Sam Mendes | Skyfall / 2012

alternative bonds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan (screenplay, based on characters by Ian Fleming), Sam Mendes (screenplay) Skyfall / 2012

 

Changing my usual pattern when speaking of the movie I have just seen, I am going to try to resist telling most details of the plot. Of course, in any James Bond movie plot is important in that the vicarious vicissitudes of the spy’s exciting adventures is at the heart of any episode. Given the complete diffidence of the early figures—particularly Sean Connery, but even Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan—who portrayed Bond as a suavely sexual, testosterone-filled male, who, in the service of Her Majesty’s Kingdom—were basically invulnerable as they drank, gambled, and sexually enchanted every woman they met, be she friend or enemy—however, I don’t believe plot was ever essential in these Ian Fleming-based fables. The Bond image, established by Connery, was an impervious penis, who plotted, gunned down, and wittily dismissed the numerous evil villains out to destroy him with a penetrating glance, along with any other tools with which Q might have provided him. Despite all the manically devastating tortures that might face him, there was no fear that 007 would not come through, his thinly tuxedo-wrapped body intact, with yet another girl on his arm or, more explicitly, impaled upon his hirsute chest.

      In the remake of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (a movie, I must admit, I never saw) Daniel Craig as Bond, changed everything. Both of these films made the Bond image over, without particularly emphasizing it, into a more vulnerable, certainly less heroic figure, without sacrificing the heroic events and womanizing of the original—at least superficially. Somehow, even in those first two films with Craig, it wasn’t just vulnerability that defined his character, but a willingness to explore terrains Connery could never have thought of. Craig, for the first time, made Bond feel less like a cartoon figure than a real human being, a troubled, sometimes confused, almost existentialist hero who, despite his smaller physique and, at times, even grizzly appearance, had all the pluck of the former Bonds without their absolute athletic abilities. Craig as James Bond was a kind of remarkable everyman, and even without all that beautiful body hair and rippling abs and the polished Scottish accent, was far sexier in his bodily clinging suits than the patriarchal debonair Connery or pretty boys Moore and Brosnan (although Brosnan has since revealed himself as a far more capable chameleon who might almost have been able to make the same transition that Craig has achieved).     

      While the previous two films merely hinted at the radical shifts of the Bond figure, Mendes’ Skyfall takes the whole Bond transformation on as its very subject, analyzing it from the shift from the cold war spy tactics to the inevitable alteration of world politics, where the evil forces are no longer moles, with their molls and evil overseers from opposing countries and political forces, but are now figures of shadowy world, where the villains are never who you might expect them to be—and, accordingly, far more dangerous and unpredictable.   

      Raul Silva (Tiago Rodriguez) (played by the powerful actor Javier Barden) is just such a figure, a former member of the British Secret Service, one of M’s favorite operatives, who has gone rogue when she abandoned him to the Chinese, who painfully tortured him. Even then, as we learn, he refused to give up information, ultimately using the cyanide pill embedded in his tooth to relieve his suffering—and release him from his discovery that M (the always admirable Judi Dench) has betrayed him. Unlike all the villains of past Bond adventures, Silva’s goal is not world domination, money, gold, or any worldly possessions—just simple vengeance, and, accordingly, he is the most dangerous villain of any Bond adventure to date. Just as in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Bardem takes evil to new levels; he is unstoppable, determined to track down his enemies and all their associates with a ploddingly mad insistency.

      Early on in this somewhat long fable, Bond is revealed, as is M, to be outdated—both mentally and physically—figures who have outlived their value to the system which they have served. M refuses to abandon her position even though under her watch, and through Bond’s effectiveness, they have allowed files listing the major spies embedded in international terrorist organizations to be stolen and utterly compromised. Indeed, their encrypted computer systems have been high-jacked, we soon learn by an international terrorist (Silva), one of their own. Early in the film Bond is shot and is presumed dead, the results of which have great significance of his possible continuance. When he, “resurrected,” as he puts it, returns, he fails all his tests; but M, mysteriously if predictably, protects him, allowing him to remain in his position despite her—and everyone else’s—serious doubts. In short, Craig as Bond is as different from Connery (Moore or Brosnan) as you can get. He can’t even shoot, let alone lure any woman to him with great success. His brief affair with Sévérine (Béréice Marlohe), a woman saved from the Macau sex trade by Silva, ends in her death—perhaps not that different from the endings of several previous “Bond women,” but sadder this time, simply because Bond is totally unable to save her from Silva’s determined murder through a perverse enactment of the William Tell myth, with, instead of an apple upon her head, is replaced by glass of Bond’s favorite whiskey as the target. Craig’s Bond, as might be expected, misses the target, shooting high, while the villain purposely does in the beauty.

      In short, instead of reiterating the Bond franchise, this special 50-year version, the 23rd or 25th Bond film (depending upon whether one includes the early spoof, Casino Royale and the unofficial Never Say Never) utterly redefines the central and subsidiary characters as both the story and figures of contemporary British politics openly debate their relevance and necessity within the culture at large. It’s a brilliant device that allows the Bond franchise both to link the new world, represented by Craig, to its past and to disassociate itself from Connery and other impersonators of that role. This movie wants it both ways—and gets it.

      On the one hand, Skyfall pulls out the stops to connect the Craig version with the Connery one—if only the audience might imagine a taller, more hirsute, more dapper figure having fallen through age into a slightly smaller, less handsome, but determinedly energetic other self. Connery’s links with Scotland, particularly in this film through the last dark scene in Bond’s childhood home, Skyfall, are retained. His long-term connection with M (as Judi Dench) has been brought forward from previous movies. Throughout the film, Mendes goes out of his way to reference several of the previous Bond films, subtly employing the memorable Bond themes, this time in low orchestral rumblings, spectacularly referencing Bond’s always international travels (some of the best scenes of this film were shot in the neon-lit Shanghai cityscape and in a recreated Macau backdrop), and, for the sixth Bond film, bringing back Connery’s silver-birch Aston Martin D85 car.  Even Miss Moneypenny, this time a beautiful and sexy Black woman, Eve (Naomie Harris) who has previously worked with Bond “in the field,” instead of the white, slightly old-maidenish woman of the early Bond movies. There’s just enough there, if you are willing to suspend your belief, to trace that earlier Sean Connery Bond to this broken down and likeable Daniel Craig version. Upon viewing this film on Christmas day, my companion Howard asked, bemusedly, are we supposed to believe that Eve Moneypenny is Miss Moneypenny’s daughter? If so, I answered, Miss Moneypenny must have been much more exciting that she appeared on screen, to secretly have sex, apparently, with a black man.

       The film fortunately does not truly dwell on this aspect of its continuity of Bond-related events, instead creating what might be described as almost an alternative universe for the famous spy hero, establishing Daniel Craig as a very different—if simultaneously related and similar mythical hero. 

     As I’ve already suggested, the Craig version of Bond is not at all diffident, removed, invulnerable, but is a totally human being about to be abolished, along with his boss. By film’s end, in case you haven’t seen this movie, M. is killed. The world she represents is destroyed, while Craig’s Bond has clearly created a new world order. Sure, he remains a ladies’ man—just like Connery—as suggested in his shower scene with Sévérine. He wins big at the Macau tables. He drinks endlessly, especially in the early scenes after he has been presumed dead. But this Bond is a moral figure, attracted to Sévérine because of his recognition of her dilemma, disgusted by his own drinking, and slinking back in embarrassment and self-loathing into M’s home. This Bond is not at all impervious to destruction: he is shot several times, almost killed, presumed dead.

      In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, tied up to a chair where the evil Silva almost undresses him while he fondles the chest wounds that he has inflicted upon him, the following conversation occurs:

 

                           Raoul Silva: [Silva unbuttons Bond's shirt and peels back the shirt

                               to expose the scar tissue where Bond removed the bullet] Ooh!

                              See what she's done to you.

                           James Bond: [suspicious] Well, she never tied me to a chair.

                           Silva: Her loss.

                           [Silva begins caressing Bond's neck.]

                           Bond: Are you sure this is about M.

                           Silva: It's about her... and you, and me. You see, we are the

                               last two rats. We can either eat each other... mmm... or eat everyone

                               else.
                           [Silva strokes Bond's neck]

                           Silva: How you're trying to remember your training now.

                           [Silva smiles].

                           Silva: What's the regulation to cope with this?

                           [Silva strokes both of Bond's upper legs]

                           Silva: Well, first time for everything.

                           [Bond smiles]

                           Silva: Yes?

                           Bond: Hm. What makes you think this is my first time?

                           Silva: [sits back] Oh, Mr. Bond.

     The very idea that Sean Connery’s Bond (or anyone of his immediate impersonators) might have responded as Craig does is inconceivable. This is truly a new man, vague as he remains, in whom we can only be interested. This time round, without any marvelous new technological weapons and without any of the youthful agility he might have to support him, he survives to plant a simple but efficient knife in the back of this marvelous villain.

      The makers of this engaging action movie have also embedded enough clues to future Bond films, asking questions such as “why Bond’s parents were murdered?” and who, actually, is the new M, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, to pique our interest for future manifestations of the franchise. Even more intriguing to me, is the possibility of once again encountering Bond’s family’s former gamekeeper, Kincade. It is so wonderful to see the heavily bewhiskered elderly Albert Finney once more on British soil that it recalled for me his puckish, slightly pudgy, adorably cute Tom Jones all over again.

       I look forward, for the first time in decades, to more Bond episodes, with the vulnerable but eternally encased action hero in his uncreasible silk suit on my local screen. His aging heroics are quite perfect for our time—an agéd population after all.

 

Los Angles, December 26, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2012).

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard | Pygmalion / 1938

the toy

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Bernard Shaw, W. P. Liscomb, Cecil Lewis (scenario and dialogue), Ian Dalrymple, Anatole de Grunwald and Kay Walsh (uncredited dialogue), Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard (directors) Pygmalion / 1938

 

Nearly everyone who has seen the hit musical and film My Fair Lady, knows the story of Shaw's  Pygmalion: it's a tale of a young, cockney flower-seller, Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller), who meets up with Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard), a master linguist, who insists that he could teach even her how to speak proper English: "Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!"

     The next day, she takes up his challenge, offering to pay for English lessons! Her stay in Higgins' house, along with Colonel George Pickering (Scott Sunderland)—a fellow dialect specialist Higgins has run into outside the opera (whom you might even describe as a "pick up")—results in the musical version, in a growing love-hate relationship between Higgins and Doolittle. In the 1938 film version, however, things are kept at a lower temperature, as the two men, Higgins and Pickering, dally with Eliza as if she were a toy, Higgins almost torturing her as she suffers through his cruel teachings (a sequence shot by a young David Lean, on his first assignment as editor).

     While in this dramatic version, we delight in their gradual transformation of their toy into a beautiful and well-spoken woman, any sexuality this film permeates exists between the two elderly "confirmed bachelors" rather than between girl and Higgins. True, even in the musical version it takes a long time before Eliza's resentment of Higgins begins to turn into dependence and, finally, a restorative love. But in Asquith's and Howard's version of the Shaw play, the work centers not on romantic fireworks but on the author's insistence that language makes the person. Asquith, a closeted homosexual, focuses his camera in the film primarily upon his two male figures who in the scene when Eliza finally gets the right accent, fling themselves into dance, as opposed to the complete involvement of Eliza in the later incarnations. 

      Today we wouldn’t hesitate to simply describe their relationship as homosexual, two elderly gay men who have happened upon an attractive woman who they determine to develop into a first class female servant. Perhaps that kind of attention explains why Higgins’ other servants appear to be so devoted to him.

     Eliza's would-be lover in this version, moreover, Freddy Eynsford-Hill (David Tree) is such a buck-toothed dimwit that we cannot for one moment believe Eliza would have him. This Freddy does not even haunt the street where she lives. But neither do we believe that there is any real possibility of romance between her and Higgins

     Her escape from the Higgins household after the two, Higgins and Pickering, celebrate her success at the great ball as primarily their doing, seems the only choice she might have made.  There is no room for her in the all-male world Higgins has created. His wish for her to return—"Get out and come home and don't be a fool!" to which Higgins' mother responds "Very nicely put indeed, Henry. No woman could resist such an invitation"—hints at no romantic intentions, but merely the fact that he and Pickering have become dependent on her as a kind of feminine form of entertainment. Aren't most dolls (with the exceptions of Ken and G.I. Joe) female?

    Eliza's return, accordingly—an ending which Shaw himself opposed—is utterly ambiguous, as is Higgins' response: "Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?" It suggests that if she is to stay, nothing will change. As Higgins' put it earlier to her: "If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate."

     Yet for all the film's misogyny, it is an absolutely first-rate presentation of Shaw's great play, with Shaw, having himself written the dialogue, winning the 1939 Academy Award for Writing of an adapted screenplay. If in her looks Hiller is no Audrey Hepburn or even Julie Andrews, her plainer features make her appear less vulnerable than the later incarnations of Eliza. Indeed, she has, in part, gotten what she sought: the ability to become a "lady," a woman who through her language and bearing can, by work's end, stand up to the worst of tyrants.

     It has always struck me, moreover, that Higgins is, at heart, the greatest of prigs, a man who transforms both Eliza and her father, Alfred (Wilfrid Lawson) from unwashed creatures of the street into figures fit for the middle class. It is no accident that the first thing that he insists after he agrees to take on Eliza as a pupil is that she wash up, to which she pleads, "I'm a good girl, I am!" But he, as we soon learn, is not necessarily a good man. For Higgins remains an outsider, not even welcome in his mother's house. Which may explain Shaw's original desire to cast the less attractive Charles Laughton—whom one might say specialized in playing demented characters such as Nero, Dr. Moreau, murderers, and other such types—in the role of Higgins.

      In the end, Eliza may stay on in the Higgins-Pickering household for the warm room it provides her, but we can be certain that she will never receive her much desired kiss. And we’re not too sure that she mightn’t have been better off as a flower-seller or even a squashed cabbage leaf, in whose embrace, so filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché showed us in her 1901 film Midwife to the Upper Class, new-born babies are nurtured.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012)

Luiz De Barros | Clubbing / 1994

confessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luiz De Barros (screenwriter and director) Clubbing / 1994

 

South African director Luiz De Barros’ (using the name Luiz Barros) explores the Johannesburg area of Hillbrow—at the time, a major neighborhood of night life and gay clubs—in the 1994 film, a period in which the country was still involved in deep prejudices but was also gradually shifting to more diverse viewpoints among younger people. The younger group that gathers for a pre-club attendance at the apartment of two openly gay boys in this film (whose actors, not listed with character names, include alphabetically Karen Coetzee, Justin Cohen, Thandi Davids, George Dzerefos, Jennifer Fenton, Wayne Fick, Stephanie Kronson, Dominic Lee, and Brendan Pollecutt) represent a wide range of viewpoints, all connected in rather vague ways with friendships to the two gay men whose apartment is the starting point of a meaningless journey.

   A handsome young “straight” man—who seems to be a closeted gay boy—has insisted his girlfriend join him. She confesses to not liking gays, and in a short “off screen confession” that interrupts the narrative—one of several by different characters throughout the film—admits that she doesn’t like about gay men is that she has no power over them, having none the effects she can rely upon with straight men. “Bi guys” really freak her out, she suggests, because she doesn’t know where she stands in relationship to such men. But, she claims, “I don’t really have a problem with blacks.”

       Although at the party the couple speak out for joys of heterosexuality, in the car beforehand they argue, mostly about the differences of their groups of friends, obviously pointing to the fact that they gravitate each to a very different subset of individuals. For a young man such as this good-looking post-teen to claim a close friend with an openly gay couple in 1994 already suggests 

       The gay boys are in the midst of ecstatic sex when two women ring their doorbell, a slightly cheeky woman (who brings Andrew, one the gay boys, a condom—“the perfect gift for the post-AIDS generation) and Anna, a black woman who Andrew has evidently met long ago and with whom he had some vague communication problems.

       In an shout out of story confession from the forceful white woman we discover that she, quite contrary to several other viewpoints, has refused to take an acting class suggested to her by an agency, and insistent that she will leave the country, believing that the violence is simply going to get worse—“So why stick around for this shit; I don’t have to feel guilty about that.”  She sees a country pretty much like a job, if you get bored and grow to dislike it, you move on.

       Later at the party we discover Anna to be in a relationship with a racist black man who doesn’t like her to have white friends. Yet the other woman, despite her sense of privilege and the fact that she has a black maid, is her best friend, and she feels trapped in her relationship despite her love for her man. She and one of the gay boys get into a nasty argument as the gay man talks about current events in terms of theory while she speaks from the view of direct politics. Indeed, the young gay boy seems to be rather smug, if not outright boring, in his rather academic viewpoints of all things.

       Another woman on her way to the party is a drug addict, supposedly recovering, and her boyfriend. She is determined to pick up someone of the street to bring along, and finally finds a young skin head, a true racist who she lures to the party with the offer of drugs. And indeed, despite her supposed reformation, she interrupts her partygoing to snort a large amount of cocaine with the white racist boy before making out with him in the bathroom.

    No one at the party likes the racist, who claims he doesn’t hate blacks, but just doesn’t like them around because they’re dirty and they ruin the country. To further rub in his bigotry, the two gay boys suddenly begin to kiss, bringing out his strong homophobia. Everyone is startled somewhat by his presence.

      Even the gay couple argue at several points, suggesting that no one in this group truly loves and enjoys one another—except for the insistent heterosexual couple, who we know are somewhat lying. The gay couple, in fact, clearly are still in love and reaffirm their love as the others gather to carpool it to the club.

      As for the clubs, which they only briefly discuss, none of the them appears to be of that great of interest, many of them according to various reports being filled with still half-closeted individuals who are ill-at-ease in such a public outing. Despite the neon signs promising “Fun,” the clubs don’t seem to provide that to any members of the gathering. And when they all finally group at their automobiles, they realize they have still not chosen a particular destination for their “clubbing.”

      The diversity of this gathering certainly hints at some progress and hope of communication between the various divisions of South African society. But, on the other hand, none of these diverse individuals seems to like the others. And although they all proclaim deep friendships, they appear to be at a loss to explain their friendships, but just as fearful of losing them. Their pre-clubbing event seems strangely purposeless, just as they all appear to be individually. Race, sex, drugs, all seem to be various ways they have of coping a world in which most of their countrymen are at war with one another, none of their identities or desires fulfilling the emptiness they suffer. But the film itself, with its seemingly rough and raw honest “confessions” appears to offer a viewpoint that is rare in 1994 in the larger society, and itself represents some variation of hope.

      It took me several years of searching, after having seen De Barros’ remarkable short film Hot Legs (1995), to track down this short movie. I hope I can eventually see others of his works such as Pretty Boys (1991), Different Strokes (1995), and Metamorphosis: The Remarkable Journey of Granny Lee (2000).

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).

 

Stephan Elliot | The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / 1994

bloody abba

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephan Elliot (screenwriter and director) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert / 1994

 

If the Australian film industry is to be believed, the 1977 tour of ABBA, when they performed in front of more than 160,000 fans, totally changed the country’s personality. Certainly, that is one of the unusual premises behind Stephan Elliot’s Dadaist-like road trip adventure, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

     Priscilla, incidentally, is not a human being, but a broken-down bus which speeds two Melbourne drag queens (Mitzi Del Bra/Anthony “Tick” Belrose, played by Hugo Weaving and Felicia Jollygoodfellow/Adam Whitely played by Guy Pearce) and one transgendered individual (Bernadette Bassenger/Ralph Waite, portrayed by the still elegant and stately Terence Stamp) into the desert. The mimed singing performances of Mitzi and Felicia are so stale that they’ve been booed off stage. Bernadette’s young boyfriend, Trumpet, has been asphyxiated while dying his hair and has himself died. There seems no better time to get out of town and see the wondrous Australian outback that these three have seemingly never before encountered.

     And what fun! We get to go along, watching them strut about in small desert towns in outrageous drag costumes with volumes of ostrich plumes, sequins, spangles, beads, bangles, and bows. Although these three may seem like ultimate victims, vulnerable outsiders in a world of pioneer-like homesteaders and native aborigines, they soon show their pluck: first by revealing unexpected aspects of themselves to each other, then by demonstrating even further surprises to the narrow-minded townspeople and dangerously bigoted miners.

     The least able, and youngest of them, Felicia (whom the handsome Pearce plays with a crazed abandonment), simply needs to expand his/her experiences, and gradually does that as they move forward into space. Fixated on empty-headed gay concerns, he is literally left out in the cold by the other two until he can comprehend his ridiculousness. As the eldest of the group, Bernadette responds early in the trip:

 

                     I’ll join this conversation on the proviso that we stop bitching about

                     people, talking about wigs, dresses, bust sizes, penises, drugs, night

                     clubs and bloody Abba!

 

     Tick’s response says it all: “Doesn’t give us much to talk about then, does it?” Felicia is even more obsessed: one of his/her greatest possessions is a small vial wherein floats a piece of fesces—belonging to Abba singer Agnetha Fältskog! Felicia may be funny and even, at times, fun to be around, but she/he is also still a child who endangers all their lives by dressing up in drag and parading before a group of small-town miners, men who suffer most of their lives deep underground. Bernadette comes to the rescue by kicking the most threatening of them in the groin and forcefully finger-wrestling him to the ground.      .  

      Earlier, at another small and not so accommodating community she out-drinks the most renowned drinker, the hostile owner of the hotel establishment. When their bus breaks down, Bernadette bravely ventures off into the desert, ultimately bringing help. The man who finally comes to their rescue is Bob (Bill Hunter), whose mail-order wife has the most unusual talent—far more pleasing to the males of this outpost—of being able to expel ping pong balls from her vagina. Fortunately, the three cross-dressing performers find a far more receptive audience in the native aborigines, who readily join in on their dancing revelries.

     When Bob’s wife leaves him (“I no like you anyway. You got little ding-a-ling”), he joins up with the dancers. Having seen “Les Girls,” a group with which Bernadette performed years earlier, he is, it becomes apparent, smitten with her, and the two celebrate with a night in the open air. The interchanges between to two are some of the best in the movie. Describing Bob as a “gentleman,” Bernadette remarks: “[to Bob] Believe me, Bob, these days gentlemen are an endangered species. Unlike bloody drag queens who just keep breeding like rabbits.”

     Tick has the most revelations of the three, revealing not only where they headed—the resort town Alice Springs, where they are scheduled to perform, but sharing his secret that he has been married—has, as Felicia quips, “been playing for both teams”—with the consequences of a young son. As the manager of the hotel in which they will perform, his wife has requested that he take the son for a while so that she might find a few weeks of deserved vacation.

     Suddenly, with that revelation we begin to see this silly set of figures as real human beings. The duality of their lives, represented by their real and fictitious names, becomes even more apparent as these cartoons pop out into real space, joining us. It is not a profound reality, and the believability of Elliott’s transformative tale is, to say the least, shaky. But it is, nonetheless, meaningful, and changes the tone of the entire film.

     Received by both wife and child with open arms and utter joy for their absurd performances, their dance becomes almost a war-whoop of retribution as they go through their paces—particularly Bernadette, who Stamp plays as a tough, war-weary figure who’s been through it all before. They are truly “Dancing Queens.” And we finally realize that these apparent “losers” have all the time been holding treasures of a sort that reveals their true abilities: the least of these, obviously, is Felicia’s bottle of a turd, yet it reveals his totally adventurous spirit and his willingness to do anything to fulfill it; for Bernadette, it is her strength of her arms and hands which assure us that she has a full grip on life; and finally, for Tick it is his son, a new spirit in the world that quickly embraces the new while remaining somehow still wide-eyed and innocent. The boy sees life in a new way that we can hope will help heal the hurts suffered by such outsider beings as these three travelers and those like them in the future.

     Bernadette and Bob determine to stay on at the hotel, managing it while Tick’s wife is traveling. Felicia—a now somewhat calmer and less flamboyant figure—falls in with Tick’s son. He is after all a somewhat elderly child who can readily play the role of older brother.

     In the final scenes the three are back in Melbourne, performing at the local bar, the son happily helping out with the lights. What began as a kind of extremist parody of gay life has now been assimilated into near normalcy.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2012).