Director: Mirrah Foulkes
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Tom Budge, Gillian Jones, Terry Norris
The case of Mia Wasikowska and Alice in Wonderland is an object lesson in not throwing out the baby with the dirty bathwater. Tim Burton’s alternately bland and ghastly 2010 film remains one of my least favourite moviegoing experiences, its astronomical success baffling and its diminishing popularity vindicating. The film was my first exposure to Wasikowska as an actress, and I wrongly dismissed her as the nondescript centre of a garish designer black hole.
The ensuing years have proven me wrong about Wasikowska, and I’ve been consistently impressed with her performances and choice of collaborators (including Chan-Wook Park, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, and Guillermo del Toro) across films like Jane Eyre, Lawless, Stoker, Tracks, Only Lovers Left Alive, Madame Bovary, Maps to the Stars, Crimson Peak, and so on. Given this eye for material, Judy & Punch stood a betting chance of being a strong, or at the very least interesting, film.
Blue Tongue Films, the Australian production company steered by Joel and Nash Edgerton and David Michod, among others, also has a track record of shepherding strong (The Square, Animal Kingdom) or at the very least interesting (Felony, Wish You Were Here, The Rover) material to the screen. Judy & Punch marks the feature directing debut of Mirrah Foulkes, a multi-hyphenate who’s written and directed a handful of short films produced by Blue Tongue, as well as acting in films, television shows, and several other Blue Tongue projects, including the sly Spider.
The film’s title, reversing the customary billing order of Punch and Judy, hints at the feminist critique afoot. Judy & Punch casts Wasikowska and Damon Herriman as puppeteers of the same name re-launching their show Punch’s Puppet Theatre, in which the scoundrel titular marionette beats his wife and other puppets for the entertainment of rowdy patrons. Punch is hailed as a genius, while the more gifted Judy is denied the limelight. When offscreen events begin to mirror onstage events, Judy must come into her own to take down her husband and, by extension, the received patriarchy of the time in which women are subservient and outsiders, especially female ones, are branded witches and heretics.
For an Australian production, Judy & Punch’s trappings are not especially Australian, though the same can be said of Moulin Rouge, Hacksaw Ridge, Sky Pirates, and The Return of Captain Invincible. And like Moulin Rouge, Judy & Punch isn’t overly precious about geographical or period specificity, playing fast and loose with time—quoting other films, featuring electronic riffs on Bach’s Baroque compositions as well as Leonard Cohen’s ‘Who by fire’ on the soundtrack—and place. The action is set simply in 'Seaside', a country town far from the sea, with the presence of ruffs and allusions to theatres re-opening suggesting it unfolds either following the plague of the 1590s or the Civil War of the mid-1600s, both of which closed London theatres down. The excellent work by cinematographer Stefan Duscio (The Dry, Jungle) production designer Josephine Ford (Animal Kingdom, The Rover), art director Adele Flere (Macbeth) and costume designer Edie Kurzer (Dead Heart, Thank God he met Lizzie) conjures a feel of time and place, but the deliberate lack of period specificity gives the film a fairy tale flavour.
The best fairy tales carry a moral wallop, and Judy & Punch offers a meta-commentary on the entertainment industry of the present via the entertainment industry of the supposedly more primitive past. Notably, it depicts how violence in media and entertainment mirror and/or engender violence offscreen: Punch beats Judy in both marionette and offstage form, and Punch and Judy shows, witch-stoning, hanging, and public brawling are all greeted with equivalent bloodthirsty applause. Additionally, the film presents a #MeToo narrative in which a successful male entertainer exploits his power and gets away with it while a talented female entertainer who experiences abuse is silenced and ostracised, but ultimately achieves justice by harnessing strength and status through numbers and community.
Just as Punch and Judy puppet performances are predictable and rote, Judy & Punch, after some surprising initial turns, unfolds somewhat predictably once its retribution counter-narrative and Judy’s victim-to-avenger arc sets in. But Foulkes elicits strong work from her lead actors. As alluded above, Wasikowska is a consistently interesting performer to watch, with a wonderfully expressive face for conveying emotional nuance. Judy’s character arc from subservient doormat to warrior woman of mettle is ultimately not dissimilar to Wasikowska’s arc in Alice in Wonderland from day-dreamer to armour-clad Jabberwocky-slayer, but the material here affords the actress a wider variety of grace notes to play. Herriman is best known these days for playing Charles Manson for both Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher, but has been a great Antipodean utility player for years in films like Son of a Gun and Down Under. Whilst eminently punchable (pun fully intended) in his role here, Herriman also gives us tangible glimpses of the man within the monster, showing him to be a product of mere mortal failings and foibles.
On the strong to interesting spectrum of previous Wasikowska and Blue Tongue films, Judy & Punch ultimately falls at the interesting end, as it settles into a recognisable trajectory with familiar beats. But it’s a confidently made feature debut from Foulkes, and with the #MeToo movement continuing to ensnare predators (see here and here) it’s timely material.
Ben Kooyman