendering it painterly and deliberately widening the gap between representation and 'reality'.

His 'Putto night' and 'Putto day' feature renaissance putti (decorative images of young children) from the Medici chapel, while 'Standing 2008' shows a naked male figure from the the Portland Vase, a 1st century Roman glass vase made famous in the 18th century.

The unusual and dramatic colourations and deliberate sense of the works being 'unfinished' (broad brushstrokes and visible drips of paint) undercut the traditions the original figures evoke. They force us to see the figures as a function of the act of painting rather than as being in any way lifelike. But it is difficult to generalise about the effects of this practice -- the putti seem less lifelike, the standing male figure more alive and dynamic, reminding me of the 1954 oil painting of Frank O'Hara by Larry Rivers, in which the poet strikes a quasi-classical pose.

Sweet Spot is at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 800 Swanston St (between Faraday and Elgin streets) Parkville, until 24 May.

Book review: Addition by Toni Jordan

2009-03-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

It’s not easy reviewing a fiction work, from a first-time author, that has received more hype than this year’s Booker winner. There are two main fears: that the temptation to pan the book will be overwhelming; and that it will be impossible to find anything original to say about it. Luckily, Tori Jordan’s Addition elicited neither response.

Jordan, a Melburnian who has science qualifications and is a veteran of RMIT’s Professional Editing and Writing course, has seemingly burst onto the literary scene out of the blue, with a short story her only previously published fiction. She’s penned a novel that is funny, deft, assured and has a believable, likeable heroine with a complex inner life. There are weaknesses in the novel, but it’s still a scintillating, emotionally intelligent read.

Addition has been hugely successful: at least 10 other countries, including the USA and the UK, are publishing it or have already. ‘Literary sensation’ is probably no exaggeration, and you can almost hear the weary sighs of a thousand unpublished writers as they read of Jordan’s success and send out yet another unsolicited manuscript.

The book is structured by a love story and this, as well as its original, ironic wit, which stems from Grace’s individuality, means that a few critics have placed it in the ‘chick lit’ genre. Indeed, it cleverly slots into the genre while effortlessly moving beyond its normal limits and into the realm of literary fiction – it’s published in Australia by Text, after all. (I hate the term ‘chick lit’ because I abhor the word ‘chick’ as a description of women, but there’s no other word for this type of book.)

Grace Vandenburg, the novel’s narrator, is a 30-something former teacher who lives in a leafy Melbourne suburb and has an unusual form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Her reclusive life revolves around counting. Everything in her confined world must be calibrated or it will descend into chaos: the steps she takes from bed to bathroom in the mornings, the brushstrokes it takes to brush her teeth, the beans she buys each week at the supermarket, the bites it takes to eat the orange cake she buys from the same café every day.

She’s constructed a rigid routine that enables her to function in a limited way and keeps her shielded from the world. A lover of numbers and the order they reveal, she revels in her obsession and channels her emotional frustration into an adoration of a brilliant, long-dead inventor.

And then she meets Seamus, a football-loving Irishman with blond hair and a charming smile, and her secure little world is soon under threat. As the love story unfolds, we gradually learn the facts of Grace’s past, both recent and otherwise.

Grace is a beautifully realised character, and her ironic take on life means that on almost every page there’s some witticism, vivid image or detail that often is also wise: ‘If someone can be unexpected using words imagine how thrilling they could be using their mouth. Or their tongue. Or their teeth.’ ‘How could I have a wart on my foot? Do they come in the mail?’ ‘Stillness races through my veins instead of blood.’ ‘The numbers scattered from my fingertips and ran across the floor.’

The novel is also filled with interesting and sometimes amusing facts about numbers. And Jordan writes a mean sex scene, managing to combine earthiness with intense eroticism.

It’s a truism of literary fiction that a successful writer makes us believe in the world they have created. Grace herself is eminently believable and her world is rich with back story. Indeed, one of the novel's main strengths is that it humanises mental illness so beautifully, yet refuses to completely separate the individual from the disorder in the way that modern psychiatry seeks to do. Grace's love of counting is bound up with who she is

On the minus side, the character of Seamus sometimes seems a tad unfilled-in. I also found some of the set-up of the love story unlikely, while perfectly suited to a ‘chick lit’ novel – the one instance where the competing genres collide with rather than complement each other, although the very unlikelihood of the set-up is probably also a drawcard in this particular market.

The one aspect of the novel I had significant argument with was its portrayal of the mental health system. I think the problem here is that this section of the novel is played for laughs.

There’s a therapy group whose chirpy facilitator seems underqualified to say the least, participants who come across as sets of symptoms rather than people, and a psychiatrist whose skill or otherwise beyond the prescribing of medication is never explored. And credibility is stretched when we read about the extreme effects of Grace’s medication – why doesn’t the psychiatrist simply adjust it when she brings the issue up with him? Jordan may well have researched this area but if so her conclusions felt superficial to me.

But to its credit the main point of the story is to destroy the dichotomy between mental health and sanity. Seamus and Grace – and the reader – learn a lesson about the preciousness of individual quirks. As much as anything, the book is a protest against normalisation and a hymn to the perfection of imperfection, the uniqueness and brilliance of each human being. Jordan’s skill is that she manages to make this point without minimising the pain that Grace’s obsession sometimes causes her. The journey towards the book’s conclusion is therefore mostly a poignant, gripping ride.

Verdict: funny, vivid, absorbing

Film review: W

2009-02-25T20:36:00.000-08:00

If you can't stand George W Bush (and who can these days?) it's not exactly fun spending 129 minutes with him, or at least an imagined version of him. W is a claustraphobic account of the making of the 43rd president of the USA, an account for which the phrase 'the banality of evil' might have been coined. Director Oliver Stone, well known for his biopics of Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy, rushed the film out before the November 2008 election, wanting to hand voters a history of the Bush presidency just in time.

The film begins with George W as a hard-drinking undergraduate at Yale. His destructive alcoholic tendencies escalate and he fails to capitalise on the attempts of his father, Republican congressman George Bush senior, to bail him out of trouble and find him a suitable career. He meets his saintly wife Laura and decides to run for the Texas governorship. He turns to God and gives up drinking. His father becomes US president and declares war on Iraq when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.

The film flashes back and forth between this narrative and the lead-up to the 2003 war in Iraq. It's essentially a story of a father and son, portraying W's rise as a doomed attempt to please the patriarchal George Bush senior.

To its credit Stanley Weiser's screenplay sticks to this narrative, leaving out Bush's other policy stuff-ups, including his crimes against America's poor. But inevitably the scenes in which the administration secretively thrashes out foreign policy in darkened rooms after the September 11 attacks are telescoped and therefore way too simplistic, with the players boldly articulating their hidden agendas, plans and beliefs for the audience's easy digestion. A more subtle approach would have been more effective but the film is obviously aimed at a mass audience.

The moral of this film might be: if someone has power, money and influence, their pathologies and weaknesses are likely to be highly damaging. Possibly this personalises the story too much, but right from the start Stone places George W in the thick of the US establishment.

In an early scene he's being subjected to an abusive initiation ritual in one of Yale's most prestigious fraternity houses. But he avoids the worst because he's able to reel off so many of the older fraternity brothers' names, and he happily relates the past generations of his family who have been members before him.

It's a deeply ironic moment because his memory here is brilliant and gets him out of trouble. It also shows us that he's good with people, and most at ease when he's roistering and playing the bad son. It's when Bush starts to play the good son that the trouble starts.

W has been shot in a moody, low-key fashion that in a cliched way parallels Bush's inner 'darkness', belying the overly cheerful exterior. Constant close-ups of his squinting visage make the viewer feel as if they are in his head, not exactly an enlightened or fascinating place to be.

And this is the film's shortcoming: we see so much through Bush's eyes only, with just occasional glimpses of the huge scale of the tragedy his enormous stupidity unleashed. Although that's not entirely true: there's one scene in which he is confronted with the casualties of war, and he's predictably, almost horrifyingly, oblivious.

The film fills in valuable detail about the political ascent that led to Bush's presidency and reminds us of the doomed search for WMD as a justification for the Iraq War. It also suggests that if Bush was intellectually grossly unsuitable for the job, he did have genuine political skills.

Like Reagan he was able to present simple messages and stark dichotomies (good against evil; right against wrong) in a way the average person could relate to. And although it's not in the film, it's easy to forget just how the media warmed to Bush's hail-fellow-well-met persona and scurrilously misrepresented Al Gore during the 2000 election campaign, even down to the likes of lefty feminist Maureen Dowd.

A friend who accompanied me remarked that it might be too early for a film like this to be made, and that for this reason the acting could offer little more than caricatures of familiar figures. I partly agree: the portrayal of Condoleezza Rice was fairly appalling, with Thandie Newton giving her a stiff, Barbie Doll-like gait, a permanently craning neck and an ironic half-smile that hardly wavered.

But is it too early? The links between the First Gulf War -- unfinished in the eyes of George W and his powerbrokers -- and Saddam's fall 12 years later are rarely referred to by our shortsighted media. As well, a film dramatising events that are still recent will have an immediacy that more distanced accounts would struggle to achieve.

To its credit, the film is economical in its implied critique of American jingoism. The patriotic and folksy jingles that erupt strategically on the soundtrack suggest that Bush's narcissism is a product of his country's, and that the USA's founding myths leave it susceptible to delusional beliefs about its role in the world.

Josh Brolin, who plays George W, was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting role in Milk. His star is on the rise and I can't see how this portrayal could hurt him. At times his expressions -- way too pleased with himself or confused and out of his depth -- are uncannily Bush-like, although sometimes there's an intensity that Bush just wasn't capable of.

It was a pleasant surprise to see two old hands prove they've still got what it takes -- Ellen Burstyn is very much the matriarch as Barbara Bush, W's mother, while Richard Dreyfuss finesses a disturbingly cool Dick Cheney. Bush Senior is played by James Cromwell; of all the protagonists he looks least like the original but this helps to distinguish him from W. He's entirely sober, industrious, politic, and deeply disturbed by his son's political ambitions. And rightly so.

Verdict: politically relevant but boring -- wait for the DVD

Exhibition: Primary Views

2009-02-20T22:54:00.000-08:00

Each year the Monash University Museum of Art holds an exhibition solely devoted to aspects of the collection. This year, the Museum asked four artists to curate their own mini-exhibition of works in the collection: Stephen Bram, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, and Juan Davila.

Three rooms, three discrete exhibitions, three separate explorations of the kinds of work that might inform the artist(s), reflect an aspect of their practice or the kind of work they most admire. As the museum itself suggests, the results can be viewed as installations of the artists and indeed the placement of the chosen works in the three spaces is particularly vital to each project.

Stephen Bram uses his introductory text not so much to disrupt the idea of an explanatory note by the artist as to use it to demonstrate what he wants art to do. It's a possibly imagined exchange between Bram and a presumed therapist about his difficulties with writing his explanatory piece for the exhibition. It's gently self-deprecating and gives an introduction to the processes enacted in his exhibition.

Elsewhere Bram has said something to the effect that he wants viewers of his art to consider the relationship between the artwork and the space outside and around it. Many of the works that he has chosen enact such a confrontation.

Three of the works overtly privilege text, refusing to see it as the 'other' of art and seeming to use text to push the viewer back into her own imagination and contemplation of the artwork and the world.

Ian Burn's 'Undeclared glasses' features dense black text on a cream background under glass. The text considers the difference between merely seeing something and apprehending it, challenging us to think about this distinction at the same time as we are busy trying to interpret the meaning of the artwork as a whole.

Mutlu Cerkez's 'Ah hi I'm (21 November 2021)' confronts with its bold, pared-down conception of the words people use to describe themselves and their desires to potential lovers in a commodifed world. It reveals a cliched yet hazy version of the self that the white capital letters on a dark, painted background render as unashamed announcement/advertisement but it's humorous in its total lack of subtlety.

The work that seems to speak most directly to Bram's is John Dunkley-Smith's 'Perspectives for conscious alterations in everyday life #5'. This consists of a dense series of linear geometric forms rendered in pencil, endlessly overlaying each other. This work deals with issues of geometry, the act of looking at art, and perspective -- a kind of meta-art -- and this is also what Bram explores in the work of his included in the exhibition, 'Untitled', in which painted geometric forms dramatically indicate perspective to suggest architectural and spacial forms.

Also noteworthy is John Nixon's 'Untitled' 1987-1992 and 2003-2006. These works consist of a series of minimalist collages, neatly laid out on a grey trestle table, that combine plain coloured paper, personal mementoes and vintage advertising, including German advertising headlines.

The collages quietly celebrates order, pattern and colour while breaking down divisions between pure art and the lived experience of the commercialised world. Because of their horizontal positioning we are forced to examine them as 'artifacts' rather than art on a wall.

Burchill and McCamley's exhibition has a (non-exclusive) interest in feminist art practice. Perhaps the most outstanding works in this collection are the 25 large photographic prints that comprise Tracey Moffat's series 'Up in the sky'.

These dramatic black-and-white pictures represent a Stolen Generations narrative, with absences that the viewer herself must fill in. The photographs capture moments of transcendence and exuberance in harsh rural settings. Many of them reflect a poverty and sense of disconnection from the earth that seem to diminish the spirit but the subjects are never entirely lost in the impersonal, sometimes dominant skies that feature in the overwhelmingly outdoor settings.

Burchill and McCamley asked a colleague, Paul Bai, to comment on the existing work of theirs included in the exhibition, 'X table', a treated poplar table in an elongated 'X' shape that, with its oval and round holes with silver- and blue-coloured inner rims, appears to jokingly resist any call to practicality. Bai comments ironically on this non-commercial surface by strategically placing on it a cash register paper roll and ruler.

Another quietly stunning work is Jacky Redgate's 'Untitled' 1990 '[From Anonymous (probably Daguerre or Niepce de Saint-Victor) table prepared for a meal, c. 1829]'. This installation/model, featuring crafted objects supposedly set up to be photographed, seems to celebrate the aesthetics of space, form and composition within the still life genre.

Juan Davila's is the most self-consciously thematic of the three exhibitions. He considers that the museum is a storehouse of memory and his chosen collection presents images of Melbourne by a wide range of artists, many of them canonic.

These works are closely grouped together on one wall while his own work, 'A panorama of Melbourne', runs down the entire length of the opposite side, in a dialogue with the group. The work, a silk screen on paper, features a series of historical depictions of a changing Melbourne, including the dispossession of Indigenous people, and ending with a city whose main raison d'etre is a techologically based commercialism.

There is a move both in the grouped works and Davila's 'Panorama' away from the human scale and the idea of human habitation to something much larger, abstract and alienating -- a megalopolis, with corresponding suburbs that Davila describes as 'dormitories lacking any support facilities'. The exhibition shows not just different versions of Melbourne, but different Melbournes, some lost for good.

Pehaps the most obviously outstanding of the grouped works is Howard Arkley's iconic 'Family home -- suburban exterior', the bungalow's bright cartoonish exterior suggesting optimism but also sinister secrets hidden behind the brick veneer. Jane Burton's haunting photograph 'I did it for you' reveals the strange, alienating melancholy of the suburban home at dusk: the lights are on, but is anyone actually home?

Chris Barry's 'Nocturne 1' presents a cityscape that is eerily, preternaturally alive but devoid of humanity. Arthur Boyd's 'Wimmera landscape with hunter' presents a dried-out landscape that could be representative of Melbourne's current drought.

Wolfgang Sievers's three black-and-white photographs of Toorak properties portray architecture as art, suggesting that there's a cultural potential to Melbourne and the city in general that goes beyond commercial imperatives.

Other prominent artists represented here include Charles Blackman, Peter Booth, Noel Counihan, Bill Henson and Rosemary Laing.

Primary Views is an intellectual exhibition with strong conceptual elements, asking much of the viewer. It thinks about curatorship in new ways, and questions the idea of the artist as a fiercely individual entity forging her own path and seeking to outstrip her predecessors.

Primary Views is at the Monash University Museum of Art, Clayton campus, and runs until 28 March.

Photo: Christian Capurro

Film review: Revolutionary Road

2009-02-14T15:09:00.000-08:00

This film, directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and starring Kate Winslet (his wife) as Leonardo DiCaprio, has been widely described as a bit of a dud, failing to elicit sympathy for the characters or involvement in their melodramatic conflict. But the film is best understood as a fable of sexual politics elevated to the level of Greek tragedy.

In telling its tale of oppressed female energy and confused masculinity, Revolutionary Road makes full use of 1950s Cold War conformity as a suitable social setting. It also strives to make such a tale universal and thus relevant to the social and economic confusions and contradictions of the noughties. And in doing so -- I've almost finished my sweeping summary of this film's grand ambitions -- it inevitably comments on the nature, status and functions of melodrama.

Winslet plays April Wheeler, a failed actress married to Frank, who has a boring marketing job at Knox, a company that makes 'business machines'. They live in a beautiful house in a picturesque Connecticut suburb, having settled there after a steamy meeting at a bohemian inner city party where Frank spots April across a smoky room and they eagerly discuss their artistic ambitions.

Now they have two children and are considered by their friends to be the 'it' couple, but both feel stifled by their narrow, artistically restricted lives and the social conformity of the era. Then April hatches a radical plan -- why not move to Paris to live? She could support her husband by working as a secretary while he freewheels, discovering what he really wants to do.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Richard Yates. It brings together two stars who demonstrated a marvellous rapport in the steamroller success that was the film Titanic. Winslet and DiCaprio are comfortable enough with each other to generate an acceptance of how two such different characters might love each other passionately.

I haven't read the book but it appears to focus much more on April's difficult background as the cause of her present troubles. But the film does the opposite: April is a universal woman caught in an impossible situation; by today's standards, her artistic ambitions seem modest. In contrast, Frank's relationship with his father becomes increasingly central to the growing conflict between them. This relationship and its implications are the keys to the film.

In one of the film's early scenes Frank descends the stairs of a subway surrounded by a herd of men all in near-identical fedoras, punctuated by a few primly dressed women and the scene, down to its muted light browns, is sharply reminiscent of John Brack's 1955 painting 'Collins St, 5p.m'. But in fact Frank is on the way up, and his casual approach to his dull job produces a creative spurt that leads to the offer of a promotion. It is at this point that the viewpoints of April and Frank begin to diverge, and the sexual politics become paramount.

The often-extreme political repression that characterised 1950s America is never directly referred to but it dances around the edges of the film, the unacknowledged corollary of the appeal to conformity. China became communist in 1949, and the growing threat of nuclear war escalated the tension between the USA and the reviled Soviet Union.

The communist witchhunt of the McCarthy era is well known but what is almost unknown is the cruel and relentless pursuit of gays and lesbians in first government, and then general employment. They were barred from all federal employment by executive order and suspected gays and lesbians sacked; at one point more than 12 million workers 'faced loyalty-security investigations'. This policy bled through to state employment and companies with government contracts, while the police swooped on gay meeting places and conducted regular mass arrests: in the early 1950s the District of Columbia carried out more than 1000 in one year. (D'emilio, 'The homosexual menace: The politics of sexuality in Cold War America' in D'emilio, ed, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University).

Why is this relevant to the film? In such an atmosphere the status of masculinity and the question of what constituted a man seemed to be vital to national security. Gays were characterised as vulnerable to blackmail and therefore the sharing of state secrets. Homosexuality weakened and threatened the boundaries of the state but it was also the enemy within: a conservative version of Freudianism posited homosexuality as deviant but also saw all men as possessing a degree of latent homosexuality.

Revolutionary Road is fascinated by the questions of manhood that preoccupied US suburbanites of the 1950s and it is the temptations of conventional masculinity that generate the conflict between April and Frank. Without giving too much away, Frank finds himself between two competing versions of masculinity: is it the taking on of male power and privilege, and the proving of one's heterosexual virility as provider and begetter of children? Or is it having the courage to refuse someone else's idea of one's vocation, and finding one's own bliss (to use modern terminology)? The question of whether a real man lets his wife support him, for example, is at the heart of Frank's uncertainty about their Paris plans.

In the film's continuing reference to Frank's father, who also worked at Knox but never had more than a lowly position, Mendes plays with Oedipal concerns, showing how Frank is tempted to both vindicate his father and beat him by securing a higher status. This preoccupation explains the fact that DiCaprio's character isn't that well modulated; he always seems on the edge of a self-righteous anger. In some ways, despite himself, Frank becomes the carrier of conventional values, not just their victim.

In fact, it is April who risks playing victim, for, as the film demonstrates, while there might be pay-offs for Frank in choosing conventional masculinity, conventional femininity would hold nothing for April, and the only alternative is madness.

The film is clearly feminist in this regard and its stunning cinematography (by Roger Deakins) is always studied, creating a hyperreality reminiscent of that other tribute to Douglas Sirk and the female melodrama, Far from Heaven. The lush autumnal tones of that film always framed the tragic heroine in an aesthetically appealing space, helping us to almost enjoy her pain and to understand why she could never fully rise above her circumstances.

In one of the final scenes in Revolutionary Road, Winslet's beauty is framed by a pale yellow, wistful, gentle morning sunlight that only highlights her inner turmoil. Mendes wants us to understand melodrama as essential to social and political concerns rather than as an artform that is inferior because it is considered feminine. (In keeping with the comparison to Far from Heaven, the immaculate fifties costumes are stunning and the interior of the Wheelers' house could have graced a home decoration magazine of the era.) The appeal to melodrama also helps to explain what has been criticised as an overly mannered performance by Winslet: it is meant to be.

The supports are mostly excellent. Michael Shannon has received an academy award nomination for his powerful portrayal of John, a mentally ill mathematician who is rudely truthful and the only character who understands the Wheelers' urge to flee. At some points in the film he seems to act as a Greek chorus, commenting frankly on their plans and motivations. Kathy Bates is a little predictable as John's mother, a needy real estate agent. And David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn both offer restrained contrast as the emotionally stifled neighbours willing to pay the price of conformity.

The score, by Thomas Newman, is restrained and faintly menacing, conventional in its signalling of the mood but not overly sentimental or intrusive.

What can the film offer us now? Is it even intended as social comment? Yes and no. Today, a radical ambition for some couples is to buy a modest house in some public transport-free outer suburb, while others build McMansions and strain their budgets to meet their mortgage payments. Status has never been more important, yet we are constantly told we have more lifestyle choices than ever before. In Australia, meanwhile, a convenient neglect of women's status means that it is actually drifting backwards, with the media gleefully 'helping' women with the double load of children and work while their husbands hold down jobs better suited to 1.5 people.

But the dilemma at the heart of Revolutionary Road -- how to retain creative freedom despite the conservatising forces of adult responsibility -- stark and simple as it is, is still highly relevant, and the gender issues, despite more reliable contraception, are still unresolved. The film forces us to ask ourselves: what are we doing with our lives? Whose agenda are we following? And what are the impacts on the spiritual and creative lives of women -- and men -- of the conventional scripts that capitalism and the nation state offer us?

Verdict: sombre, absorbing, relevant

Book review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

2009-02-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

A group of friends, relatives and colleagues gather in a prosperous suburban home in Melbourne for a Saturday evening barbecue. Aisha, the daughter of an English mother and Indian father, and Hector, the son of Greek migrants, serve up a multicultural feast with the help of Hector's parents, Manolis and Koula. But the revelling comes to an abrupt end when a man slaps someone else's misbehaving child. The consequences of this event are huge and far reaching, splitting bonds and pitting friends and family members against each other.

Some of my responses to this book are inevitably personal. Like Tsiolkas I'm a Generation X-er, but I'm also a refugee from Melbourne's inner city, which many of my generation discovered when they went to Melbourne Uni or RMIT. This novel maps Melbourne suburbs, particularly the inner north, with a loving detail that one might usually ascribe to the city's crime writers.

With the same wide vista it maps the joys and ills of Generation X and just as significantly its children, whether they're in nappies or the throes of adolescence. It's rooted in place but in no way provincial. It's distinctly Melburnian in its adumbration of the multicultural nature of the city, where Lebanese, Jewish, Indian and Greek befriend each other, fall in love and negotiate each other's cultural legacies. In that sense Tsiolkas is a much more articulate voice for Generation X than is, say, Elliot Perlman, writer of the problematic Three Dollars.

Without trying to ghettoise Tsiolkas, his voice as the son of Greek migrants is a distinctive one. His first novel, Loaded, was characterised as 'grunge lit', while its anti-hero, Ali, was a member of an alienated generation caught between two cultures, both of which Ali held in contempt. The novel thus positioned itself against the mainstream.

But through the success of the novel and in his subsequent writing, including The Slap, Tsiolkas has helped to change the nature of mainstream Australian literature, showing how the migrant voice is part of the mainstream, and in doing so altering and problematising the meaning of 'mainstream' in Australian lit. In this way he has had an impact that could in some respects be compared to that of Garner's Monkey Grip, which shone a spotlight on inner-city Melbourne bohemians of the 1970s, changing the literary landscape forever.

There is an energy behind all of Tsiolkas's writing, a creative propulsion that makes his refusal to write beautiful sentences a virtue. He will never write sentences like Garner, as smooth as a worn pebble, but he doesn't want to. Tsiolkas's writing style is raw, rough around the edges, sometimes journalistic. He seeks to coolly describe the zeitgeist rather than to judge it:

Sandi was standing at the edge of the pool, her skin tanned a rich honey. She too was wearing a bikini, but whereas the girls' swimsuits had seemed sluttish and vulgar, his wife seemed to him to be as exquisite as the elegant European models on the covers of the magazines she read ... He looked up at her and regretted fantasising over the cheap floozies on the beach.

Tsiolkas is alone among our writers in the extent of his ease with the body and its functions, its often unwelcome desires and betrayals. His characters live through their bodies and are never abstract. His microscopic knowledge of popular music and the drug and communication habits of young people, and his matter-of-fact descriptions of sexuality earth the novel, but the uncompromising picture of modern life, particularly our collective addiction to the screen, is sometimes bleak. Nevertheless there are frequent joyous experiences, revelations and breakthroughs.

I liked Tsiolkas's previous novel, Dead Europe, but felt claustrophobic being stuck in the head of the novel's main character, who was intense to say the least. The structure of The Slap -- innovative, simple and effective -- avoids this danger. Rather than trying to handle so many points of view at once Tsiolkas has divided the novel into eight sections, each told by an omniscient narrator but from the viewpoint of one of the individuals in the drama. This works well because the story moves on through the characters, that is, the same story isn't repeated endlessly and seen from different points of view. The only issue for me is that some interesting characters 'miss out' so we don't feel we know them as well.

The attempt to show so many facets of modern life is a real development for Tsiolkas as he refuses to be sidelined as a merely 'ethnic', gay or even political writer. His characters encompass a host of cultural backgrounds, ages, political standpoints and sexualities. He has said that he enjoyed the process of using his imagination to tell the story and here he revels in seeing the world through many eyes.

There's one thing that bothered me about the novel and my reaction to it is perhaps a function of Tsiolkas's refusal to judge his characters. The women in this novel who are mothers -- Aisha, Rosie and Sandi -- all seem to have a masochistic streak. And significantly, to various extents they are the most angry about the slap. I think Tsiolkas is attempting here to show us the lives of average women as they are lived rather than a feminist fantasy, but in doing so he risks essentialising some aspects of femininity such as the maternal urge and its social and political consequences.

For more recent book and film reviews, visit my new blog Feminist Culture Muncher!

Film review: Milk

2009-02-03T18:18:00.000-08:00

Harvey Milk burst onto the San Francisco political scene when the Watergate scandal propelled him to run for the role of city supervisor. After four years of unsuccessful campaigns he achieved victory in 1977, becoming the first openly gay man to win public office in California. While opposing homophobia he also built alliances with other minorities and supported the elderly, unions, public transport and education.

Along with Mayor Moscone he was fatally shot by a political rival, Dan White, in 1978, and the seven-year sentence White received -- he served only five years -- led to the infamous White Night Riots in San Francisco. Milk's memory has been lovingly preserved and there are a plaza, school and recreation centre named after him but his story is not widely known. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and director Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Junebug, Paranoid Park) bring that story vividly to the screen in the biopic Milk.

Rather than trying to cover Milk's entire life, Black has wisely chosen to start the story with Milk turning 40, meeting his partner Scott Smith and fleeing New York for San Francisco where they open a camera store in the famous 'gay ghetto' known as the Castro. From there we experience the major political stepping stones that led to Milk's election to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors in 1977. However, the film is bookended with scenes of a tired Milk sitting alone in his kitchen, hunched over a tape recorder and describing his political ascent, believing that sooner or later the assassin's bullet will find him.

The Stonewall riots that many believe kicked off Gay Liberation had only taken place in 1969 and in the 1970s a repressive police force targeted gay men and tolerated gay bashings. This had helped to fuel Milk's activism, and as a businessowner in the Castro he was one of the first to understand the power of the pink dollar.

Interwoven with Milk's campaigns and their aftermath is the story of a vicious religious-right reaction to Gay Liberation. All over the USA, the religious right, led by the singer Anita Bryant, spearheaded a series of referendums to repeal enlightened state legislation that banned discrimination against gays in employment and housing. In California, this resulted in the sinister Proposition 6, which would have outlawed gay people teaching in the state's public schools.

At the end of the day, this is a conventionally structured biopic with a strong emphasis on the politics. I was heartened and saddened by the story, and left with the feeling that I had seen a good film rather than a great one. I think this is because so much of the focus is on Milk and his political trajectory, with the growing anger and political energy of San Francisco gays as the main backdrop: and while Milk's courage and persistence are extraordinary, he is in many ways lovably ordinary.

Prior to the assassination Milk's killer, Dan White, had resigned as city supervisor but unsuccessfully requested his job back. The angry gay community had no doubt that the verdict of manslaughter and low sentence he received were due to homophobia. White went on to commit suicide two years after his release from prison and the film's slant on his motives for the murder may be controversial.

The acting is exemplary. Sean Penn, who stars as Milk, has been nominated for an Academy Award. No wonder -- he appears to channel Milk rather than play him. Straight men playing gay men don't always get it right, sometimes exhibiting a macho intensity that feels repressive. In contrast, Penn relaxes into the sharp but easygoing character Milk seems to have been, a personable, compassionate guy with political brilliance and nerves of steel.

Emile Hirsch is unrecognisable but excellent as a young supporter of Milk's, Cleve Jones, in huge aviator sunglasses and what looks like a curly wig. James Franco is sweet and easygoing as Milk's long-term lover, Scott Smith. Alison Pill is effective but too cutesy as the lesbian campaign manager who helps to spearhead his eventual victory.

Unashamed nostalgia is one of the film's main strengths, and who wouldn't be nostalgic for a time, before the scourge of AIDS, when a new liberation movement, inspired by the recent success of the civil rights movement, believed it could transform human society? Huge moustaches, tight T-shirts, bouffy hairstyles and unrenovated, brightly painted interiors help to evoke the carefree mood and out-there sexuality of the Castro, epicentre of the emerging gay identity in the 1970s -- an identity that, as the film shows so well, was becoming increasingly politicised.

Jones, a consultant on the film, has said that he and his friends knew they were doing something new, and the excitement, euphoria and sense of sexual freedom all shine through, despite the continuing discrimination. The scenes of spontaneous, angry nighttime demonstrations are enough to make any left-liberal heart swell.

Milk believed that there was huge power to be gained from all gays coming out both in the home and at work, refusing to cooperate in the culture of fear that kept them hidden (in one scene, in front of a crowd of supporters, he orders a friend to ring his father and come out to him). His life is a shining testament to this belief.

Verdict: Well worth seeing