Love Serenade

(Shirley Barrett, Australia, 1996)

In an important and powerful essay on personal relationships and sexuality in Australian films, Meaghan Morris remarked:

Australian cinema could scarcely be accused of promoting the virtues of life-long love and marriage. There is little or no glorification of full-blown romantic love, and none of the heightened respect for the eternal drama of the couple that defines the themes of so much European and American cinema.

These words are as true today as they were in 1980, when they were written. In many Australian films we see inscribed, with a sad and piercing clarity, a modern abyss between men and women. Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade is a witheringly comic excavation of this abyss.

Set in the miserable, small country town of Sunray that appears to have frozen in time several decades previously, the story centres on two sisters, Vicki-Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda Otto). Theirs is a quietly sado-masochistic relationship – pinched, eternal, loveless, like an Antipodean version of a Harold Pinter play. Vicki-Ann bluffs and bosses, while Dimity contorts herself into an ever-more neurotic ball. And yet they remain cemented by a dark, subterranean complicity.

Into this static, cold world comes Ken (George Shevtsov), a lugubrious, middle-aged DJ whose glory days in the big city are well behind him. Vicki-Ann begins projecting ludicrously inappropriate romantic fantasies onto Ken, but Dimity finds her way into his bed first. Now the scene is set for these superficial relationships to unravel in the most agonising fashion imaginable. There is even a touch of Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers (1988) in the revenge-plot that ensues.

Commentators over-eager to construct a new Oz genre out of a handful of quirky comedies – Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Children of the Revolution (1996) – pounced on Love Serenade as an exemplar of a mid ‘90s national Zeitgeist. And these films do have loose commonalities: an exaggerated, quasi-surreal air; a lurid fascination with Australian dagginess in all its forms; a horridly kitsch sense of fashion, architecture and interior design. But Barrett’s feature debut (her 1988 film school short Cherith garnered attention and acclaim) has its own, distinct focus.

Love Serenade has been compared to the oeuvre of Mike Leigh, particularly his modestly scaled, bitingly ironic comedies such as Life is Sweet (1990). There is a similar, excruciating texture of endless little humiliations, daily stupidities and the endless drone of humdrum lives. More confrontingly, Barrett also reinforces Leigh’s sardonic, somewhat despairing depiction of the sexes: men are sleazy monsters, and women are their neurotic victims. Barrett trains an unforgiving eye upon the embarrassing ugliness of the sexual encounter, with its mucky, base physicality.

As you may gather, Love Serenade is not meant to be a warm-hearted, humanist, optimistic movie! It belongs to something we might well call a cinema of cruelty – the kind that depicts human relations always in the light of the darker, baser, more decadent emotions and drives like envy, jealousy, revenge, exploitation, seduction, corruption and abuse. Everybody looks, acts and sounds rather ‘dim’ (hence the name Dimity).

The actors certainly grasp the quasi-grotesque performance style required for this material. Miranda Otto’s body language is particularly eloquent, within a tradition of mucky self-loathing: her limb motions are withdrawn and ungainly, she hardly opens her mouth when she speaks, her vocal emissions sound like gargling …

Barrett’s way of staging scenes partakes of this generalised ambience of cruelty. Study, for instance, the protracted visual gag that cross-cuts repeatedly between Ken sitting smug and stone-faced on the couch, while Dimity nervously strips for him. Even the wall-to-wall pop songs (some of them insistently repeated) – hypnotic, cyclical, sleazy disco hits from the 1970s by Barry White and others – convey a puerile attitude towards sex that soon becomes deliberately grating for the audience.

There is a particular presentation of emotional-sexual life offered here: if the private acts between couples don’t literally become public (through spying, witnessing, confessing, rumour and gossip) they are made public, cinematically, by the insistent recourse to parallel montage, which always draws connections and comparisons, building a collective context (usually heavily ironic).

I will confess: I did not much like Love Serenade on a first viewing in October 1996, and I said so, in no uncertain terms, in newspaper print – thereby triggering a ferocious (but, fortunately for me, ultimately unsuccessful) campaign against me and my weekly reviewing job led by no less a figure than Jane Campion, a result of her close connection to the film’s producer, Jan Chapman. Campion dubbed me the “Smiling Hangman” of film reviewers (thanks, Jane) – and concluded her lengthy tirade with the assertion that, on the day I dare make a film myself, she’ll be first in the queue to support my post-critical efforts! A nice rhetorical move, that one.

Judge for yourself! My single-star review began:

Begging to differ with the jury of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival – and risking the inevitable charge of Tall Poppy Syndrome – I must declare my hand: Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade is a poor film.

And I didn’t stop there!

This is a repetitive and laboured movie on every level. It has the feel of a 50-minute script forcibly stretched to feature length, resulting in an unbearable amount of padding. Visual gags are terribly protracted, beyond endurance point. The hyper-kitsch 1970s disco songs are mildly funny until they come around for repeat playings on the soundtrack. And those interior design jokes are also reiterated ad nauseam.

I added a comparative craft observation.

Barrett also has a few evident problems making this tale of a DJ cinematically interesting. There are some excellent films about radio (including Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio [1988]), but this one gets quickly bogged down in views of Ken lounging in his chair watching a record spin, or fussy crane shots of the women hanging out somewhere listening to his broadcasts.

Rubbing it in, I wound things up by estimating that the film is “mildly interesting … but its welcome wears out long before the end – and its single, central touch of surrealism or magic realism (which I won’t spoil here) makes precious little thematic sense”. (I still agree with myself on that latter point.) I concluded:

A press article at the time of the film’s release, bravely alluding to the widespread difference of critical opinion it generated, rode to the defence of its ‘subtlety’. But subtlety and sound artistic judgement are precisely what Love Serenade lacks in spades.

And I have sometimes innocently wondered why some filmmakers are wary of me?

The effects of Campion & co.’s anti-me push lingered for the better part of a decade. (I was once curtly informed that I would never be invited to appear in any even vaguely Campion-related academic film-studies event in New Zealand! And that prediction has proven entirely true.) At the Melbourne public media preview of Barrett’s subsequent feature, Walk the Talk (2000), the director strode onto the stage pre-screening, angrily took the mic and demanded to know: “Is Adrian Martin in this audience?”. As it turned out, she didn’t need to worry; I liked the film (it took me two viewings to really appreciate it) and reviewed it quite positively (with a couple of critical demurrals) in that same newspaper. But it had an unusual production genesis and a distribution history that seriously disadvantaged it: American entrepreneur-producer David Geffen was so impressed with Love Serenade that he gave her total backing and freedom to make whatever she liked; alas, he was not wowed by the result, and more or less locked Walk the Talk away.

It was ten years before she got to direct another film, South Solitary (2010). Like many in Australia, her offbeat, even perverse sensibility did not correspond (I suspect) to whichever agenda was driving the official Australian funding bodies from one season to the next. So she directed many TV episodes (of Love My Way, Offspring, A Place to Call Home and others) to stay in the game, and turned to novel writing for creative expression: Rush Oh! (2015) and The Bus on Thursday (2018).

When and why did I change my mind on Love Serenade? I was pushed into reconsidering it on two occasions, both involving survey and assessment of the ‘90s decade in this national cinema, for consideration in places far from Australia. The first was for a retrospective in Denmark in 1998, and the second was for a series of lectures and seminars I was invited (by Patrice Petro) to give at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in November 1999. That ‘boomerang perspective’ – from Australia to elsewhere and back again – made me see and value the film’s peculiar qualities differently. I still think it’s a not-great movie with various craft problems (and it is thinly stretched), but it bottles a special, prickly, culturally revealing sensibility well.

Shirley Barrett died from cancer in August 2022, at the age of 61. Her final novel Mrs Hopkins will appear in 2024 from Allen & Unwin. Her website, which includes several treats (including the clip of her short-lived band The Fruit Pastilles – with Alan Gaunt, my Media Studies classmate of 1977, on synth keyboard – on Countdown in 1982) is at: https://shirleybarrett.com/.

© Adrian Martin October 1996 / August 1998 / November 1999 / February 2024