Melbourne International Film Festival Edited Highlights (That I Can Complain About)

Men’s Group

I went into this not knowing anything about it, beyond that it was about a men’s group. I also thought it was a documentary for the first ten minutes, because the camera was wobbling everywhere and going out of focus at random in an attempt to look like a documentary (even though most documentaries don’t actually look like this at all), but it turned out to be a drama that was part-written and part-improvised.

A movie about a group of men who sit around discussing their feelings with each other could either have been quite interesting or an enormous pile of self-pitying wank. It turns out to be somewhere in between, veering strongly toward wank in the last act. They don’t say that women are responsible for their problems, but, well, there doesn’t seem to be anything responsible for their problems. These men have trouble empathising and controlling their rage because… they just do. The closest they come is talking about their fathers not loving them enough and, in fact, the only one who speaks fondly of their father is the counsellor who runs the group, ie. the only one who’s stable. But this just underlines how it cops out: Their fathers are the only reason they turned out this way? Society, other men, the expectations that society has of men, their role models, the way men are taught to relate to each other… no, it’s just their dads. How did their dads turn out that way? Buggered if I know. By asking us to take it as read that these men have universal male problems, it doesn’t actually explore them in any meaningful way.

Now, as I said above, the saving grace of the thing is that it doesn’t blame these guys’ problems on women, a post-feminist crisis in masculinity, society revering women whilst considering men expendable, or any other of Warren Farrell’s Greatest Hits. There’s one exception, and it’s a doozy. One of the guys in the group, Freddy, has been left by his girlfriend because he’s fat. Not only that, but girls were mean to him for being fat when he was a kid. Not only that, but he spends his nights doing situps to try and impress her. Not only that, but the bitch has taken his daughter and won’t let him see her, even though he’s bought her birthday presents and taken the day off. Not only that, but his jolly exterior hides that he’s a sensitive soul who’s so lonely he cries when he gets home. Not only that, but he’s a stand up comedian… or is he? Yes, turn away now if you don’t want the ending spoiled: He’s not a standup comedian. When we seem him telling jokes in front of a curtain with no visible audience, it’s not a cost-cutting measure to avoid renting out a comedy club to film some ten-second cutaways, he actually is standing in front of a curtain with no audience. It’s in his flat, and he’s performing for a stuffed toy rabbit. At this point it stops simply pressing our buttons and goes them with a fucking sledgehammer, because after Freddy performs his final routine – “How many family court judges does it take to fuck up your life? Just the one” – and kills himself. Specifically, he kills himself while sad music plays and we get poignant cutaways of the setting sun. Not even E.T. was this manipulative.

At the end, one of the extra-angry guys gets extra-extra-angry and smashes up the flat they have the meeting in. Then there’s a montage, he shaves his beard off and is miraculously cured of angriness. We’re meant to take it as read that his outburst let all the anger out and now he’s cool, which may be true, but again, it’s not properly explored. So we come out learning that men have problems with rage and empathy, but very little about why, or how to solve them.

Two Birds

A guy and a girl who he’s either dating or friends with go to a party. They both get drugged. The girl gets raped by two guys while the semi-conscious boy watches. The guy then strips off and gets into the bed with her, so when she regains consciousness, she thinks she’d had sex with him (or, more accurately, that he waited until she was unconscious and fucked her without her consent, but it’s OK because he’s not ugly like the other two guys). She says “I’m glad it was with you”, and we get an excruciatingly-long closeup of the guy looking haunted and tortured. Because he’s the one who’s really suffered here. Yeah, thanks.

Alex And Her Arse Truck

A slacker with no personality meets a sexilicious nymphomaniac raver girl whom he suggestively shoots with a water pistol. There’s nothing especially disturbing about it, it’s just difficult to shake the feeling that the writer was wanking after every page.

Not Quite Hollywood

Or “The Quentin Tarantino Show Down Under”. As an overview of Australian exploitation cinema in the 70s and 80s, it’s excellent. There are two specific sections that made me go “Hang on…”, though. One: A bunch of very, very smug exploitation producers talk about how great it was to smash down censorship laws because people wanted to see tits on screen. All well and good. But then they start talking about how people wanted to see women being mutilated on screen as if this is the next logical step. They then talk about how great it is that there’s a renaissance in exploitation cinema now, meaning that (thought they don’t explicitly say it) there’s a whole new generation of cheap movies about women being mutilated (Wolf Creek, Hostel, Hostel 2, Captivity, The One With Lindsay Lohan). We’re left with the impression that legislation’s moved on, but the attitudes themselves didn’t follow suit, because that might have threatened a bunch of sleazy dudes’ sense of entitlement.

The second thing basically encapsulates my issues with Quentin Tarantino and people who like to believe they’d be close personal friends with Quentin Tarantino. He talks about how exploitation cinema is worthwhile because, as it’s churned out without much attention paid to it, people can get away with utterly bizarre stuff that would never make it into a mainstream production. I agree entirely, whilst brandishing Robo Vampire in one hand and Machine Girl in the other. But then his example of a ker-azy movie moment is… a woman who gets beaten up, stripped and tied to the front of a car like a hood-ornament. Yyyeah. It’s “weird”, but it’s still a woman who’s been beaten up, stripped and tied to the front of a car, for fuck’s sake. It’s not about taste or appropriateness, neither of which I have any time for, it’s about the idea that bare-knuckle misogyny isn’t an issue provided the result is cool enough. Were there no better examples…?