Flammable Children

 

Australian Actresses Radha Mitchell (left to right), Asher Keddie, and Kylie Minogue

FLAMMABLE CHILDREN                         C                    

aka:  Swingin’ Safari

Australia  (97 mi)  2018  d:  Stephan Elliot 

If our parents have everything, why are they so miserable?

Probably more than any other film seen, this is simply not a festival quality film (despite being picked Best of the Fest at the Edinburgh Film Festival) and is actually one of the worst films of the year, feeling more like a Kuchar Brothers production making a film in Australia about life in suburbia in the 1970’s, as it just feels so amateurish, though it features big name stars.  This is about as over-the-top as you can get in broad-based comedy, exaggerated to the point of caricature, becoming almost cartoonish, except, oddly enough, there’s very little humor to be had, as this is instead just outrageously cringeworthy.  Supposedly a satire on bad parenting, a laissez-faire era when kids did pretty much whatever they pleased, this film fondly looks back as if these were the good old days, where memories may be distorted over time, almost like fishing stories, becoming more and more embellished until it has the feel of make believe.  Nothing, absolutely nothing in this film looks remotely realistic or believable, instead it’s all fabricated for kitsch commercial processing, like we’re getting 90-minutes of advertisement outtakes, where the theme might be all the reasons you would never want to visit Australia.  Let’s imagine all the things that could go wrong that might turn people off, and then let’s string them all together in one epic misadventure and call it a wacky Aussie comedy.  Honestly, it’s right out of the National Lampoon’s Vacation series starring Chevy Chase and the misfit Griswold family, consisting of anybody else who wants to make a paycheck.  The film is written and directed by Stephan Elliott, most famous for his work on the film THE ADVENTURES OF PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT (1994), which explored the LGBT gender dynamics.  This film is so straight it’s like they’re bending over backwards to make sure nothing closeted creeps in, becoming so offensive to the mainstream that no one could mistake the world being depicted as anything other than that idyllic suburban dream where everyone conforms while looking and behaving exactly like everyone else, told from a child’s point of view so no one is ever seen working, yet everyone’s affluent, without a care in the world, free to enjoy the full extent of happiness in life, where it’s the best life money can buy for that perfect little world living at the end of a cul-de-sac in a Queensland subdivision one summer in the 1970’s, in a seaside town called Nobby’s Beach not far from the scenic ocean shoreline, described as a town that “time, and taste, forgot,” viewed as a happier time when things were much simpler, retitled SWINGIN’ SAFARI in Australia to match the zillion seller hit from 1962, Bert Kaempfert And His Orchestra: A Swingin' Safari - YouTube (3:07), which is about as annoying as this film ends up being. 

The crassness of the film’s intentional bad taste is no accident, with Oscar winner Lizzy Gardiner from Priscilla returning as the costume designer, which pretty much defines the look of the film, as it’s an era of polyester leisure suits and bad facial hair, where outlandish outfits are all the rage, perhaps best expressed by flared pants and bold, obnoxious patterns on shirts, and while that hangover effect resuscitates your memory banks, the sexual revolution is also in full swing, where experimentation with sex in the suburbs is all the rage.  The times are described by narrator Richard Roxburgh, who announces at the start, “We were the first generation to wear full synthetic fabrics.  We were also the last.”  The film concerns itself with three lovably eccentric middle-class couples living next to each other, Keith (Guy Pearce as a bleached blond, always flexing his muscles) and Kaye Hall (Kylie Minogue, a boozer, somewhat neurotic in a wig), Rick (Julian McMahon, the most well-off, leering throughout, always hosting the parties at their house) and Jo Jones (Radha Mitchell, nearly unrecognizable in a wig, but sex-charged, another boozy floozy), and Bob (Jeremy Sims, gargantuan sideburns, dementedly crazy) and Gale Marsh (Asher Keddie, the prude), none ready to let go of their youth, all feeling their oats and eager to try the latest fads, but drinking is always plentiful as they finagle any old excuse to hold a party among themselves, living in a bubble completely ignoring their children.  Meanwhile, fending for themselves, misunderstood teens include Jeff Marsh (Atticus Robb) as a budding filmmaker (the narration is a grown-up version of this character, looking back with nostalgia-tinged memories), the director’s childhood image of himself as a “backyard Spielberg” carrying his Super 8 video camera around with him wherever he goes, whose bad amateur quality footage comprises much of the film (a film within a film), as he pursues his heartthrob, next door neighbor Melly Jones (Darcey Wilson), moody, overly shy, easily embarrassed, yet willing to be seen at Jeff’s side through most of the picture, basically as an excuse to get away from her parents.  With the adult parents continually embarrassing themselves, the children are much more level-headed and tend to be the adults in the room, though Jeff gets his start under the “Deathcheaters” banner filming gory neighborhood movies with flaming daredevil stunt antics, as kids are willing to endure setting each other on fire and other exploding special effects that inevitably go haywire (hey, they can always jump in the pool), all captured on film which makes them feel larger than life and full of themselves, the kind of stuff people put out on YouTube today.  The American title comes from a freak accident that occurred with a match when Jeff and Melly’s synthetic clothing caught on fire, giving them an indelible nickname and a fitting end to the synthetic fabric generation. 

“A decade with too much time, too much money, and too much cask wine,” goes Richard Roxburgh’s narration, and while Keith sells Funk & Wagnall encyclopedias, Kaye drinks, bored with their marital malaise, unable to keep an eye on the children.  Rick and Jo are the wealthiest among them with the biggest house, featuring a sunken pit in their living room, perfect for holding drunken fondue parties, but their daughter Melly is painfully shy.  On the other side are Gail and Bob, sexually frustrated themselves, with a sexually overactive teenage daughter Bec (Chelsea Glaw), who is the highlight of the neighborhood for all the teenage boys, much of it filmed by Jeff, as the boys line up in the hallway outside her door to get a chance to be with her.   The real-life inspirations for Jeff and Melly are the director and his costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, who’ve been friends since childhood, once living on the same block.  While the adults mistook the time they spent together as a budding romance, Elliot in real-life is openly gay, not really interested in girls, so that was always inconceivable in their minds, but they have remained close friends.  Nothing brings kids together more than their parents acting like imbeciles, which they proceed to do with the novel idea of a wife-swapping party, which may work in their imaginations, but the results are dreadful, as the idea of your next-door neighbor bonking your wife may arouse anger and suspicion, turning into trust issues, where friends are suddenly friends no more, getting into heated altercations, with the kids watching all this wondering what’s going on.  Suddenly backyard barbeques and beachside picnics are no longer in vogue, with all the adults getting the silent treatment.  What transpires to change all this is an unforeseen casualty, like an act of God, when a giant-sized 200-ton blue whale washes up to shore, barely still alive, something residents had never seen before, all gathering around taking photos, where it becomes the biggest event in town history, with people from all over the country dropping in to see what the hoopla is all about, broadcast live on television news features, where few show any interest in the health of the whale, but just want that incomparable photo that proves they were there.  That the poor animal died was of little consequence, as soon the crowds died down and people stopped coming, but there was a question of what to do with that enormous creature that was still stuck on the beach.  The best civic minds apparently thought that blowing the creature up was the best policy, which excited people in the near vicinity, as everyone showed up for the demolition, cameras ready, in another chaotic frenzy, where it was once again the talk of the town.  Of course, like all the other ideas, this one didn’t go so well, but it may have been the magical event that eventually motivated Jeff and Melly to finally make their way out of town and start new lives elsewhere.  

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #4 Holy Motors

HOLY MOTORS            A 

France  Germany  (115 mi)  2012  d:  Léos Carax

My guess is the more experience you have with cinema, the more you’ll like this film, which defies any narrative construction, yet continually exhilarates in its pure love and devotion to film language, much of it feeling like bits and pieces of old films all strewn together like broken parts to make something completely new.  Those with a need for rational explanation need not enter here, as to many this will simply not make sense, but certainly anyone who does give this a try can’t help but be blown away by the sheer originality and mad energy of the movie itself.  In other words you don’t even have to like it, but you can appreciate the unbridled joy with which this film was made, almost like a love letter to cinema itself.  Carax was once the boy wunderkind of cinema, where at 24 his first film Boy Meets Girl (1984), shot in black and white on location in Paris, won the Youth Award at Cannes, while his next Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) was a post New Wave primary color extravaganza that won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, an award given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art.  Given a free reign over his next project, the boy wonder’s cost overruns created the most expensive French production in history, where production was halted several times before finally releasing the extravagant The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) (1991), a sumptuous and romantic tribute to both Paris and lead actress Juliette Binoche, which was a colossal flop in Paris, not released internationally until 1999, thirteen years after his previous film.  When his next film POLA X (1999) was a huge flop as well, his career was all but finished, where we heard literally nothing about the man throughout the next decade, returning another thirteen years later to Cannes with this mammoth work that literally defies description, but is so ingeniously wacky that parts of the movie are simply off-the-charts hilarious, once again starring Denis Lavant as the director’s alter ego and stand-in for the creative force required to make an art film in the modern era.

This devoutly uninhibited film has such an edgy, stream-of conscious style that it likely summons different thoughts and ideas inside every head that shares this film experience, which plays out more like performance art, where Lavant is an outrageous chameleon-like character who literally takes on various disguises and different theatrical personas as he injects himself into the streets of Paris causing mayhem wherever he goes.  What’s intriguing straightaway is the viewer questions whether this character is even real or whether it’s some form of visiting spirit from a world beyond.  While this may not make sense to some, but it was reminiscent of The Phantom of the Opera, a scarred or disfigured character hidden from the world due to some deep personal tragedy or loss, living instead in a subterranean or alternate universe, which seems to be a blend of the future mixing with the past, where the connecting thread is the pure unadulterated joy of cinema.  Lavant is known by a half a dozen different names, but he’s driven around the streets of Paris in a white stretch limousine, where Édith Scob, the aged star of a French horror film more than 50 years ago, Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), is the driver, also dressed all in white, including the color of her hair.  She may as well be the driver of dead souls, as she transports Lavant around town where he sits in the back and receives 8 daily case assignments one at a time, literally transforming himself into character for each assignment, where the limo is largely a dressing room on wheels, where Lavant spends most of his time getting perfectly into disguise, becoming the manifestation of faded roles from cinema history which might die out altogether if he didn’t attempt to resuscitate them back into the modern world.  Much like the use of memories in Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienb... (1961), which may die if not remembered, Lavant seems to be the reincarnation of near dead movie roles, literally attempting to breathe new life into them, but taken completely out of context when set on modern streets, where he is literally out of place, out of time, where people on the street are aghast at what they see.  

The mix of fabulously designed set pieces and on-site locations are part of the brilliance of the film, as Carax does create an otherworldly impression throughout, where never for a single moment does anyone in the audience have any idea what’s happening next, where the built-up intrigue of these imaginary characters and what they’re doing returning back to earth is befuddling to say the least, where even the actors onscreen seem in complete bewilderment at Lavant.  In one assignment, like a creature from the silent era, Lavant turns into a little green Leprechaun with bright orange hair, a hideous creature that never utters a word but instead makes weird animal sounds.  When he crawls out of a sewer and leaps into a crowd on the street, people back away in disgust, where a high fashion photographer is taking photos of Eva Mendes as an haute-cuture fashion model, a statuesque figure of beauty, but this beastly creature instantly grabs the photographer’s attention, where he orders one of his underlings to immediately sign the creature up for a photo shoot.  When she attempts to communicate with the monster, she ridiculously attempts to relate by asking if he’s ever heard of Diane Arbus, famous for taking pictures of giants, dwarfs, and other freaks of nature.  Lavant simply grabs the model and carries her off into his lair in the sewers beneath the city that exists in stillness and in silence.  In such a short period of time, the marvel of invention that occurs in front of the camera in this one sequence is wildly imaginative and extremely cinematic, using rousing music in much the same way there are frequent cinema homages, as Carax is simply re-inventing cinema by reconnecting all the unused pieces, much like reassembling all the broken body parts of mannequins that we see strewn around the empty warehouse settings.

Midway through his day, Lavant’s assignment book reads “Entracte,” or intermission, conjuring up quick images on early archival black and white film stock of a shirtless man peforming before a crowd, like a circus act, which quickly cuts to Lavant leading a march of accordion players "Let my Baby Ride" by Doctor L (RL Burnside Cover)- Holy Motors OST  YouTube (3:20), an utterly enthralling piece of music that literally comes out of nowhere adding a sense of exhilaration to the film.  Who knows where Carax comes up with these ideas, where Lavant enters a Tati-like modern glass designed skyscraper dressed in a glow in the dark outfit where he does outrageous MATRIX-like dances in a darkened room, where he receives instructions from an unseen voice, like Warren Beatty in Mickey One (1965), becoming highly experimental using a dazzling strobe light effect, eventually joined by a shapely woman contortionist who can bend her body like a pretzel, with Lavant somewhere entwined.  Using two cinematographers, Yves Cape and Caroline Champetier, the streets of Paris often become hallucinogenic-tinged, or the shapes of buildings literally melt, creating phantasmagoric images of a reality unfolding into itself, where the world is seen in utter transformation.  Purely by chance, Lavant runs into an old flame, where he wanted to use Binoche, who apparently would not agree, so director Claire Denis suggested he use Kylie Minogue, where they have an extended sequence together that feels altogether unworldly on the rooftops of Paris, a direct reference to Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001) that starred Minogue, literally bringing in film segments from every bit of the director’s own imagination.  This may be too much for some, who may wonder what in the hell is going on, but this is a quintessential dip into the collective subconscious history of cinema, where the entire movie is a subliminal flash in time, spliced together using bits of broken pieces, where the finale with Lavant finally at home, innocently looking out his window at night feels like he’s just a kid waiting for the arrival of Peter Pan.