Wenona Byrne | Saturn's Return / 2001 [TV film]

putting the past to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christos Tsiolkas (screenplay), Wenona Byrne (director) Saturn's Return / 2001 [26 minutes] [TV film]

 

Lovers Barney (Joel Edgerton) and Dimi (Damian Walshe-Howling) are on a voyage of return, making their way from Melbourne to Sydney, an 11-hour car trip that takes them three days. On the way Dimi stops to visit the old border migrant camp at Bonegilla built near Victoria for the post-World War II immigration boom.

      It’s estimated that 1.5 million Australians are descended from migrants who spent time in that camp, which saw riots in 1952 and 1961 for the lack of better jobs and working conditions, mostly staged by Italian and German migrants. Dimi’s father evidently as spent his early years there.

      Their goal is Barney’s home town of Sydney where he plans to visit his dying father, a legend of sorts who as an aged hippie who traveled in better years to Nepal and India. At least Barney’s father’s stories are of good memories, Dimi observes, hinting that his own father’s memories of Bonegilla were not at all pleasant. Barney’s father has begged his son to return for his final days.

       As they stop in a caravan rental spot for the night, they engage in joyful sex which they boisterously photograph.

       Barney’s father Dan (Harold Hopkins) is not in good condition: “Lungs are fucked. My kidneys are about to cave in. I’ve got a discharge coming out of my arse. My ears. My dick. I’m scratchin’ all over. And I can’t shake this cough. But apart from that, I’m doin’ all right.” The old man comments on Dimitri’s great eyes. And “Great butt too. Tight.”

        Dan’s plans appear to entail an assisted suicide. And he wants Barney there to be by his side. All of which somewhat shocks Dimi who admits he had “no idea that fathers could ask such things of their sons.”

        As Barney suggests that he gets someone to move in with him, Dan ignores his comments, telling him that he wants his son to become the executor, although it doesn’t entail much. Barney suggests that even he and Dimi will stay on with him. But Dan continues to ignore their suggestions. The boys take up smoking again, discussing their options into the night.

        In the morning, Barney shaves his father, revealing a handsome man under the white whiskers. But there is no comment from Dan.

       Dimi relates the history. That Barney was 13 when Dan first got into LSD, providing the boy with a truly “fantastic” birthday. The boys also visit Sheila (Tina Bursill), Barney’s estranged mother. The only thing she wants, she claims, is a grandchild. She suggests he find a nice female surrogate, but Dimi hints that perhaps he wouldn’t want to be the father. And Barney argues that they’d have find a woman who put up with Sheila as a mother-in-law. Dimitri argues that the last he’d need is more family. But Sheila totally loses it as the boys share a kiss, quickly revealing her utter homophobia.

       A true argument about the past ensues, Barney recalling that all he remembers is waking up late for school with syringes all over the place. Of going across the road to borrow money from evangelists to pay the family bills. At one point she even brings in Dimi’s Greek family, he interrupting that she doesn’t know his mother. The wounds of Barney’s family life are beginning to be revealed, and the reasons he lives near Dimi’s family in Melbourne becomes increasing apparent. Even his own seemingly more conservative views begin to make sense as we see the wounds left by their hippie life-styles that didn’t exactly embrace the full of family life, the way Dimi’s Greek family continue to.

       And we now begin to comprehend what the “return” of the Saturn, the planet that takes 29 years to revolve around the sun truly means in the context of Barney’s return to Sydney and his family. She reminds that she has spent years apologizing for what she didn’t do as a mother, arguing that he should let his father do what he wants, namely is decision to kill himself.

       Without soap-opera antics, this intense film suddenly has laid an entire family history before us, revealing the scars it has left behind, made even more fascinating that our view is through the eyes of Dimitri (in the form of screenwriter Christos Tsiolkas), the outsider to the events laid forth, a man clearly overwhelmed by his own familial difficulties.

        Dimitri’s father, we now learn, was in Bonegilla shacks in 1967, Dan, who’s been watching their tapes of it, commenting that he’s never even heard of it: the common statement of so many individuals of every country who no nothing about the difficult times of those trying to enter their culture and become part of it, while also hinting at the true obliviousness to those of the counterculture of the 1960s who professed love without comprehending what it truly involved on a social and even political level, including being openly gay. He obviously also watched their caravan sexual events. “But I didn’t find it much of a turn on.”

        The tension between the two young men is beginning to be felt. The two worlds they represent has collided in ways they can’t even explain. Dimi can’t even get Barney to take him out for his birthday celebration on a night on the town. Angry, he storms out, making a call home, reporting simply that he visited Bonegilla. There is nothing else to share except that Barney’s father is truly ill. But he call is clearly a symbolic plea for his own return to familial normalcy.

       Suddenly Dan is freezing. When Barney asks Dimi to get him a blanket, he claims to know no one name Dimitri. Evidently they had planned a dinner with Sheila for that evening, and Barney is now ready to call it off. But Dan insists that it not be cancelled, a dinner he had demanded as obviously a kind of last supper. 

       At a restaurant, replete with an Egyptian belly dancer, Dan both drinks and smokes, neither of which he is now permitted to do. Dmitri toasts him as a champion, while his son and ex-wife demur. Dan asks Sheila if she’s ever heard of Bonegilla, to which she also replies in the negative. “The kids made a video of it. I don’t think it’s your kind of movie, love.”

        Back at home Dan puts on some of his 1960s music and lists his favorite albums of the period. He has some good taste, naming the Beatles’ The White Album and everything by Otis Redding.  When he begins a coughing jag, Barney reaches for his pills, but Dan insists he won’t need that. Sheila puts down her wine glass, unfolds a small cloth she has brought and asks Barney to get her a spoon. In the package is a syringe and packages of heroin.

      Dani rises, and Dan goes over to hug him goodbye. Dan, Barney, and Sheila enter into a small, curtained room on the side.

       Rewatching the film he has made in Bonegilla, for the first time we see that Dani has sprayed one the white empty, decaying buildings with red paint, spelling out the words: Eleni + Demit 1967, presumably the names of his parents.

       Meanwhile, Barney leaves the small room, the overdose having been successful, returning to the living room and hugging his lover close to him. Both have resolved their familial pasts to the best of their abilities, having laid rest, in a literal and largely metaphorical sense, to the dilemmas these younger people have suffered through their parents from the previous century of so very much hate, destruction, sorrow, bitterness, emptiness, self-centeredness, and general absurdity.

       Over the years, I have proposed that some of the best short, independent films were made in the first decade of the 21st century, at a time when the issues of the later 20th century were colliding with the concerns of the new century before they became overwhelmed in the terrible realities of international politics, disease, and general rightest Trumpism. Australian director Wenona Byrne’s Saturn’s Return is certainly one of these memorable films.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).