Film Review: Fish Tank

Film
Fish Tank
Released May 27

Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank.

Set within the same socio-economic ballpark as Harry Brown’s housing estates, Fish Tank looks like a picnic by comparison. Whereas Daniel Barber shows us the hellish underbelly of London’s infamous ‘Elephant and Castle’, rife with pitiless violence, underage prostitution and the pointy end of the drug trade, Andrea Arnold is more interested in the casual neglect that afflicts a large swathe of the UK’s youth; and Fish Tank is a far richer film in terms of character and construction.

Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis) is fifteen, a highschool drop-out, and pops cans of lager like most kids her age pop cola. She lives in a tiny flat in a housing estate, with her booze-soaked mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler. In her spare time Mia sneaks off to an abandoned neighbouring high-rise and practises her dance moves – relentlessly. Her one spark of sunshine is the promise of a better life that this one talent holds forth.

As with her Oscar-winning short Wasp and her Cannes-winning debut feature Red Road (both visions of women surviving the physical and emotional minefields of life in a low-income and high-crime urban jungle), Arnold excels as a storyteller within this territory. Bolstered by Katie Jarvis’ incredibly natural performance, the director creates a heroine who is vulnerable, cheeky, tough and fragile – no mere cipher; even the film’s most potent symbol (the horse chained-up in an abandoned lot) feels natural, rather than laboured.

Fish Tank is most confronting when it explores the usually-taboo area of underage sex. When Joanne brings home Connor (Michael Fassbender – Hunger), a laid-back lover twice Mia’s age, awakening sexuality and desire for a father figure push Mia into his arms; the emotional fall-out for mother and daughter pushes the teen to make a tough decision, at a turning point in her life.

Mercifully, Arnold’s mood is optimistic; Mia is a survivor, with 150% spunk – despite a total lack of parental affirmations and institutional guidance. When she is unexpectedly put in her mother’s position, Mia manages to make better decisions. Mia’s life might be bleak, but things are definitely looking up.

4/5 Dee Jefferson

Film Review: Robin Hood

Film
Robin Hood
Released May 13

In one sense, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is fresh – a ‘prequel’ to the typical Sherwood Forest story, and Robin as you’ve never seen him before; in another, it’s anything but – a mishmash of things you’ve seen plenty of times before. But being a historical action epic starring Russell Crowe as a common soldier who leads an uprising, goes on to fight side-by-side with kings, before becoming an outlaw – it’s fair to say that Scott has given the Robin Hood legend the Gladiator treatment. This is a distinct departure from the camp, comic and swashbuckling incarnations from the past – from Douglas Fairbanks to Disney, Errol Flynn to Sean Connery, and (who could forget) Kevin Costner’s ‘Prince of Thieves’.

That’s not to say this film is bad – with Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, Scott has proven his passion and proficiency for historical epics with superbly shot battle sequences, and a heady mix of political machinations, romance, sex and blood. Robin Hood follows this mould, while never quite filling it (by comparison to Gladiator). While he surrounds the legend with lots of interesting historical detail, and ties it to the origins of England’s Magna Carta (a charter of liberties that marks the birth of modern constitutional law), I found it hard to muster much interest in the actual characters, despite good performances.

Crowe plays Robin ‘Longstride’ as a warrior, with considerably more heft than cheeky wit; Cate Blanchett gives her typically nuanced inflection to Marion (a glint of the eye here, a raised eyebrow there, perhaps a hint of amusement around the corners of her mouth), although the period setting and the steely nerve at the centre of her performance call to mind Elizabeth. There are some fun scenes between the two, and even a couple of genuinely romantic moments – but no real urst.

If it’s an adventure you want, that’s what you’ll get – but not much more!

3/5
Dee Jefferson

Theatre Review: The Power of Yes (Belvoir)

Photo: Heidrun Lohr

Theatre
The Power of Yes
Until May 30 @ Belvoir St

A play by David Hare, about the Global Financial Crisis, is a fairly irresistible proposition for any theatre company, I imagine. Commissioned by London’s prestigious National Theatre in 2008, The Power of Yes holds forth the tantalising prospect of debunking all the jargon and hysteria around one of this decade’s defining historical moments, where capitalism fell to its knees.

The challenge, however, is making The Power of Yes sparkle on stage like it does on the page. Hare has transposed his interviews with various players in the realm of finance into characters (in some cases using their own words as dialogue), and has arranged the resulting information in a roughly chronological timeline, from 80s Thatcherism to the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Hare inserts himself into the script, where he acts as a guide; adopting a position of financial ignorance, he asks questions on our behalf. What, for instance, are these ‘credit default swaps’, or ‘securitised credit arrangements’, that everyone’s been talking about? Ultimately, however, Hare is trying to get to the psychological root of this madness that we call the financial sector.

Director Sam Strong does an admirable job of making this production more than just twelve people talking about finance. For example, balloons become not only colourful counterpoints to the parade of suits, but handy visual aids for illustrating the bundling, slicing and dicing of financial assets (not to mention the more obvious financial metaphors). The set itself feels like a classroom or lecture theatre, in which we and ‘The Author’ (Brian Lipson) are the students, listening to a rotating cycle of lecturers – from politicians to financial journalists, fund managers, bankers, and financial entrepreneurs like George Soros. Apart from the Author, the characters are in more-or-less constant movement on and off stage and across it, maintaining a certain energy and rhythm to the exchanges.

The Power of Yes presents a captivating story, and is far more enlightening than the bulk of journalism about the GFC. At the end of the day, however, the nature of this beast is that it’s very “talky”, so staying tuned-in for the duration does, at times, feel like a struggle – albeit worthwhile!

4/5
Dee Jefferson

Theatre Review: Honour (STC)

Theatre
Honour
Until May 29 at Drama Theatre, SOH.

In Honour, a marriage of 32 years between one-time author Honor (Wendy Hughes) and seasoned journalist George (William Zappa), is torn apart after the intrusion of sexy young media graduate Claudia (Paula Arundell). Looking on sceptically from the sidelines is their daughter Sophie (Yael Stone), who is almost the same age as her father’s new lover.

This production continues what might be a trend in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Opera House programming: like Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Yazmina Reza’s God of Carnage, Joanna Murray Smith’s play is ostensibly pitch-perfect for a middle-class, middle-aged, well-educated audience (who can knowingly chuckle about references to Derrida and Foucault).

That’s not to say that this play is bland – the writing is elegant and insightful, the narrative is cleverly structured, and it delves into the real pain of a marital breakdown. So real, in fact, that I got the distinct feeling this was too close to the bone for many – the exposition of gender roles (women who sacrifice their careers while men ‘sow their oats’, for example), in particular, elicited bleak chuckles from the audience.

Director Lee Lewis (That Face – Company B) highlights the play’s strengths by paring back the set to a simple geometric structure of beech-wood poles – no distractions obscuring the ideas being explored. At the same time, it somehow evokes two financially comfortable baby-boomers from the intellectual class, with that hint of a retro Danish aesthetic.

At its most interesting, Honour invites us to examine our values around career and relationships, and at an even deeper level, our understanding of love – which is contrasted with passion. Are you really in love with that person, or do you just love how they make you feel? For Claudia, love is the ability to undo the other person – or their inability to cope without you. These ideas are universally interesting, regardless of age or circumstance. That said – while the performances are solid, 90 minutes of people intellectualising their relationships is not everyone’s idea of riveting theatre.

3.5/5
Dee Jefferson

Theatre Review: The End (Belvoir St)

Theatre
The End
Until May 8 (Belvoir St Downstairs)

Samuel Beckett is right up there with Pinter as a frequently-invoked god amongst modern theatremakers, and it seems unlikely he’ll go out of fashion any time soon. In 2007 Dublin’s Gate Theatre brought out a trilogy of Beckett for Sydney Festival; in 2009 we saw Malthouse and Company B’s production of Happy Days tour the east coast; this year Sir Ian McEwan is headlining Waiting for Godot at the Opera House.

For me, the prospect of a Beckett play evokes a certain heaviness of heart, and the feeling of girding one’s loins for battle with the dreaded abyss of existential angst. The End, however, brings out Beckett’s gifts as a storyteller, and his beautifully evocative use of language, full of unexpected descriptive flourishes. Of course, the existential angst is still overwhelmingly present – this is, after all, a work about death.

The End is one of four first-person novellas written by Beckett in the five years following WW2, around the same time as his trilogy of novels – and before Godot. In The End, an elderly man released from an institution finds himself adrift in a world where he has no function. With a little money in his pocket, and the clothes on his back, he finds lodgings, and waits for the money to run out – and enters the slow physical and mental decline of the end.

Robert Menzies is a fantastic performer, and a good choice for the role of the mentally fractious vagrant. With Beckett’s script in hand, he delivers a poignant monologue that, at its best, takes us on a vivid journey from the rain-soaked cloister to the fetid basement where he lodges, a cave by the sea, a blood-and-semen-soaked woodland cabin, and his final resting place, in a rat-infested boat, covered in his own excrement.

The challenge of this work is making it more than an aural performance – and on the second night of the season, I am not sure Menzies and director Eamon Flack (A Midsummer Night’s Dream – B-Sharp 2009) had quite achieved that. Yet. But until it comes out on CD, I recommend The End as a 70-minute journey worth every penny of the fare.

3.5/5
Dee Jefferson

Film
Audi German Film Festival
April 24 – May 2

I’m not going to review Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon or Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen, two films that film junkies will have pounced on as soon as the program dropped. They are both getting proper cinema releases after the Festival – but if you want to see them first, this is your chance! If you want to understand Turkish/German filmmaker Fatih Akin – and if you’ve seen Head On and Edge of Heaven, then how can you not? – you should see Crossing the Bridge (2005), his documentary set amongst the street musicians of Istanbul and Thrace. Mixing politics, music and a bunch of real characters, this film is a peek into the city’s teeming cultural life – and the things that move Akin most. Also showing is his debut feature, Short Sharp Shock (1998).

Opening night film Whisky with Vodka is directed by Andreas Dresen, whose Cloud 9 played at last year’s festival. Both films deal charmingly with aging – Dresen’s is a humanist vision. In this latest film, however, the issue that makes the film so poignant is somewhat obscured by the period drama dressings, and the film-about-a-film narrative structure. It’s a clever idea, but I preferred the ultra-realism of Cloud 9 – the sense that you were seeing real, old, imperfect human bodies; people refusing to relinquish lust, refusing to go quietly into their twilight years.

Coming up in week two of the festival is Hans-Christian Schmid’s Storm, which has been on my hit list for a while – he made Requiem (2004), the lo-fi version of the “Haunting of Emily Rose” exorcism story. Storm tackles evil in its more tangible form: war criminals. The drama of this restrained thriller revolves around the trial of a Bosnian Army commander, in the United Nationals Court of the Hague. It’s a lot more self-righteous than Requiem, for understandable reasons, but the subtlety of performances by Aussie actress Kerry Fox and Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) make up for the occasionally clunky scripting.

Anno Saul is definitely not a one-trick pony – Kebab Connection and The Door (both showing at the fest) could not be further apart. My main interest in The Door was lead actor Mads Mikkelsen, who I love in anything – and the tantalising program note, that compared it to Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. To my dismay, no malevolent midgets. As far as I can tell, the comparison is fairy liberal, based on the opening scenes which set up the emotional premise for the film – and of course, the freaky factor. Mads plays a middle-aged man who, after failing in his husbandly and fatherly duties, discovers a door to a better reality. But of course, there’s a catch. It’s good for sci-fi-heads and anyone who likes Mads. Style-wise, it reminded me of Hitchcock – or for a modern comparison, Lemming – genre-happy and psycho-dramatic to the point of being camp. Awesome.

Dee Jefferson

Theatre Review: Spring Awakening (Sydney Theatre Company)

Sydney Theatre Company’s Spring Awakening © Photo by Brett Boardman

Sydney Theatre Co.
Spring Awakening
Runs until March 7.

Spring Awakening is a musical adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage experience and sexual awakening. Writer Steven Sater and musician Duncan Sheik gave the play an indie rock update, while keeping Wedekind’s story about a troupe of pubescent teens roughly in the same social setting, of slightly puritanical countryside Germany in the late 19th century. Strangely, it works.

Sheik has a successful career as a singer-songwriter, and the songs are actually good – besides having awesome names like ‘The Bitch of Living’ and ‘Everything’s Fucked’. Sater manages to nicely tread the line between moments of genuine pain, dealing with topics like incest, abortion and suicide – and moments of carefree youth and humour.

This Australian production takes the Sater/Sheik version, and marries it with brilliant, intuitive choreography, by Force Majeure’s Kate Champion. The result bristles with youthful energy and is quite unlike any musical you’ve ever seen.

It’s also been cast wonderfully, from open auditions across Australia, with a range of performers who easily carry off being teens, and who manage to traverse the often disjunctive transitions from speaking to singing with ease. It feels altogether authentic – like the content and its rock dressing are completely integrated, rather than one slapped on top of the other.

There is a catch, however; Wedekind’s play is arguably a lot darker than this Broadway show; what he portrays as a rape, Sater transposes to a night of irrepressible lust. Wedekind’s play was still funny, but it was a far more complicated beast, composed of the irreverent and the earnest; the playful and the serious; the innocuous and the poisonous. Sheik and Sater, who have been credited with reinventing the musical as a genre, haven’t really changed the ultimately sunny outlook that makes Broadway a multi-million-dollar industry.

So STC’s Spring Awakening is a great production and hard to fault on any level – but the suspicion that they have subverted the spirit of Wedekind’s play puts a dampener on it.

3.5/5
Dee Jefferson

Sydney Festival: The Manganiyar Seduction

Seymour Centre
The Manganiyar Seduction
Reviewed January 13

As promised, Roysten Abel’s popular production transforms a concert of traditional Indian music into a sparkling theatrical delight, presenting its 43 Rajisthani musicians in a sort of “advent calendar” of musical delights.

The performers sit behind red curtains in a multi-tiered structure of single compartments. The performance begins with one curtain opening, and a man begins to play his sarangi (similar in appearance to a chinese zither). The basic premise is that the musicians and singers gradually phase in, with curtains opening, instruments joining, and the sounds becoming more rich and diverse – from various sizes and timbres of drum to different bowed and plucked instruments and wood-winds.

To a greater extent than I had expected, the musicians bow in and out of the weave, and the intensity and energy of the piece ebbs and flows. At a certain point the conductor, Daevo Khan, emerges to coordinate the intricate score, with the aid of finger clackers, which he operates with awe-inspiring dexterity.

The Manganiyars are a hereditary caste of Muslim musicians from North India, and the way Abel talks about their sound, it is closer to soul music than classical music. Although the singers are not surtitled, you get the sense that master storytellers are at work, from the expressiveness of their faces, to the way their hands often seem to weave the music before your very eyes.

If it’s a seduction, it’s the earthy, enthusiastic kind rather than anything sultry or understated – although no less persuasive! Mesmerized throughout the performance, the audience unanimously rose to their feet for an extended standing ovation at the end..

4/5
Dee Jefferson

Theatre Review: Tot Mom (STC)

Essie Davis and Zoe Carides in Sydney Theatre Company’s Tot Mom
© Lisa Tomasetti. Sydney Theatre Company.

Sydney Theatre Company
Tot Mom
Runs until January 31.

Steven Soderbergh’s Tot Mom (pronounced Taht Mawm, American style) is a searing indictment of America’s “media-as-entertainment” culture, particularly their insatiable apetite for true crime, as manifested in media coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, and the popularity of shows like Judge Judy and the Nancy Grace show.

Soderbergh as attacked this facet of American culture through the prism of one particularly sordid case, as analysed on CNN’s Nancy Grace – the case of 23-year-old single mother Casey Anthony, who has been indicted on suspicion of murdering her 3-year-old infant Caylee in 2008.

The case transfixed America – thanks in no small part to Grace’s show, which followed the case in minute detail, including interviewing those involved in the case, broadcasting the original 911 calls by Casey’s mother to the police, and reporting each piece of evidence as it came to light. And all this before the case has even gone to trial – which is scheduled for June this year.

Tot Mom fits into the “Verbatim” genre, theatre which is created from actual transcripts, recorded interviews, phone calls, emails etc, relating to the event in question. In this case, Soderbergh has collated interviews and conversations from the Grace show, which form the basis of the work. 911 calls, and phone calls that Casey Anthony made to her brother from jail, are played back in their raw form; footage from the Grace show, on the other hand, is acted out by the cast, which includes Wayne Blair, Darren Gilshenan, Zoe Carides and Essie Davis, playing blonde bombshell Nancy Grace.

If Davis’ performance seems overblown at times – perhaps even erring on the side of caricature – it’s worth looking up footage of Grace on YouTube, for evidence of just how closely Davis has studied her part. She even has Grace’s odd inflection of “Caylee”, which sounds slightly mangled, down pat.

Verbatim theatre has allowed Soderbergh to re-arrange “reality” – to edit and re-order it in the same way that Grace does, in fact; it also draws the audience’s attention to the fact that this is entertainment. Grace’s show presents the story as a who-dunnit –and the fact that it relates to real people makes it even more thrilling.

On a deeper level, Soderbergh puts you, the audience, in the uncomfortable position of culpability: here you are being damn-well entertained by the story of a 3-year-old child who has been brutally murdered. No-one, in this scenario, is spotless – and you find yourself interrogating your own reasons for being in the theatre tonight. I also found myself interrogating Soderbergh’s reasons for choosing this particular case – if all he wanted to do (as he claims) was look at how the media relates to crime, then he could have picked any number of less sordid cases. But would they have the same shock appeal?

4/5
Dee Jefferson

Film Review: Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are.

Film
Where the Wild Things Are
Released December 3.

Where the Wild Things Are remakes Maurice Sendak’s beloved childhood picture book for a modern day single-parent generation: a young boy feeling alienated from his family and unloved, who journeys in his imagination to a place where he is allowed to physically express his emotions, a place where he belongs, a place where he is in control even – king of the Wild Things.

Spike Jonze has nailed the visuals and the spirit of the book; perhaps surprisingly (for a film that deals largely in puppets) it has also nailed the performances. The eight-or-so months spent making the costumes for the Wild Things result in detailed, lived-in concoctions of scales, feather and fur; the CGI facial expressions added in post production are perfectly synced with the pre-recorded voice work performed in ensemble by James Gandolfini, Forest Whittaker et al (which the costumed “performers” shaped their actions and interactions around). As a result, the Wild Things exude real personality, and their relationship with Max is both emotional and physical – none of this green screen business.

Newcomer Max Records is unselfconscious on screen, channelling the anger, frustration and inconsolable hurt of a six year old who just wants to be the centre of a tight family unit; who can’t understand why his mom is hanging out with a strange new man, or why his sister would rather hang out with her mates than play with him. In a moment of rage, Max finds himself transported to where the Wild Things are, where his new friends embody the emotions he finds so hard to repress – anger, apathy, mistrust, resentment, alienation.

Hand held camera work for the action sequences is counterbalanced by some quite stunning wide shots, and Jonze uses evocative landscapes – a forest of trees blackened from bushfires; a gravelly wasteland; desert dunes. The soundtrack is largely comprised of the irrepressible can-do pop of Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and “the kids”, with the occasional interlude by composer Carter Burwell, whose soundtracks for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are so distinctive.

4/5
Dee Jefferson