 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Jenny Kissed Me
|
 |
|
In an essay in The
Australian Screen (Penguin, 1989) titled “The Fairest Child of the
Motherland”, William Routt explores the frequently intense, ambiguous and even
perverse relationships between fathers and daughters in Australian cinema –
particularly during the 1920s and ‘30s. He refers, however, to the much-later Jenny Kissed Me as “perhaps the single
most extreme example of the father-daughter sub-genre”. And he’s absolutely
right.
It plunges us, right from the start, into a volatile
character triangle: Carol (Deborra-Lee Furness), a frustrated housewife
stagnating in a sleepy country town; her moody young daughter, Jenny (Tamsin
West); and the de facto partner, Lindsay (Ivar Kants) – who appears to care
more (certainly more intensely) for Jenny than for Carol. What’s more, Jenny
reciprocates the preference.
Urged on by her old pal (and high-class prostitute from
the city), Gaynor (Carmen Duncan), Carol has a tryst with her neighbour. During
this, a storm rages, leaving Jenny alone, crying out for “Dad!” Lindsay is
moved to rage by this and other of Carol’s actions, which he takes as proof of
her inability to be a “proper” mother. Their relationship then becomes violent
and impossible to sustain.
Carol flees to the city with Jenny in tow, duly
becoming a prostitute and getting entangled with a drug-pushing pimp. Lindsay,
for his part, searches the city in vain for his little golden girl, while he
slowly dies from cancer. Ultimately, after a strident court battle, Carol and
Lindsay are married at his deathbed. In a coda back at the country home, mother
and daughter are finally united in love.
I re-tell the plot of this film in such detail
(against my usual practice) because it is one that so few people have seen, or
are able to see; as the Oz Movies website drolly reports, it “doesn’t appear to have jumped the digital divide”
after its initial TV screenings and VHS release of the 1980s or ‘90s. But hope
springs eternal – even in the 21st century era when the
“Ozploitation” cult on DVD and elsewhere leans far more heavily toward the
unproblematically masculine action genres (in which Trenchard-Smith usually
worked) than an odd, melodramatic fish like Jenny
Kissed Me. Not all “trash”, it would seem, is equally redeemable by
denizens of the cult-movie crowd.
Beyond its crisp and efficient direction
(Trenchard-Smith is deft at cutting on movement), what makes the film intriguing,
even fascinating, is precisely the vein of B movie melodrama (an aspect which,
as Oz Movies suspects, indeed
“beguiled” me: beware – it would seem – the seductive wiles of this feminine
genre!). There is virtually no conventional or legible psychology; only a
series of action-packed, sometimes barely motivated, behavioural “moves” by
characters maintained, for the most part, as walking stereotypes. That would
serve, moreover, as a description of a great deal of good and under-sung cinema
that lands between diverse genres.
The film’s moral stance toward what it shows is
extremely opaque and fluctuating. The script would seem to essentially take
Lindsay’s side, as a loving, caring, selfless father-figure – as opposed to
Carol, who is presented as the philandering, selfish, literally whoring Bad
Mother. This would fully tally with a lumpy trend in 1980s popular cinema, and
beyond: the melodrama of male pathos,
where guys (and especially fathers), feeling themselves victimised by feminism,
lose contact with their kids. It was (probably still is) the “weepie” side of
the Iron John masculinist movement in
New Age circles. Hence the necessary recourse to melodrama in Jenny Kissed Me – mixed up with a few
outbursts of action.
As it plays, however, the film’s central triangle is
far more ambiguous than a straightforwardly anti-feminist tearjerker for blokey
blokes. Carol is, at times, an extremely sympathetic character, while Lindsay’s
single-minded obsession for Jenny registers, much more often, as excessive and
“unnatural” (as Carol flatly suggests) – if we follow the conventional social
logic that Jenny is not his “biological” child. Almost inevitably, therefore –
given the terms in which the melodrama is set up – the film trembles with a
strange, disquieting, largely unspoken theme of incest. That is why it is the
“single most extreme” case in Routt’s survey.
When, finally, Carol simply takes Lindsay’s place in
Jenny’s affections by repeating the same, ritualistic words and gestures of
love that he performed earlier, the drama seems not at all resolved, but left
still gaping open, in suspense – as if, now, the mother-daughter relationship
has become just as perversely charged as the previous filial arrangement.
Jenny Kissed Me’s undeniably
compelling level of intensity is caught in the verse – the second half of the 18th century romantic ode “Rondeau” by J.H. Leigh Hunt – that is inscribed on the
screen at the start, and which we hear spoken (by Lindsay!) over the ending.
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
MORE Trenchard-Smith: BMX Bandits © Adrian Martin 1991 / update February 2022 |
