Cosi

(Mark Joffe, Australia/USA, 1996)

I am not exactly overjoyed by the Australian trend towards adapting films from successful plays. Mark Joffe’s Cosi, scripted by Louis Nowra from his 1992 play (which had the more accurately accented title Così), is a case in point. It is a strenuously feel-good movie, bursting with heart, optimism and fortune-cookie wisdom. It is also a sluggish, mechanical effort that takes the safe, middlebrow option at every turn.

Lewis (Ben Mendelsohn) is a young, mildly artistic type assigned to run the drama program in a psychiatric institution. Putting on a theatrical production with the variously dysfunctional characters in his care turns out to be harder than Lewis expected – particularly with the manic-depressive inmate Roy (Barry Otto) insisting on a full, operatic staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte (1790).

Nowra’s script demonstrates that peculiarly Aussie tempering of an upbeat American narrative formula – involving reconciliation, mutual understanding, success against impossible odds – with a very British air of daggy, laconic humour. Since the international success of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983), hybrids of this kind have become a staple of world cinema. Yet they are so often unsatisfying – half-hearted as entertainment, soft-headed as drama.

As a film, Cosi has many problems in common with Richard Franklin’s bland version of Hannie Rayson’s Hotel Sorrento (1995), as well as virtually all of the films derived from David Williamson’s plays. I am not complaining here that Cosi is stagey, confined claustrophobically to a few sets. Many great films have made an intense virtue of such a restriction.

The trouble with our recent stage adaptations lies elsewhere. Characters in largely naturalistic Australian plays tend to be outsize, two-dimensional, emblematic figures. Everything they say and do announces that they embody a certain set of social values and beliefs, a particular class position or psychological temperament.

On stage, this convention can (sometimes) work. When transported to a filmic milieu, however, such characters simply never take root. They seem like cardboard cut-outs spouting expository slogans about themselves and their world. Almost all the characters in Così come across in exactly this way.

Stage plots, too, do not always transfer well. On stage it might be easy to accept the unreal premise of Cosi: that Lewis and his group manage to bash together a wayward operatic recital at stolen hours, unseen, in a hidden-away hall. On screen, the idea strains all credibility – and this film is not nearly enough of a modern fairy tale to convince us that such verisimilitude is, in this case, beside the point.

More disturbing than this lack of cinematic nous is Cosi’s play-it-safe approach to its material. Just as the film walks a very mild-mannered line between comedy and drama, so too it strains to be slightly bold and cheeky … but never truly confronting.

For instance, Nowra and Joffe do not pussy-foot around when it comes to making a rude joke of mental disability – on this score, their film has a welcome gusto and directness, reminiscent of Andrew Denton’s televisual treatment of this (in The Year of the Patronising Bastard, 1990) and similar subjects.

But, in other areas, Cosi backs right away from the possibility of confronting its audience. Part of the frisson of this tale derives from Lewis’ growing intimacy and complicity with the inmates. Cherry (Jacki Weaver), a hilariously direct, childlike character who respects no personal borders, falls for Lewis instantly. But Cosi sees fit to pair Lewis, for the purposes of a little light romance, with the person who is the most traditionally normal of the group in both appearance and behaviour, Julie (Toni Collette).

A further, cautious note of tokenism enters the picture via a sub-plot concerning Mozart’s opera, and a running debate between characters over its ancient, perhaps misogynist values. Nowra duplicates the situation of Così fan tutte in his own story by having Lewis and his best mate, Nick (Aden Young), make a bet to test the faithfulness of Lewis’ girlfriend, Lucy (Rachel Griffiths). Here, the film looks sets to explore intriguing complications of desire and need – but scarcely anything comes of it.

There are very flat elements in Cosi. The vaguely bohemian world that is sketched – Nick’s flowery artistic pretensions, and the casual domestic relationship between Lewis and Lucy – lacks even moderate authenticity. And when the final stage performance is unveiled, it flies past too quickly, blurred by a hail of comic distractions.

Cosi is the first Australian film to receive pre-production funding from the American company Miramax. I would speculate that, for Miramax, it corresponds to a post-Local Hero style of product: modest, whimsical, impeccably humanist, and offering (at least for an American audience) the sweet taste of a small country’s seemingly old-fashioned (and hence nostalgic) lifestyle.

Just like, to put it bluntly, that other, contemporaneous monument to middlebrow taste pedalled by Miramax all the way to the Oscar ceremony: Il Postino (1994).

© Adrian Martin March 1996