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Fistful of Flies
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Although
it is too little recognised and acknowledged, Australian cinema has a strong,
subterranean tradition of the Gothic and grotesque. This tradition captures the
national pastime of self-loathing at its most intense and feverishly inventive
– all those shorts and features in which suburbia deadens, nuclear families are
sick, sexual congress is disgusting, and even the youngest, firmest body is
seized by spectacular decay.
Monica
Pellizzari’s Fistful of Flies may be
the last word in Australian grotesquerie. At least, one hopes so. The film
certainly has the courage of its dark convictions. It is bold, strident,
exhibitionistic, hyper-stylised. Every image is shot like a horror story and
scored like a melodrama. Visual metaphors – particularly those pesky bugs of
the title – proliferate in florid inserts and expressionistic dream-images. The
net result overloads and short-circuits badly. It seems also to have spelt the
end for Pellizzari’s career in cinema and TV, when she had scarcely reached her
mid 30s. (Note for the historical record: one subsequent academic thesis
declared that the film received “heated criticism from male critics”; and
another account suggests that, while “European audiences have responded well to
this film, Australian reviewers have been negative”. Australian male film
critic, hello!)
Fistful of Flies presents a curious mixture: a pronounced taste for the film medium’s histrionic
genres (horror and melodrama – it isn’t surprising that the film premiered at
Spain’s Gijón festival of the fantastique),
combined with an evident aspiration to art cinema. And all that wrapped up in
some very banal, static and underdeveloped diagrams of character interaction.
Mars
(Tasma Walton) is a teenager caught in a stultifying country town and a
horrifying family environment. Her father, Joe (John Lucantonio), is Patriarchy
incarnate: violent, bullish, sexually rapacious. Her mother, Grace (Dina
Panozzo), is a twitching, repressed neurotic who takes out her frustrations on
the children. Every aspect of Mars’ world – down to the last, garish lawn
statue – reinforces her and our sense of its apocalyptic awfulness.
The
film’s minimal plot details Mars’ inaugural attempts to carve a free space for
herself in this hellish milieu. In its unending carnival of nightmares, Fistful of Flies resembles the loud,
histrionic Italian comedies of the 1960s (such as Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned [1964]) – except
that Pellizzari’s overt stabs at humour (as when a Catholic priest places
racing bets on his mobile phone while hearing confessional) are the very
weakest scenes.
The
film is full of flagrant absurdities that travel under the dim alibi of
anti-realism. When the young Mars is fascinated by the sight of dogs
copulating, Grace places a sack over her head, rather than simply distracting
her attention. When the teenage Mars shocks her family by wearing tampons for
earrings at a family gathering, no one present even orders her to remove them.
And when Grace finally rebels against her evil husband, her speech takes on a
ribald dimension that is completely out-of-character.
Through
her acclaimed shorts Rabbit on the Moon (1987), No No Nonno (1990) and Just Desserts (1993), Pellizzari garnered
ongoing attention as a progressive, feminist, multicultural artist. But how
progressive is a film that appears to despise almost every aspect of the human
condition, including the Italo-Australian culture (the director’s own
background) it so extravagantly satirises? Pellizzari’s vision is clearly
fuelled by righteous rage and indignation – which has undoubtedly been, in
other hands, the source of some great cinema.
But
the ultimate undoing of this project comes when Pellizzari tries to affirm
something positive amid all the relentless negativity. The film hands out
brownie points to lesbianism, female masturbation, inter-generational
sisterhood and wishy-washy, New Age ego-stroking – but the images that embody
such glowing rapture are dead, the least original and imaginative of the entire
movie.
Fistful of Flies is at
its most passionate when it is hard and cruel: that is its mean distinction.
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