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The Well
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Down the Well
1997
was not a good year for Australian cinema. I was variously bored, disappointed
or angered by a succession of local films released then, including Zone 39, Blackrock, Fistful of Flies and River Street.
I
was once asked a disarmingly direct question in public by a student at the
Australian Film, Television and Radio School in Sydney: “What do Australian
films lack?” A bald but pointed question, and also a perennial one. One part of
me well knows that to generalise about any national cinema in this way – to
diagnose its character, its symptoms, its problems – is truly a folly. But some
other part of me, the frustrated cinephile part, does indeed wonder, much of
the time: what’s wrong with so many of our movies, what is the magic ingredient
(or ingredients) they seem to be missing? And if speculation of this sort seems
justified, that’s because so many of the apparent problems come around again
and again, in virtually every new batch of Australian movies.
Let
me put this as simply as I feel it. Many – I’ll say it, most – Australian films
lack an oomph, an élan. That’s to
say, they lack a sense of cinema:
some exciting, pleasing way that images and sounds, story forms and
performances, are brought together and shaped up. The way films are conceived,
developed, funded and assessed in Australia is overly bound up with the script
– entailing very conventional literary and theatrical notions of what a good
script is and does. I’m not an anti-script kind of critic; I certainly don’t (often)
believe that movies are magically brought into being by divine, demiurgic
directors on the set from out of thin air. Scripts are all-important as
blueprints for movies, and there can be a great deal of craft and art in them –
no question about it.
But
when every thought, decision and dream about cinema revolves around the script
– around characters, themes and personal and/or mythic journeys – we tend to
get a very impoverished kind of filmmaking. And Australia is not, by any means,
the only “small nation” (small in geopolitical influence, if not geographical
size) that suffers from this syndrome.
Don’t
get me wrong. When certain critics and cinephiles start pining for that old
cinema élan, they often have a very
aggressive, kinetic, spectacular style in mind: basically, an American style,
the style of Scorsese’s dramas, or the Hong Kong style of John Woo’s action
epics. There have been sweet moments of that style in Australian cinema – in
George Miller’s Mad
Max movies or Aleksi Vellis’ Nirvana
Street Murder (1990), for instance. I love this high style myself, but I do
not believe that it is the only one that defines cinema.
Quiet,
laid back, minimal styles can have a special excitement and tension, using
various experimental or contemplative modes. I’ve experienced that sort of
frisson, sometimes, in our filmmaking history – in Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural
Tragedy (1989), for example, or Jackie Farkas’ The Illustrated Auschwitz (1992).
Both of those are short films; it is often shorts, rather than features, that
offer some of the most thrilling cinema work done in this country – a fact
which needs to be impressed upon so many local reviewers and journalists who
fixate myopically on the feature film arena.
I’m
not against simple, essentially naturalistic, character-based stories: we’ve
sometimes done them well. But we’ve also done too many of them, still pumping
them out, and not looking beyond these borders to other kinds of movies.
Genre
filmmaking – thrillers, romantic comedies, horror fantasies, action films and
so on – is particularly underdeveloped in Australia. Sometimes genre films do
get made, but in a strange vacuum, with very little sense of the possibilities
and conventions of the genre in question – and that ignorance leads to duds
like Hotel De
Love (1996) or Zone 39.
The
problem with our naturalistic character dramas is that they’re not digging into
the potentials of even that form.
They are not gritty, minute, intense character studies like Mike Leigh’s work
(whether you love it or hate it, it does stand for something). On the contrary,
we tend to tread a very safe middle-path with our dramas – calling upon the
very particular, rather old-fashioned theatrical talents of writers such as
David Williamson, Hannie Rayson, Nick Enright and Louis Nowra.
With The Well, directed by Samantha Lang,
we are forcibly returned to the problem of the so-called art film in Australia. Art cinema of the feature-length variety is
a big disaster area here. Apart from Jane Campion’s debut feature Sweetie (1989),
and one or two fine independent movies like Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession (1995), all we
really have is the somewhat raw and naive personal filmmaking of Paul Cox (Lust and Revenge,
1996) and Rolf de Heer (The Quiet Room,
1996). The Well, however, aims for a
more cultivated form.
Adapted
by Laura Jones (who also scripted several Campion films) from the 1986 novel of
the same name by Elizabeth Jolley (1923-2007), it is an intense two-hander
about the ambiguous friendship between two women, young, boppy Katherine
(Miranda Otto) and the older Hester (Pamela Rabe). It’s a classic play-off: one
is vital, crazy, impulsive; the other is stiff, neurotic, cautious. The two
women are bound together in a complex tangle of need, want and favour.
Nothing
is ever entirely spelt out in this relationship – certainly no explicit sexual
desire or bond – but there’s supposed to be a great deal of tension, as well as
many moves on the surface and in the depths, shifts in the power balance
between these two characters. And, to put this whole relationship into relief,
to heighten and cook up the psychological tensions, we have one of those
parched, isolated settings sporting a run-down, claustrophobic house.
Straight
away, outlining the intrigue of The Well in this fashion, I have a bunch of movies – mainly art films, to reluctantly go
on using that dreadful, snobbish term – buzzing around in my head. Roman Polanski,
for instance, and his claustrophobic films about escalating madness, such as Knife in the Water (1962) and Repulsion (1965). Or Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona (1966), about the cruel, mysterious symbiosis between two women; also R.W. Fassbinder’s The Bitter
Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), adapted from his own play, on the
S&M psychological power games between a mistress and servant.
These
are all films from (or with their roots in) the 1960s, and that leads me to
say: if, in the Australian context, True Love and Chaos (1997) is full of the ‘70s
(Wim Wenders, Leonard Cohen, etc.), then The
Well is full of the ‘60s. But I do not mean that in a good way.
In
its most achieved moments – when Lang’s direction is expressive, or Rabe’s performance
is indelible, subtle and intricate in a highly physical way – I remembered
another classic ‘60s homo-erotic two-hander, Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1963). But The Well is highly ‘60s in another, negative
way: it reminded me of the terrible, often hysterical prurience of movies from
that period when dealing with the lurid combination of lesbians (or repressed, would-be
lesbians), psychological sado-masochism and closed, hot-house environments. Gothic,
overcharged films like Robert Aldrich’s The
Killing of Sister George (1968), for instance, that are not so easy to
watch today, at least from a “sex-pol” standpoint. The Well brings back that slightly lascivious-yet-moralistic,
creepy interest in what Raymond Durgnat called the skin games of ‘60s and ‘70s cinema.
But The Well is not a melodrama –
although it tries, very unsuccessfully, to blend in some passing elements of horror-fantasy
in the course of a poor pastiche of a typical psychological-scare dream
sequence. Lang has tried to make an understated work, where the real stuff is
going on in the submerged part of the narrative iceberg. But, to tell the
truth, this is a movie that spells out not enough and too much at the same time.
So
much of the story, with its twin character-portrait, seems jerky and episodic,
launching off onto some new plateau of intrigue every 20 minutes or so. There
is no sense of the deep logic or hidden drive animating these shifts in
personal power – as there most certainly is in The Servant or The Bitter
Tears of Petra von Kant. And, going in the other direction completely, Lang
and Jones have decided to make real and explicit something that remains mysterious
to the very end of Jolley’s novel.
The
whole film spins around the intriguing question: what is down the well on
Hester’s humble property? In the course of events, we see the two women run
over a man on the road at night – in fact, we get a glimpse of that event at
the very start, like a cheap telemovie pre-credits teaser. Once his body is in
the well – and this is another horror/Polanski-style cue – his status, alive
or dead, seems ambiguous; Katherine appears to be getting messages from him,
talking to and feeding him, even receiving money from him. Here’s the central
ambiguity: is Katherine going crazy, is the guy somehow still alive, or is
there some other kind of psychological game going on? Familiar generic terrain,
on one level, but still open to variation and inventiveness.
I
won’t spoil any of that for you. But finally, it’s hard to care about the
answers. The Well is extremely thin,
attenuated on so many levels. It doesn’t move forward convincingly; and so many
of its individual moments seems pale and poorly articulated. Unlike in Losey’s
or Polanski’s work, nothing really cinematic is ever done, in a sharp or
compelling way, with the contours of the claustrophobic space, or the uncanny, eerie
airiness of the wide-open landscape. The actors, too – even though I think Otto
and Rabe are both excellent players – are directed to perform in an
externalised, theatrical, signposting kind of way. Their physical gestures are
never turned into finely-tuned cinematic gestures.
Style-wise,
the film has one glaring aspect: the colour effect known as a bleach-bypass,
which desaturates natural colour, and gives almost everything a steely, ghostly,
blue cast. For a while, this procedure is intriguing, OK on the eye. But then
it quickly becomes monotonous, unmodulated, unsupple: it’s what I think of the
tomato sauce approach to style, a single formal mannerism or tic plastered all
over the film on the assumption that – in some vague, overall way – it suits
the mood, feel or message of the piece. This is the bad legacy of Sidney
Lumet’s filmmaking advice in Making
Movies (1995) – and of “quality” TV production, which slathers the template
of a handy, cohering “look” over literally everything.
And
this is exactly the kind of thing I mean about not enough attention being paid
to the stuff of cinema – and particularly to the art of direction – in
contemporary Australian film. I’m not accusing Samantha Lang (whose earlier
shorts were promising) of being indifferent to cinema, or cine-illiterate; all
those abundant ‘60s references prove otherwise. And she’s not dwelling down in
that didactic, very stagey form of naturalism that cripples and deadens local
films like Cosi (1996), Blackrock, Hotel Sorrento (1995) or River Street. But Lang’s
approach to style/form is not precise or specific; it’s laid on, as in a rock
video, not keyed to the demands or possibilities of each unfolding moment of
this strange drama.
In
that regard, The Well reminds me of
Monica Pellizzari’s Fistful of Flies,
which I mentioned at the start of this review. Pellizzari is another young
filmmaker with some sense of the formal spectacle of cinema: every shot in her
extremely grotesque movie is shot like a horror story and scored like a melodrama,
with hopeful visual metaphors (like the flies of her title) inserted like
expressionistic dream-images at every turn. In both The Well and Fistful of Flies we encounter this curious mixture of a taste for histrionic genres (horror and
melodrama) and an aspiration to art cinema – as well as, alas, the mixture of that
combo with some very banal, static, underdeveloped diagrams of character
interaction, a surface pattern without a deep-structure.
I
may be getting myself into hot water here, in more ways than one. Criticising
almost any Australian film, for starters, registers, for some, as the absolute
in bad form and manners, endangering our fragile industry and stomping on our
young, delicate flowers. Criticising an Australian art film, particularly one that was chosen by those folks at the
Cannes Film festival desperate to locate the next Antipodean genius like Campion,
can get a reviewer into deep trouble (I know from experience). And being a
bloke criticising what are touted as women’s films – films by women, about
women, possibly reflecting some specifically female sensibility or perspective
… well, as they say, fools rush in.
But
I bristle against what I see as the tendency within so many sectors of our film
industry and film culture to over-protect Australian movies, to assigns them
labels and auras, noble intentions and agendas, that are meant to deflect or
dissuade any sensible or rigorous criticism. Our local movies, our national
cinema, should surely be able to withstand a bit of rough, demanding, cinephile
love.
MORE Lang: The Monkey's Mask © Adrian Martin July 1997 |
