Chamber pieces: Sunday (2014), Disclosure (2020)

Sunday (2014) is an Australia/New Zealand co-production about an ex-couple at a relationship crossroads. After months of separation, Australian Charlie (Dustin Clare) and New Zealander Eve (Camille Keenan) are reunited when Eve tells Charlie she’s pregnant. Over 24 hours in Christchurch, the couple must decide about their and their unborn child’s future. Sunday is gentle, cleanly executed, and at a tight 70 minutes economically told. Director Michelle Joy Lloyd co-wrote the film with her actors, and befitting the story the production feels intimate and propelled by its time and narrative constraints. It also nicely utilises its backdrop of post-earthquake Christchurch, adding thematic heft.

I have a fondness for Australian films that share titles with better-known overseas productions, among them Fair Game, Thirst, and now Disclosure (2020). Clocking in at 80 minutes and with nary a Michael Douglas, Demi Moore, or VR machine in sight, Michael Bentham’s Disclosure is another economical and intimate drama, albeit here focused on two couples and confined to a single location. The story centres on the gladiatorial verbiage exchanged between two affluent married couples (creatives played by Mark Leonard Winter and Matilda Ridgway, politickers played by Tom Wren and Geraldine Hakewill) around an incident involving their children. While based on an original screenplay by Bentham, Disclosure feels like a stage play adapted for film with its single location, small ensemble, and dialogue-driven narrative. In particular, it carries whiffs of Roman Polanski’s film adaptations of Death and the Maiden (with its political dimension) and especially Carnage, similarly a civil dialogue between two married couples regarding their children that progressively degenerates. Disclosure isn’t as meaty or unique as either of those titles, but it's well-executed and acted and evocatively scored to the ambient sounds of the surrounding Australian shrub.

Ben

The Return of Down Under Flix: Elvis (2022), Burning Man (2011), and Telegram Man (2011)

While it feels counter-intuitive, given its subject, to list Elvis (2022) as an Australian film, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards (AACTA) expressed no qualms, awarding this US-Australian co-production Best Film, Director, and Actor, along with 9 other awards, a veritable sweep. AACTA also gave director Baz Luhrmann’s previous co-production, The Great Gatsby , the same top gongs and a slew of others nine years earlier. Ironically, Australia , Luhrmann’s most Antipodean-flavoured work since his breakthrough Strictly Ballroom , was nominated largely in craft categories by AACTA’s predecessor, the Australian Film Insititute Awards. Having said that, perhaps the best way to look at Luhrmann — indisputably our most successful working director and a truly internationally-minded one — is to treat him as our Sergio Leone. Much as Leone’s work is a product of both American Westerns and Italian cinema, so too is Luhrmann a filmmaker dabbling in American genres and stories ...

The Way, My Way (2024)

As someone on a perpetual two-to-three-year pop culture delay, it’s very rare I see a new film in theatrical release, let alone its first day of theatrical release, let alone a new Australian film on its first day of theatrical release. However, I had this opportunity for Bill Bennett's The Way, My Way (2024) . Bennett's film is also, by coincidence, the second film I’ve seen in as many months about someone making a pilgrimage along the famed Camino trail, the other being Emilio Estevez’s The Way . Both films, intriguingly, foreground their filmmakers in the screen story and provide onscreen surrogates for them: in The Way , Estevez appears briefly as a deceased doctor whose father—the film’s protagonist, played by Estevez’s real-life father Martin Sheen—embarks on the Camino trail to scatter his son’s ashes; in The Way, My Way , adapted from director Bennett’s autobiographical travel writing, Chris Haywood is cast as the filmmaker and follows in his director’s footsteps. ...

Season's greetings from DUF

Christmas gift hamper: Paul Goldman’s working-class noir Suburban Mayhem (2006) , about a femme fatale’s machinations to get her brother out of prison, starts strong but runs out of steam; despite a committed and star-making (in another film industry alas) lead turn from Emily Barclay, its diabolical streak eventually becomes tiresome. Much as Emily Barclay is the MVP of Suburban Mayhem , the wonderfully expressive Miranda Otto is the MVP of Love Serenade (1996) [1]. Shirley Barrett’s Camera d’Or winning film, about small-town sisters (Otto and Rebecca Frith) enchanted by the arrival of a new radio host (George Shevstov), is willfully offbeat and indefatigably charming. Little Australian film headlined by child star of beloved global blockbuster #1: From the star of E.T. and the director of Turkey Shoot ... While it’s unlikely E.T. would have survived the blood sport of Turkey Shoot , his pal Henry Thomas negotiates Trenchard-Smith’s Frog Dreaming (1986) intact. ...

Down Under Flix

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