Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Love and Other Catastrophes
Love and Other Catastrophes
Director: Emma-Kate Croghan
Starring: Frances O’Connor, Matt Day, Alice Garner, Radha
Mitchell, Matthew Dyktynski
In
1992, Quentin Tarantino kicked off Reservoir
Dogs with a monologue about Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’. In 1994,
Kevin Smith punctuated Clerks with
a conversation lamenting the fate of the Death Star construction workers
in Return of the Jedi.
At the risk of simplification, 1996’s Love
and Other Catastrophes feels like a film both by and about the
very kids that Tarantino and Smith sent scurrying to film school. Tarantino’s
venerated status among 1990s movie disciples is even acknowledged in a surreal
scene midway through the film (more on that later). A few weeks ago, I
commented on Dogs in Space as a timestamp of both when it was set and when it was
made; in the case of Love
and Other Catastrophes, you can pinpoint not just the era, but
practically the month, date, and day of the week it was shot.
Love
and Other Catastrophes, colloquially known as Love
Cats, is set mainly on a university campus and revolves around a
quintet of students. Film students Mia (Frances O’Connor) and Alice (Alice
Garner) need a new housemate. Mia wants out of her relationship with girlfriend
Danni (Radha Mitchell) but really, really, desperately wants in on film scholar
Adrian Martin’s course and must first negotiate with doughnut-scoffing
Hitchcock aficionado Professor Leach (Kym Gyngell). Meanwhile, Alice is
crushing on Ari (Matthew Dyktynski), a classics student and gigolo, while
medical student Michael (Matt Day) is crushing on Alice and in need of a new
pad.
In
addition to its status as a post-Tarantino/Smith pop culture-savvy indie, Love Cats also rode a
steady wave of films demystifying LGBT themes and lifestyles for mainstream
audiences, such as The Sum
of Us locally and Chasing
Amy (Smith again) abroad, as well as helping usher in a wave
of inexpensive Australian grotty
chic dark comedies with likable young casts (e.g. Occasional Course Language, Sample People, Angst). Love Cats’ subplot involving
Mia and Danni is topical in light of the gay marriage postal vote currently
happening nationwide, and while these characters experience relationship trials
and tribulations, director Emma-Kate Croghan and her co-scribes Yael Bergman,
Helen Bandis, and Stavros Kazantzidis don’t treat them any differently to a
straight onscreen relationship. This lack of fuss and avoidance of identity
politics is both apolitical and a political gesture in itself.
I’d
be curious to know how Love
Cats plays to university students today, given how
transactional higher education has become and that many local students now live
at home longer. Made in a time when university was arguably more of a
centripetal force in the lives of students, Love Cats will resonate with viewers of a
certain vintage and background (this reviewer included). But said viewers may
also feel a smidgen of cringin’, with the preoccupations and concerns of the
film’s characters symptomatic of a particular age and rendered trivial by the
passage of time. Mia in particular suffers in this regard, her wants and needs
and treatment of her girlfriend becoming rather unsympathetic in retrospect.
Regardless, Love Cats succeeds
in capturing some of the flavour of uni life in the 1990s, even if budgetary
constraints prevent the film from conveying the genuine swarm and bustle of a
lively campus. Today’s diversity agenda also renders the film somewhat passé:
while gay characters feature prominently and the film aces the Bechdel
test, Love Cats presents
perhaps the whitest campus in Australia. Even the Spike Lee enthusiast film
students are white, as seen in one of the film’s more awkward moments:
Love
Cats exhibits
tell-tale signs of a young filmmaker in both its blemishes and its simultaneous
pretensions and self-deprecation, and it’s a pity we haven’t gotten to see
Croghan grow as a filmmaker. Her sophomore feature, Strange Planet, was released in
1999, and she subsequently flirted with adapting Phillip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, but Croghan hasn’t made another film since. Stavros
Kazantzidis, credited with the story, co-wrote Strange Planet with Croghan as well as True Love and Chaos, and wrote and directed the
somewhat middling Russian
Doll and Horseplay in
the early 2000s, but he’s likewise been missing in action. It’s a shame. Akin
to looking back at a high school yearbook photo – with all the conflicting
feelings of nostalgia and embarrassment that entails – Love Cats is both familiar
and refreshing, a film we know well but don’t really make anymore in Australia:
spunky, charismatically cast and acted, and both preposterous and deeply
earnest in its trivial pursuits.
Youth on the March
Director: Mike Retter
Stars: Ben Ryan, Stefanie Rossi, Jessica Burgess, Marc Clement, Robbie
Greenwell, Simon Chandler, Ethan Scharkie, Tim Hawkins
While
the characters in Love Cats are
likely to have a Calamity
Jane poster on a wall in their home, the protagonist of Youth on the March has
a Tron: Legacy poster
adorning his bedroom wall. This is one of many signs that the character has
problems.
I
jest, but…
Youth
on the March is
the latest from Mike Retter and the Port Film Co-Op, the firebrands previously
responsible for Stanley’s Mouth.
The film will be screening at the Adelaide Film Festival in October (click here for details) and I was fortunate to preview the film. Retter’s film centres
on the frequently strained relationship between Gill (Ben Ryan), a guy in his
late teens/early twenties, and his single mother Stef (Stefanie Rossi). Stef
works around the clock, Gill neither works nor studies, and much of the
screentime is devoted to Gill’s aimless and often dubious recreational
activities.
Like
Retter’s previous film, Youth
on the March is a micro-budgeted D.I.Y feature shot in a
vertical style, as opposed to the typical horizontal frame of the cinema
screen. I watched the film on my iPhone and it was an ideal and logical fit for
the vertical framing. Youth
on the March represents a marked leap in craft from Stanley’s Mouth –
compositions are more fluid, sound is better, and Retter and co are clearly
more confident behind the camera – but the vertical approach is also used to
different effect here. Where in Stanley’s
Mouth the compositions were largely close-ups, used to convey
tactility, obscure scenery, and in service of a largely naturalistic
story, Youth on the March,
while similarly defiant of convention, rejects Stanley’s Mouth’s naturalism. Shots are
captured from unusual vantage points and odd angles, often to woozy effect,
with each scene affording new opportunities for testing where to place the
camera and how to move the camera. While such deliberate showmanship often
works against narrative absorption, it’s hard not to be delighted by the drive
to experiment. There’s also some striking use of colour on display.
Like
Kriv Stenders’ Lucky Country, reviewed last month, Youth on
the March is an ironic title. There’s no marching going on here,
more an amble and a trudge. Retter’s youth, both singular and plural, are
largely directionless, finding their kicks in bong smoking and mild property
damage: think a Larry Clark film, but more amiable. At one point Gill and Stef
watch A Clockwork Orange,
identifiable by its iconic Moog synthesizer score, and it’s a fitting
touchstone; both Gill and A
Clockwork Orange‘s Alex are troubled youth, though Gill lacks the
sense of identity (however wrong) afforded Alex by Beethoven and Droog-dom.
There’s a conservative undercurrent to the film’s implicit linking of Gill’s
shiftlessness and anesthetizing via drugs with the absence of a paternal
figure, but this is somewhat offset by the film’s chintzy budget hedonism. Both
a lament for a generation and an exercise in technique and form, Youth on the March is sly,
effective D.I.Y. Australian filmmaking.
Ben Kooyman