Innehållsförteckning för No. 202 från Metro

JUDY & PUNCH IS BOTH OPENLY RIDICULOUS … AND A SERIOUS STUDY OF VIOLENCE – BE IT AS A SOCIALLY CONDONED WEAPON OF DOMESTIC OPPRESSION, A MORALLY RIGHTEOUS TOOL OF VENGEANCE OR A STORYTELLING TROPE, AND BE IT IN A MOTION PICTURE OR PUPPET SHOW. When Judy & Punch premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, its creator – Sydney-based actor-turned-director Mirrah Foulkes – was nervous about how it would be received. She was a first-time filmmaker, few American audiences are familiar with the 400-year-old puppet show on which it is based and, even in the realm of film festivals, the resulting work was a genuine oddity. ‘I was nervous about it. It’s a weird film; its tone is unusual. It’s nutso!’ Foulkes laughs. Setting out to make Judy &…

PALM BEACH’S ENSEMBLE DREAM WISTFULLY OF THE MATERIALISTIC 1980S … COMPARING THE CHARACTERS’ CURRENT AFFLUENCE WITH THE ZEITGEIST OF THEIR HEYDAY DECADE, IT’S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE WHAT THEY’RE PINING FOR BEYOND THEIR OWN PERSONAL YOUTH AND VIGOUR. The first three shots of Palm Beach (2019), the second feature film by actor-turned-director Rachel Ward, are almost the whole work in microcosm. We begin with a close-up on a sulphur-crested cockatoo. Then there’s a wide shot on a beach where a number of pleasure boats are moored; we hear the sounds of someone working on an engine. In the third shot, we see Frank (Bryan Brown) up to his elbows in the guts of a speedboat while his adult son, Dan (Charlie Vickers), sitting nearby, looks at his smartphone, utterly unengaged in…

Australia has consistently produced high-quality screen content for children, with some of the country’s best television series – from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which aired from 1968 to 1970, to today’s Bluey1 – having been broadcast, and now streamed, around the world. From a local policy perspective, children (generally referring, in industry terms, to persons under fourteen years of age) have been considered a ‘special audience’, easily influenced by what they see on screen.2 Within the landscape of television, therefore, children’s programming has experienced high levels of regulation since the late 1970s, most saliently in the form of the content quotas enshrined in the Children’s Television Standards (CTS) first introduced in 1979 and updated in 2009.3 But the rigorous scrutiny and regulation that attends to children’s media engagement, along with…

THIS HYPNOTIC, ENIGMATIC FILM BY PHUTTIPHONG AROONPHENG CONTAINS NOT JUST HINTS OF FAMED CINEASTE APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL’S WORK, BUT ALSO SUBTLE COMMENTARY ON THE PLIGHT OF THE STATELESS ROHINGYA PEOPLE SEEKING REFUGE IN THE DIRECTOR’S THAI HOMELAND. NICHOLAS GODFREY EXAMINES THE DEPICTIONS OF DOUBLING, DISPLACEMENT AND COMMON HUMANITY IN THIS IMPRESSIVE FEATURE DEBUT. This jungle becomes the central location of the film, accruing the significance of the Athenian forest from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, offering the twin promise of transformation and grave peril. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s feature directorial debut, Manta Ray (2018), is a mysterious and elliptical tale of life on the borderlands of his native Thailand. The film begins with a title card stating, ‘For the Rohingyas’ – referring to Myanmar’s stateless people who are nonetheless confined by the…

As icons of Australian music go, Jimmy Barnes, Peter Garrett and Michael Hutchence – along with the respective bands they fronted, Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and INXS – are about as iconic as you can get. They are among the most recognisable and renowned names in the annals of Australian music history, not to mention the global cultural landscape, and are emblematic of an era of mega-selling chart success for Australian rock around the world. Each, alongside the incredibly successful Crocodile Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986), also helped give the country something of a singular, defining identity as a land of untamed masculinity. These artists emerged out of the societal upheaval of the 1970s, in a country that was beginning to reckon with the part it played in the global market,…

The latest feature by Sydney-based filmmaker Partho Sen-Gupta, Slam (2018), is haunted by a terrifying moment from his past. As a child growing up in Mumbai, he paid scant attention to dire warnings from his parents about the threat of kidnappings until, one terrifying day, when he was around seven or eight years old, a man attempted to snatch him outside his home. ‘I didn’t realise then how traumatic an experience that was,’ he recalls of the startling near-miss that haunts him, especially now that he has become a father himself. For many years, the memory was locked away within a dark recess in the 54-year-old director’s mind. But the full weight of the attack rammed back into his consciousness when he saw a poster of a missing girl on…

A Queensland production over a decade in the making, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (Kriv Stenders, 2019) is a bold yet intimate Anzac war drama that sidesteps politics in favour of saluting Aussie brotherhood and bravery in times of conflict. I speak to Stenders about his experience of working with scribe Stuart Beattie – who previously penned Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) and Tomorrow, When the War Began (Beattie, 2010) – to do big-screen justice to this curiously overlooked Australian chapter of the Vietnam War. Oliver Pfeiffer: The Battle of Long Tan is a lesser-known Australian contribution to the Vietnam War. Why was it important, for you, to revisit this particular Anzac story? Kriv Stenders: Firstly, it’s quite a remarkable story in terms of the actual statistics: 100 men…

It is, perhaps, atypical of a Palme d’Or–winning film that among its most resonant images is one of a young woman sitting despondently on a toilet, staring at her phone, as sewage spews out of it like a cursed Willy Wonka contraption. Such is the earthy subversion of Bong Joonho’s Parasite (2019), a chattering social satire of wildly oscillating tones in which a family of hustlers insinuate themselves into the household staff of a renowned South Korean businessman’s bourgeois family. Bong’s latest excoriation of the ruling class and their attendant power is as cynical as his 2014 film Snowpiercer, which presents a dystopian future vision of humankind’s hierarchy compressed into the grim confines of a looping locomotive. But what distinguishes Parasite is its careful observation of the everyday inhumanity of…

In So Long, My Son (2019), Wang Xiaoshuai weaves a beautiful tapestry of life in modern China. Spanning four decades – from the 1980s to today – the film eschews epic traditions for an intimate examination of domesticity, hope and guilt against the backdrop of a rapidly changing culture. Wang and A Mei’s screenplay interlaces interconnected narrative filaments across different eras with confident fluidity. That can be confusing; as we thread from one decade to another with an easy jump cut, particulars of the storyline are tangled and obfuscated. Yet Wang’s deft command of his film’s formal qualities ensures that So Long, My Son is defined by an emotional clarity that resonates long after the credits roll. We’re introduced to the story somewhere around its middle, opening on two prepubescent…

‘The boats have not stopped,’ wrote The Guardian journalist Ben Doherty of Australia’s controversial asylum-seeker policies back in 2014. As the world urges closer cooperation on the issue of mass and irregular migrations, Australia grows ever more isolationist. Moving the problem over the horizon is not the same as addressing it.1 If we look back on this quote from our increasingly disillusioned 2019 standpoint, Doherty’s reflections feel almost too small-scale. We now know that the Australian politicians who instituted the legislation collected under the slogan ‘stop the boats’2 never had any intention of addressing any problem other than voter discontent at who was crossing our borders and the colour of their skin. Doherty, who continues to cover Australia’s draconian refugee policies at The Guardian, features prominently in a series of…

We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood. —Teresia Teaiwa1 A spiritual sequel to the anthology film Waru (2017), Vai (2019) – the second feature-length release from Brown Sugar Apple Grunt Productions – enlists eight female writer/directors from eight Pacific Island nations to make a portmanteau film about the latter titular character. The languages of the Pacific aren’t always mutually intelligible, but they retain certain shared words; ‘vai’ (‘water’) is a key example. This is undoubtedly a result of Islander cultures having been shaped, in fundamental ways, by the largest body of water on Earth; the Pacific Ocean flows through our creation stories, sustains our agricultural practices, is filled with life and is seen to give life. In a manner similar…

‘They forgot the spring rolls!’ Lots of kids’ shows are set around a fantastical premise: there are fruit in human clothing, princess knights, and mutant reptiles who are also teenage ninjas. Kids have short attention spans, so TV programming for them often needs to be big, loud and colourful. Yet the ABC’s Bluey focuses on the modest idiosyncrasies of Australian life – like waiting around for Chinese takeaway – and this animated series about a family of blue and red heelers is now the most watched television series in ABC iview history, having been seen 90 million times1 and counting. Disney, a company famous for a mouse, is so enamoured with the pups that it has announced that the show would air not only on its dedicated broadcast channel for…

SOME OF WORLD CINEMA’S MOST CELEBRATED FILMMAKERS HAVE TUMULTUOUS TIES WITH THEIR HOMELANDS, AND ISRAEL’S NADAV LAPID – WHO HAS MADE THREE FEATURES TO DATE, INCLUDING 2019 GOLDEN BEAR WINNER SYNONYMS – IS NO DIFFERENT. IN CONVERSATION WITH THE WRITER/DIRECTOR, ANTHONY CAREW EXAMINES HOW THIS RELATIONSHIP MANIFESTS IN OPPOSITIONS BETWEEN ARTISTRY AND AGGRESSION, OPULENCE AND OPPRESSION, PATRIOTISM AND PROTEST. ‘It’s not important if you love your country or you hate your country,’ says Nadav Lapid. ‘It’s more important who you are.’ This is a simple, almost banal koan, but, for the filmmaker, it’s loaded with meaning. As an Israeli native (born, in 1975, in Tel Aviv), Lapid has a conflicted relationship with his homeland, the contradictory feelings greeting him every morning. When he wakes up in Tel Aviv, he opens…

I’m overcome with tears almost from the start. The subject of She Who Must Be Obeyed Loved (Erica Glynn, 2018) is Alfreda ‘Freda’ Glynn, a powerful then-78-year-old Kaytetye matriarch whose expressions and movements – the way she sings out ‘True?’ with a hearty laugh, just like my mum does, and just like my nan used to do – make me homesick. Mum is crook with a chest infection during NAIDOC Week and spends a lot of it at home, resting but glued to NITV. She lives in a little town on Yorta Yorta Country. After watching the film, she calls me to ask if I’ve seen it. ‘I have, Mum. It’s so beautiful. I’m actually going to be writing about it.’ Mum’s pleased and tells me that she can see…

Sanctuary (2019) was the result of an accidental meeting. ‘While I was making another documentary […] an asylum-seeker advocate told me the story of Khaled,’ says writer/director Kaye Harrison. At the time, he was living in immigration detention on Christmas Island. I started talking to him and became so interested in his life story that I wanted to make a film about it. He’d worked as an interpreter for the [War in Iraq] coalition forces […] He was part of the war against terror. Yet he was in detention, considered a potential threat to our safety. After spending eight months in the Christmas Island Immigration Reception and Processing Centre, Khaled, despite being registered as a refugee with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), was handcuffed…

JAYMES DURANTE A teenage punk rocker dangles from a tightrope between two Sydney skyscrapers, journalists and bystanders ogling nervously from the ground below. She’s wearing a rainbow cape, a yellow leather harness and two humungous, scene-stealing prop breasts. This madcap scheme – yes, it’s planned – is the brainchild of her fourteen-year-old cousin Angus (Ross O’Donovan), who’s also her manager. The aim: a spot on the evening news, a naive, last-ditch attempt at musical stardom. The singer is Jackie Mullens, played by the indomitable Jo Kennedy in her feature debut. The film is Starstruck (1982), Australia’s first rock’n’roll musical, directed by Gillian Armstrong three years after My Brilliant Career (1979), the stunning success that shot her to industry fame and instantly onto the top rung of Australian film directors. That…

Throughout Western history there has been much debate over the relationship between gender and humour.1 Even with the presence of funny female actors, writers and comedians, the label of ‘unfunny’ has lingered over the heads of women, especially within the hyper-visible space of popular culture.2 From the late twentieth century until the present day, female comedy has been typecast as performances of humour centred on domesticity, bodily functions and stages of life.3 This style was regarded as being directed at a female audience and, while considered ‘funny’, was not legitimated as an expression of intelligent humour; as media theorist Nancy Walker remarks, it was deemed ‘a sharing of experience rather than a demonstration of cleverness’.4 However, it could also be argued that female comedians have used this type of humour…