Old Yorker

  • Wake in Fright

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ted Kotcheff (1971)

    Released in the US as Outback, Wake in Fright developed a reputation, during the decades when it was unavailable on VHS or DVD and wasn’t shown on television, as a great ‘lost’ Australian film.   A digital re-release was shown in Australia in 2009 and the picture newly acclaimed.  It had screened in competition at Cannes in 1971 and, also in 2009, was shown for a second time at the Festival as a ‘Cannes Classic’ (a second screening of this kind is extremely rare).  Now Wake in Fright has been re-released in this country too and enthusiastically received.  It currently enjoys a 100% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  It’s good news that the film has been resurrected but I can’t share the enthusiasm.   The movie, with a screenplay by Evan Jones based on a novel by Kenneth Cook, is set in the Australian outback, at first in a township called Tiboonda but principally in a mining town called Bundanyabba – known locally as ‘the Yabba’.  The protagonist is John Grant, a young teacher.  A middle-class, big city boy, Grant is stultified by his teaching job in Tiboonda.  It’s the start of the Christmas school holiday and he’s looking forward to going back to Sydney to spend some time with his girlfriend.   He needs to spend a night in the Yabba before catching a flight the next morning.  The seasonal setting is enough in itself to give an alien quality to a Northern hemisphere viewer.  There are familiar Christmas decorations on display and ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ on the soundtrack but people are drooping in the intense heat of Australian midsummer.  And John Grant is a stranger in the Yabba, a place where the relentlessly hard-drinking men are not so much men as psychotically macho.  Everyone Grant meets there comments that he’s not from around these parts.

    As played by Gary Bond, however, Grant isn’t even from Australia – he’s decidedly English, although no one comments on this so presumably the audience isn’t meant to notice.  It’s not just a matter of Bond’s not attempting the accent:  everything about him suggests a good public school education, perhaps a future career as a Tory MP.  Although good-looking, he’s bland and inert.  There’s the odd moment when his face recalls Peter O’Toole’s but Bond’s eyes aren’t alive and his acting is stagy.  John Grant hates teaching but Bond declaims this rather than expressing it; he makes Grant’s contempt for the ethos of the Yabba too emphatic also.  The whole performance is incongruous and stiff beside the temperamentally volatile Donald Pleasence, as an alcoholic medic, and the largely Australian cast some of whose playing is ropy but never as theatrically deliberate as the lead’s.   One of the oddest sequences in Wake in Fright comes when Grant vomits just as he’s about to have sex with the desperate and easily available daughter (Sylvia Kay) of a man (Al Thomas) who befriends him in a bar. I wasn’t sure whether Grant was sick because he was drunk or because the woman revolted him but Gary Bond is so emotionally remote that if would have been difficult to believe in congress between the pair had it occurred.  Grant has images in his mind of his girlfriend in the surf of Bondi Beach but there’s no other suggestion of sexual or even emotional appetite on his part.  Bond, who didn’t enjoy a long film career (or, sad to say, a long life:  he died of AIDS in his mid-fifties), makes Grant so oddly and excessively superior that he lacks the ordinary-but-civilised Everyman quality that’s needed for a viewer to identify with.  As a result, there’s not much power in most of the nightmare that John Grant experiences.

    The one exception (although its power isn’t because of Grant’s involvement) is the lengthy sequence of a kangaroo hunt.  This comprises two parts, the first in daylight, the second in darkness, when only the car headlights provide illumination.  The hunt is very shocking and is what stays in your mind after you’ve left the cinema.  It’s clear as you’re watching that, in a movie of more than forty years ago with a modest budget, animals were harmed in the making of this picture.  That still doesn’t prepare you for the having-it-both-ways self-approval of the closing legends, which explain that the film-makers shot a real kangaroo hunt and that the footage is included with the endorsement of animal welfare activists.  The implication of this is that the sequence isn’t in the movie as the culmination of Wake in Fright‘s description of the locals’ brutality but because it will help make more people aware that the kangaroo is an endangered species.  In which case, what a lucky chance that the hunt also illustrates the mindset that is Ted Kotcheff’s subject.

    Even though the film doesn’t exactly contradict contemporary European prejudices about outback Aussies, it doesn’t come as a surprise either that the culmination to the big-night-out shooting kangaroos and getting repeatedly drunk is the doctor’s making a homosexual approach to Grant, who wakes up next to him in bed.  That John Grant appears to be more disgusted by this than by almost anything else seems peculiarly pointless, given that it’s the aggressively male behaviour that’s meant to be shockingly reprehensible.  (Although it does help having Pleasence in the role of Doc Tydon:  he’s such an involvedly creepy and distinctive presence that at least the doctor’s perversion comes across as individual rather than representative.)  Some of Ted Kotcheff’s staging of the more documentary elements of the life of the Yabba works well:  the sexual segregation (the wives and girlfriends having a Christmas night out in a separate part of the bar); the locals’ coin-tossing gambling game, which is intriguing partly because it’s so basic.

    Grant wins big at this initially – big enough to decide to ride his luck in the hope of winning enough to give up teaching altogether (and, presumably, go to England – which he talks about doing at one stage).  Of course, he then loses the lot and hasn’t enough funds even to continue to Sydney.   Chips Rafferty, in his final screen appearance, has an easygoing menacing authority as a local policeman – it’s effective that the menace never materialises in the way you think it might.  But the acting is crude and overdone when macho depravity is in the foreground – as with the men who take part the most enthusiastically in the kangaroo hunt.  John Grant eventually gets back to where he started, in Tiboonda.  The satisfied look on the face of the man, played by Jack Thompson, who runs the boarding house where Grant rents a room makes clear that he knew what would happen to Grant.   Although it has seemed crucial to the scheme of the film that the Yabba is a world apart, Thompson’s closing look suggests its ethos prevails across the Australian outback.  This makes you wonder why John Grant never noticed it before – that his township life induced boredom rather than fear.

    10 March 2014

  • Wadjda

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Haifaa al-Mansour (2012)

    The significance of Wadjda as an event in world cinema is undeniable:  it’s the first feature-length picture by a female Saudi director (who also wrote the screenplay).   I was put off by this until I read Toby Lichtig’s review in the TLS.  He, like me, had wondered, because Wadjda is such a worthy enterprise, if it ‘could be tricky to judge the film on its own merits’.  Lichtig’s mild apprehension may have made his experience of watching the movie, and finding that he genuinely liked it, all the more enjoyable.  And his summary of the plot suggested an attractive balance of metaphor and particularity.  The eponymous heroine, an eleven-year-old girl living in Riyadh, determines to get a bicycle.  Although Wadjda’s family are well off, Saudi women aren’t meant to ride bikes in public and her mother won’t buy her daughter one.  Wadjda therefore enters a school competition to answer questions on and recite verses from the Koran.  The competition carries a substantial cash prize.

    I’m glad I read Toby Lichtig’s TLS piece and went to see Wadjda – although I don’t think I inferred from the film, as Lichtig did, that Haifaa al-Mansour saw ‘quiet, gradual liberalization’ as all that’s needed in Saudi Arabia.  It’s true that al-Mansour has a light touch but Western audiences at least are almost bound to be dismayed by her description of the treatment of Saudi women by their husbands and Saudi girls in their schools.  Wadjda is immediately introduced as a mildly comical subversive:  the camera moves along a row of schoolgirls’ feet – just one pair of them is shod in trainers.   But for Wadjda’s unhappy mother (herself a teacher, at another school) the costume dichotomy between her life indoors and outdoors is stark.  (As Lichtig says, at home she ‘slinks around in casual clothes … in public she is a pair of eyes’.)   The wardrobe aspect of the mother’s life is increasingly upsetting:  because she hasn’t borne him a son, her absent husband is thinking of taking a second wife; Wadjda’s mother (she isn’t given a name) looks hopefully at a red dress she could buy to try and attract him back.  The main plus points of the culture on display in the film are the food that the mother makes (primarily for the husband and a group of his friends) and the chanting of the Koranic verses by several different female characters – this is beautiful both in the feeling and in the variety of the voices.

    Although, in one sense, there’s never been a film like Wadjda before, it’s generic as a ‘competition’ movie, with elements that are familiar and appealing.  The motive for entering the competition in the first place comes back to bite.  A faltering start is followed by rapid progress to become a leading contender.  The win, when it happens, is heavily qualified – by the winner’s public flouting of the values of the contest.  The prize is snatched away.  Then there’s a finale in which things turn out right in a way that makes the protagonist – and the audience – much happier than the competitive outcome did.  Whether a competition movie is exciting (like Saturday Night Fever) or so-so (like Populaire), it’s essential that you root for the main character.   That certainly happens in Wadjda, even though Haifaa al-Mansour’s political intentions rather get in the way of each other within the competition framework.  Wadjda struck me as far too canny and self-possessed to announce to the whole school at the moment of her triumph that she’ll spend the winnings on a bike.  (The scandalised head teacher refuses to let Wadjda have her winnings, which are donated to a Palestinian good cause instead.  The Wadjda you’ve come to know during the film would have prepared for this moment:  she would have told the head that she wanted to talk with her family about which good cause(s) to give the money to.)  But this setback is necessary to tie the themes up:  Wadjda’s mother buys her daugher a bike instead of spending money on the seductive red dress that she now knows to be a lost cause.  The final image of the girl on her bike is, of course, symbolically powerful, even if the relationship between Wadjda and her conveyance is never as humanly compelling as that of the Dardennes’ kid with a bike.  The image chimes with another extraordinary one from earlier in the film – when Wadjda, from a distance, sees a bicycle that looks to be travelling through the sky before the camera reveals that it’s being carried atop another vehicle.

    There was a sizeable turnout at the Renoir for an early evening show of a film now in its third week.  This was good to see but the audience laughter was less good to hear:  there was a condescension in the chuckles – the things kid say and do, and Saudi kids too!  Still, Waad Mohammed at Wadjda is first rate:  her face is an interesting combination of plainness and vitality and she knows how to point a line.  The children – including Abdullrahman Al Gohani as the young boy who takes a (sentimental) shine to Wadjda and Dana Abdullilah as one of her competition rivals – are more expressive than the adults, who are all good enough but mostly unsurprising.   Reem Abdullah as the mother and Ahd as the head teacher make the strongest impression.  Of course, Wadjda is bound to be remembered less for its quality than for getting made at all.  This doesn’t mean it’s not skilful and entertaining but it would have had to be a masterpiece to upstage the circumstances in which it was shot – on the streets of Riyadh, with Haifaa al-Mansour, because she wasn’t allowed to mix publicly with the men in her crew, directing most scenes via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

    7 August 2013

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