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Kiss or Kill
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Australian
cinema is on the road again. It’s a journalistic commonplace to point out how
many recent Australian films take the form of a journey and, more specifically,
are fully-fledged road movies. Through
one of those strange processes of synchronicity that regularly affects film
production (or distribution/exhibition), three separate contemporaneous
releases take on a quite specific sub-genre of the road movie: lovers on the run, in which a criminal
couple (or a small band of outsiders) heads off across the wide open landscape,
with diverse interested parties, from both sides of the law, in pursuit. I’m
thinking of True Love and Chaos (Stavros Kazantzidis, 1997), Heaven's Burning (Craig Lahiff,
1997) and now Kiss or Kill, both written
and directed by Bill Bennett. Kiss or
Kill is a very impressive movie – surprisingly impressive, I’d have to say,
given that I haven’t liked any of Bennett’s previous work. For me, it’s the
best Australian feature since Lawrence Johnston’s Life (1996).
We
shouldn’t be too rigid in applying labels like road movie or lovers-on-the-run,
because it’s easy to end up blaming a film for not meeting every supposed rule
of some purely imaginary model set up in advance. The happy fact is that the
road movie is a gloriously diverse and impure tradition – and Australian movies
partake of this impurity, for better and for worse. There’s an art-film end of
the road movie spectrum: all those plotless, wandering pieces about lost souls
looking for home or identity, from Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders and Aki
Kaurismäki through to some quite notable Australian films, such as Ian Pringle’s Wrong World (1985) and Esben Storm’s In Search of Anna (1978). The opposite
end of the road movie spectrum is its yahoo, action-adventure side: the chase
or heist film, all those Smokey and the
Bandit-type comedies, and the apocalyptic Mad Max-type sagas about modern-day
warriors burning rubber around some disputed, barren territory. And once you
put together an idea for a road movie that mixes up intimate themes of loss,
longing and personal journey with cops, robbers and criminal revenge, you’ve
instantly got a stake in both ends of that spectrum.
There
tends to be one big problem with chase movies, which I first noticed in the
third Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985). The structure of chase stories tends to be rigid, linear and
repetitive: you’ve got the anti-hero lovers out front, zooming down the road,
and a motley crew of pursuers – violent villains, bumbling cops, concerned
family members – usually two steps behind. The challenge with this kind of
structure is to find ways to anticipate the next road-stop or refer back to a
previous one; to cleverly interlink the various incidents and characters,
rather than just have a string of episodes unwinding one after another,
happening to each of the characters in turn. The episodic, picaresque,
rambling, open-ended structure is what you find in art-film road movies like
Monte Hellman’s masterpiece Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971), or the great Wim Wenders films of the 1970s, such as Alice in the Cities (1974); it works well there, but frequently not so well in any
movie where the filmmaker is trying to create and sustain tension or intrigue. (Even
Wenders himself has collided with this problem in his subsequent, more
mainstream work.)
Kiss or Kill goes to work on this
problem in a very clever way. The story is essentially about two young crooks,
Al (Matt Day) and Nikki (Frances O’Connor), both of whom are an interesting mixture
of grimy ordinariness and charismatic glamour. After scamming a guy in a hotel
(he suddenly drops dead), these two good-looking operators hit the road, taking
with them a videotape found in the dead man’s suitcase. That tape shows the
Australian celebrity, an ex-sports star with the memorable name of Zipper Doyle
(Barry Langrishe), in the middle of highly incriminating, illegal acts. So
Zipper is now after our heroes, as are two cops, who thankfully aren’t the
regulation bumbling cops we saw for instance in Bennett’s previous film, the
woeful Two If By Sea (1996).
The
trick to Kiss or Kill’s narrative is
that, as various characters are encountered along the road, they start existing
and interrelating in their own mysterious little story of intrigue, passion and
murder. This is an Australian film where, for a change, the quirky folks at
every stopover are actually interesting, compelling and enigmatic. A bold touch
of soap opera is added: as when Nikki, in repeated scenes as a sleepwalker,
relives a shocking primal, childhood trauma. The bottom-line is this: people
keep dying and everyone suspects everyone else of doing the killing.
One
of the most satisfying things about Kiss
or Kill is its grasp of a theme, and how every incident or character
relates to that central thematic core. Why should I make a special point of
this? Don’t most movies routinely have a basic theme or subject? Alas, no – and
less and less so all the time, it seems. Themes are one of the most basic
elements of drama, and most stories (in whatever medium) should be very clearly organised around those themes. In point of fact,
I often get tired of the very conventional way that most narrative films
announce their extremely basic ideas, and then play them out in a plodding,
simplistic fashion, as if they were morality fables. As a result, I find myself
eagerly grasping for more unusual movies that have a very dispersed central
theme, such as Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996); or secretive, hidden themes,
as in David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996).
But
the sad fact is that, when it comes to Australian films, we are faced with two
equally grim options. Either our movies have moral-fable themes – I’m thinking
of Cosi (Mark Joffe, 1996) or River Street (Tony Mahood, 1997) – that
collapse down into a proverb or injunction: love one another, life goes on,
forgive your folks, keep on truckin’; or else they have hardly any central
animating theme at all. Our local road movies are particularly prone to this
meandering, episodic, theme-less ride, where there’s nothing to give shape and resonance
to individual scenes and events. There is also a third option, just as bad: in
many Australian movies, there is a vague fan or array of themes – trust, family,
race, sex, memory, hope – but no central core whatsoever (True Love and Chaos is an example of such all-in thematic vagueness).
Now,
I don’t want a theme that can be summed up in a proverb. Real themes in fiction
don’t work like that; a theme is not so much a statement as a subject or,
better still, a question. (See here for a
good example.) A theme is genuinely dramatised in a mosaic way: the subject is considered first from one angle, then
another, and these different aspects or perspectives – often embodied in the
various characters – are put into subtle relations of contrast, comparison and
paradox. When you look back, in awestruck admiration, at the great classical
films of the past – Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, 1947), Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) or Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) – you can see this careful, complex playing-out, this
embodying of the theme in actions, events and dialogue; as well as in the film’s
style, in the shifting perspectives that the filmmaker takes up towards his or
her material.
Kiss or Kill has a real theme. It’s
the theme of never really knowing another person – even the person seemingly
closest to you. It’s about that fundamental mystery, that ambiguity in human
behaviour; we could call it the irreducible otherness of every other person,
which can be as unsettling or frightening as it is alluring and desirable. Everything
in the narrative of Kiss or Kill relates, in an ongoing, exploratory way, to this theme – and, as I’ve
suggested, this basic level of satisfying dramatic organisation is rare in our
national cinema. Bennett has talked in press interviews about how he tried to
write it for years, how he’s lived with it and struggled to find its form; and,
especially, how it sprang from the seed of a single, formative, traumatic
incident: when a co-worker pulled a knife on him and, for an interminable
moment, Bennett didn’t know whether the gesture was a joke or deadly serious.
So
the plot of Kiss and Kill, from its
opening comic scenes of Al and Nikki scamming the oily businessman, constantly
foregrounds a certain theatrical performance of self in everyday life – except
that, as in the films of Robert Altman, this role-play tends to obscure more
about people than it reveals; masquerade only prolongs the psychological mystery.
The only part of this film that rang false for me was an unnecessary voice-over
narration in the penultimate scene, where Nikki laboriously spells out the
central thematic concerns in the purplest of prose. The final scene, however,
gets the movie back on track.
The
style that Bennett has used for Kiss and
Kill is bold, intricate and effective – best of all, it’s consistent and
systematic from start to end (another rarity in Australian cinema). He employs
a particularly nervy and frenetic form of jump-cutting that keeps taking us
from the very start and to the very end of inessential actions: people getting
out of cars, eating meals, reading newspapers … All that kind of thing is
skipped in a blink, so that the movie becomes an unbroken chain of vivid
moments. For added fragmentation, Bennett uses bits of different takes from
slightly different angles, throwing strict visual continuity to the wind. Of
course, this is not exactly a new procedure: films from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) to Oliver Stone’s Natural Born
Killers (1994) have used it just as extensively – and Alain Resnais’
brilliant Muriel (1963) already took
the extreme-condensation-of-essentials experiment to its absolute limit 34
years previously.
What
makes the visual style in Kiss or Kill intriguing and effective, however, is the way it interacts, in a volatile combustion,
with the acting style and the soundtrack. Bennett, as is well known, includes a
great deal of improvisation – here, in fact, none of the dialogue was written
in advance, only the action of the scenes. As in the early, independent work of
Nick Gomez (Drowning Mona, 2000), Bennett deliberately uses his editing to extract the
purest, most intense moments of such on-the-fly exchanges, meanwhile pushing
his visual style toward a type of expressionistic action painting: all movement
and sudden breaks, swirls and spirals of emotion.
In
a particularly inspired twist, Bennett clearly decided that, whatever control
or continuity he lost in the acting and framing, he was going to restore in the
sound. Every moment of Kiss or Kill,
every word and sound effect, is post-synchronised. The moody, disquieting
calmness and consistency of Kiss or Kill on this aural plane is further clinched by the fact that it is one of the few
films that has absolutely no composed musical score whatsoever; only the low
hum or quiet wall of noise that comes with the rendering of rooms, landscapes
and machinery. This integrated stylistic ensemble of image and sound is an
enormous success; only the occasional intrusion of some murky lighting in a few
key scenes jars our involvement, as if Bennett and his cinematographer Malcolm
McCulloch fitfully aimed for an Aussie B movie variant on the classic American noir
look.
The
mixture of an international style and theme (the sexy-violent mystery-thriller lovers-on-the-run
combo) with a recognisably laconic Australian humour and sense of social
observation works for me in Kiss or Kill – where it has rarely worked before. Even the inclusion of an Aboriginal
tracker, introduced in the middle of the investigation, registers not as the
usual token, politically correct nod toward multiculturalism, but something
that works in its own funny and exciting terms.
Kiss or Kill is a local movie
that we don’t have to talk up with special pleading or precious, protective
analysis. That’s a welcome change in the Australian film scene – as well as a
sturdy sign of life.
MORE (and lesser) Bennett: Deck Dogz, The Nugget, In a Savage Land © Adrian Martin July 1997 |
