by Douglas Messerli
Andrew Creagh and Barry Lowe (screenplay, based on a story by Richard Turner), Richard Turner (director) Violet’s Visit / 1995
From the paucity of reviews on the internet, I
presume Australian director Richard Turner’s Violet’s Visit (1995) was
basically ignored by the critics and perhaps audiences upon its release. Which
is too bad, really, because it’s a fairly honest and forthright view of gay
life in the 1990s Sydney in the laid back manner of the 1994 film The Sum of
Us while utterly at odds with the over-the-top vision of gay life presented
by Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, also of 1994. You might say that Alec
(Graham Harvey) and his lover long-term lover Pete (David Franklin), both
highly assimilated gay men living in an active gay community stand somewhere
between the more sexually hesitant plumber Jeff and his working class
connections at whose edges still stand a quite homophobic society in The Sum
of Us, and the outrageous drag-queen road tripping queens, on their way
from Sydney to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory who meet up with both
surprised acceptance and virulent homophobia in the Australian Outback.
Alec and Pete represent the more typical, to my way of thinking, gay
couple, despite the fact that in their late 30s and early 40s they seem to be
just a little more buff and well-to-do than many a person I knew at the time.
But then San Francisco and Los Angeles did indeed have thousands and Alecs and
Petes in their midst. Unfortunately, we never get a chance to know much about
their personal lives.
Pete
seems to be a lawyer, but what Alec does is never quite explained or perhaps I
simply missed his job description in one of the heavily Aussie accented scenes
I couldn’t quite grasp without a closed caption setting. And I must say I did
wonder why they had so very many copies of soft gay porn mags lying about given
the fact that these two bronzed beauties seem pretty much in love and up and
ready for sex; but we later do find out that they’re having some relationship
issues, which temporarily pulls them apart and may explain the need for such a
mountain of whacking material. And then, it appears, some of their friends may
appear as models in their pages, which makes sense now that I know Alec owns a
local gym.
Otherwise, it appears that Turner, his set designers, and even his
actors has got the scene down pretty honestly, certainly without the hysteria
of Priscilla and the curiosity-shop mentality of so very many movies
portraying gay couples of the 1980 and 1990s. If they stay shirtless more than
one might normally expect, what better way to show off their well-developed
abs. And at least they never don a turban, a Chinese housecoat, or an ensemble
purchased just to stir their friends’ macaronic envy. These blokes are
good-looking gay guys hanging out in a neighborhood of equally good-looking gay
guys who, when they meet up on the streets, they hug and kiss, sit down with
and gossip, and once in a while share a stray serious thought.
It
so happens, as expected, that one of their cutest well muscled friends has a
crush on Alec, but Alec doesn’t get flustered by his advances and doesn’t “give
in” as you might expect in any gay film devoted just to the lives of these two
men. The problems they have with one another have to do with the difficulties
any couple, gay or straight, have with temperament and expression of love not
with extra-marital affairs. But then this film isn’t truly about a gay couple,
but about the interloper who in the very first scenes of the movie shows up at
their door.
When Alec does return, she recognizes him as the guy a few minutes earlier she had run into on the street and derogated from being and “old man,” and he is faced with a fact that he apparently never quite digested, that before leaving the town in which he could no longer survive, he’d gotten drunk and evidently fucked the woman, Sharon (May Lloyd) who is now the town slut.
The girl he produced with Sharon is not only plain-looking but totally
unimaginative, and without any vision of what she might like to do in life
except design various objects of kitschy delight. She’s surly and more street
smart than she should be at her age, and Alec wants no part of her,
particularly after she refuses to even touch the Indonesian dinner he whips up
for her and Pete.
Pete plays the go-between, convincing Alec that he can’t simply send her
to the streets or even back to Kemble Bay where her only future career, as
Scooter admits, would be as a hairdresser. We’ve seen that world before in P.
J. Hogan’s portrayal of another dead-end beach town, Porpoise Spit in Muriel’s
Wedding, another movie of 1994, this about a determined straight girl, even
if she’s also a queer outsider.
She
may be a bit confused about her dad and step-dad’s sexual goings on, but she
quickly finds models who she likes enough to clip out of their magazines and
paste on her bedroom wall in place of Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves. She cuts out
penises and pastes them on other Hollywood hotties. And even more perversely
develops a teenage crush on their beautiful body-builder friend, Wayne (Caleb
Packham), the one who’s desperate to get Alec into bed. Wayne, who has a mind
of a 15-year-old teenager invites Scooter to drop by his place any time she
likes and befriends her in a way that she confuses with love, despite Alec and
Pete’s warnings that he’s only into boys.
Like
most teenagers, however, she perceives their misgivings only as further
evidence that her feelings are right, only to be even more confused when she
furtively observes her imaginary “boyfriend” pick up another boy for the night,
an act that so upsets her that she insists she wants to return to her mother in
Pembroke Bay, where at least she knows the territory.
By
this time her father has so grown to love his daughter that he attempts to
dissuade her, while she’s, as she puts it, as stubborn as he is, and insists he
call Sharon, whose telephonic histrionics concerning what she imagines to be
Pete and Alec’s orgiastic behavior around her daughter represents the only
vision of Australian homophobia in this film. When she arrives with a new
boyfriend in the front seat, Scooter scoots back into her father’s house,
unable to stand being introduced yet again to a new man in his mother’s always
busy life. But in returning “home,” she suddenly discovers that Pete has left
Alec, apparently over her presence.
In
fact, we and she later realize, it is not that Pete will not remain if Scooter
stays on, but that he has no way to argue out their problems in her presence.
But as all not clear-thinking youth tend to do, she blames herself and
disappears for a few days, while Alec searches the city in terror of what might
have happened, finally reporting her absence to the police.
When Pete finally hears of the situation, he too returns to participate
in the search; even if he and Alec have not yet found a way to solve their
problems, it’s clear they both are desperate to find and resolve the
misunderstandings of their young charge.
Wayne finally finds her by the bay, after she has spent a few nights
with several homeless crazies, and lures her back to McDonald’s—which provides
us a clue of where Violet-now-Scooter’s imagination and stomach will take her
in the future—as Alec and Pete rush to bring her back into their lives. Alec agrees
he’s “pushy” and promises to make time to talk out the problems with Pete; and
Scooter evidently will happily return to her gay booty shrine in their house
where she hopefully can sort out the difference between beautiful looking men
and handsome straight boys to whom she might be attracted—a distinction which
this film doesn’t dare to explore. Perhaps Alec may finally convince her to
sign up for art school. But I still feel there’s something wrong with this
picture.
I
have to admit I’m not convinced of the well-being that composer Paul Anthony
Smith’s music attempts to evoke at film’s end. What is the beef between Pete
and Alec really about? We certainly don’t have evidence of their ability to
resolve a problem about which we’ve never truly been told. And what about the
unthinking girl in their attic? What’s to become of her? One can hardly imagine
her surviving in the insular gay world in which her new fathers exist. We have
to presume that Alec and Pete once upon a time celebrated with tacky gay
parties and took trips to Phuket, Thailand, Sanibel, or Key West once in a
while. Somehow I can’t imagine the two boys returning to Kemble Bay for an
Aussie Christmas. Sacrifices might surely be made, but can we truly expect them
to sacrifice their very existence? I get
an uneasy feeling, sad to say, about this feel-good movie.
Los Angeles, November 1, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2021).
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