Life

(Lawrence Johnston, Australia, 1996)

I’ve given some hard, critical reviews to Australian films in my time. And let me tell you, it’s a fraught area, reviewers talking about “our”, locally produced films. I just want to let you know that, to adapt the words of an Aretha Franklin song, I take it like I give it.

After my (I thought pretty fair) review of Metal Skin (1995), its director Geoffrey Wright went on national, live television to recommend a lobotomy for me. And, just as publicly (but in print), Jane Campion – no less – called me the “sneering hangman” among film reviewers, for my piece on Love Serenade (1996). How flattering, all this attention!

I’ve come not to bury an Australian film, but to praise it. It’s Lawrence Johnston’s Life, among the best Australian movies of the 1990s.

It begins with a force and a daring that I have rarely encountered in this national cinema. First up, we read, printed on screen, a solemn quotation from John Donne’s “Devotions”, a poem about life, death and the bonds of human community. There’s serious, synthesised, symphonic music by John Clifford-White. Then, images begin – slowly, seeping in from the darkness, as so many of the film’s images will do.

We see the face of a man (played by John Brumpton), and he opens his eyes, as if to begin some solemn, religious ritual. Then his mental images appear: a woman dancing naked – we learn later that she is, in fact, a stripper he knows. As this guy’s hands wander sensually over his own body, we realise that he is masturbating, and that the film is conjuring his auto-erotic fantasy. A dissolve takes us to the sight of this character languid after the act, and then we are confronted with the stark but mysterious title: that one word, Life.

That is a fantastic way to start a film. What a confronting mixture: High Art poetry (the kind you learn to recite in school), and then the spectacle of male masturbation in a jail cell. And that mixture equals life: life itself, life and nothing but!

Immediately, my mind cast back to a passage in one of my all-time favourite books, Michel Leiris’ perverse, extraordinary autobiography Manhood (1939). Leiris writes, in his typically calm and intense way, about a little something he once did while on a holiday.

In 1927, visiting Olympia during a trip to Greece, I could not resist the desire to offer a libation of a particular kind to the ruins of the Temple of Zeus. I remember that it was a beautiful, sunny day, that there were many sounds of insects, and that the air smelled of pine, and I still see the intimate offering flowing down the soft gray stone. I had the distinct sense – not at all literary, but really spontaneous – that I had offered a sacrifice, with all that this word implies of the mystical and the intoxicating. (University of Chicago Press edition, 1984, trans. Richard Howard, p. 28)

We’ll return to this strange, shotgun marriage of the profane and the sacred.

On a more mundane level, the title Life refers to life imprisonment. More specifically, the story concerns a group of prisoners who are being held in the HIV-positive section of this jail. So, life immediately signifies its opposite: death. These men have gone to prison to serve their time, but then discover that AIDS has handed them a death sentence.

Much of the film shows these guys simply “doing time” (its one nod to the prison film genre). They mark their days and nights, pacing up and down, talking tersely and haltingly, exercising, remembering their previous lifestyles. And dreaming. Johnston gives us a panorama of men, isolated in their cells, in lyrical montage scenes – a little in the Kryzstof Kieślowski mode, with the filmmaker joining up lost souls in some, almost mystical or virtual community. Or – more earthily – the model could be Jean Genet’s remarkable short (and sole attempt at hands-on filmmaking), Un chant d’amour (1950).

Yet Life, designed by Sarah Stollman (who worked on What I Have Written [1996] as well as films by Todd Haynes, John Waters and Hal Hartley) also gives us another way of viewing and observing these men in a highly stylised set, with its blood-red floors and transparent walls. Out of this mosaic, two central characters emerge – Des (Brumpton) and Ralph (David Tredinnick).

Life has been adapted for the screen by Johnston and Brumpton from the latter’s play, Containment. It would be far too easy to reduce the material to a worthy, ultra-topical, social-issue piece fit for kicking off classroom discussions – a consciousness-raising drama about prison conditions, the treatment of AIDS, and the homophobia entrenched in Australian society. Those issues are there, embedded in the narrative, but there’s much more going on. In particular, the solemn, ritualistic, quasi-spiritual air raises the drama to a higher level – the level where the deepest, truest themes of the film reside. And these themes are secretive, mysterious, frankly existential.

Let’s take, for starters, the theme of gay/queer sexuality. Johnston is well known in the Australian independent cinema scene as the director of the remarkable long short (or short feature) Night Out (1989) – another work that moves from a social-issue plane (homophobia and gay-bashing) to an intimate, intense plane of human relationships. It’s a bit like the gay film that John Cassavetes could never have made.

Should we rush to instantly label Life a gay/queer film? Yes and no, because we should remember that, in-between Night Out and Life, Johnston made the lyrical documentary Eternity (1994) about Arthur Stace – not at all gay-themed. Johnston is a filmmaker bigger and more interesting than the narrow boxes some journalists casually place him in. Johnston does avow, however, that, for him, Life is a film about masculinity – especially Australian, working-class models of male behaviour. There is some fairly schematic material here reminiscent of Robert Altman’s Streamers (1983) or, indeed, many films since the 1970s that deal with men thrown together in war, at boot camp, or in prison: the type of drama that tries to point up how men deny whatever homosexual desire they might harbour, and the aggro, defensive, blokey modes of behaviour that serve to cover this denial. In Life, this is especially evident in the dining hall scenes: in the violent way that guys tell jokes and end up either bonding in a somewhat hysterical, tense way – or beating the crap out of each other.

Like in an entire modern tradition of American cinema – Martin Scorsese, James Toback, Michael Cimino – the dialogue in Life shows a fine ear for the intricate patterns of verbal abuse between men, the words that flatten, deny and stop dead any real emotions lurking under the surface. These words function like many of the images: lonely little missiles, shots in the dark, making their mark and then dying away.

But this is not a film about that great over-simplification, repressed homosexuality – as if every male in existence is or was secretly gay (or, as in the Freudian schema, constitutionally bisexual at birth). We need to distinguish carefully (certainly more carefully than happens in much mainstream discourse) between the homosexual, the homoerotic, and the homo-social. Some of the most intense and affectionate looks at male friendship in movies – Gary Sinise’s underrated version of Of Mice and Men (1992), for instance – aren’t necessarily haunted by hidden gay scenarios. They might be about men’s love for each other, or their deep sense of comfort and security in being with each other – but that is quite different from the all-purpose conspiracy theory of repressed/outlawed gayness in a sham, straight world.

The sexual feelings and relations that develop between these characters in Life are fluid and complex. To use the terminology that has come into vogue over the 1990s, it’s more a queer film than a strictly gay one – queer here referring to that quality of fluidity, a constant shifting of sexual identity and desire. In some militantly queer films (I am thinking of several by Haynes), this fluidity is (I feel) imposed on the characters, as if the movie is the demonstration-illustration of an attractive theoretical idea. That makes for so-called radical movies which are implacably dead and schematic.

But if there’s queerness in Life, it’s because of the human pressures, drives and anxieties released in this situation of mortal confinement. After all, these men arrived at this prison, and contracted the AIDS virus, through diverse paths. And they start out from different points on the spectrum of male sexuality. What they do and how they cope once they’re in this place together, how they change, how they decide to relate to one another – that’s the drama they must negotiate in real terms. Johnston himself made the comment, in a Cinema Papers interview, that there’s a “prison type of homosexuality” which is a “separate ... to gay sexuality”; that comment reflects a close understanding of how variable and contingent erotic identities can be.

Johnston’s treatment of the spectacle of dying is similarly complex. This is not a melancholic piece about disease, decay and the wasting of vitality (as a number of AIDS films or disease-of-the-week trauma-telemovies surely are). On the contrary, and provocatively, Life is a quite voluptuous, ecstatic film about life in extremis. Tawdry sexual fantasies, drug taking, even desperate acts of violence are rendered with a tough, poetic edge; they are made somewhat sublime.

Especially notable here is the remarkable way that Johnston frames, lights and films the human body, in collaboration with gifted cinematographer Mandy Walker (Return Home, 1990). These are bodies suffused with light, picked out in the prevailing darkness, bodies grasped at the most commanding angles with their postures, attitudes and gestures memorialised for us.

There are some structural problems and overwrought dramatic elements in the script. It’s hard to sustain a story on a string of flashbacks that are fairly conventionally cued for the viewer – even Michael Powell’s films of the 1940s had more daring ways of leaping backward in time than we see here.

On the content level, there are aspects that reminded me of Metal Skin – histrionic, melodramatic, almost hysterical touches, such as the rather shocking scene of one prisoner’s self-mutilation; as well as an entire, important thread concerning a bullish, homophobic guard played by Ian Scott (the resolution of which provides a whammy ending).

But, even in these scenes, Johnston’s manner of directing is to deliver the events swiftly or delicately, with an effect that instantly flares up and disappears – he doesn’t linger on the sensationalism of it, as the lobotomy advocate Mr Wright loves to do.

Life is ultimately carried by the strength and focus of its overall direction. The style is at once minimal, lyrical and emotionally intense. For me, this style evoked a near-magical combination of Carl Dreyer’s mystical Ordet (1955), Chant d’amour, and the searingly physical masculine dramas directed by Sean Penn (such as The Crossing Guard, 1995). I may never have connected these three filmmakers in my mind, if it wasn’t for Life!

On that note, a further and final reflection. I’ve become aware of a special cinema world where the most painful, the ugliest, the sleaziest experiences of the flesh – witch burning, striptease, carking it on a deathbed, sharing a cigarette through a hole in a prison wall, furtive masturbation – are transmuted from the profane to the sacred, from the dirty to the poetic. This is a vision in which our general idea of beauty is qualified, but also strangely enhanced, by imagining it in the muckiest, lowliest circumstances possible – situations where human impulses are more connected to the ground and the gutter than to the stars in the sky.

It's a world marked and defined by limits and compromise, disillusion and failure – but still, for all that, redeemed in the eye of cinema. Is this what Siegfried Kraceur, a film theorist of bygone days, was thinking about when he described cinema as offering a redemption of physical reality? Whatever the case, that’s the kind of redemption through art that we most sorely need when the spectre of AIDS touches our fragile, daily lives.

2025 Postscript: After working in the late ‘90s with a French producer on an Australian comedy (in the vein of A Night at the Roxbury, 1998) that never came to fruition, Lawrence Johnston’s career has, to date, mainly stayed within the field of the lyrical and/or personal documentary, as well as within the borders of the nation: in particular I note The Dream of Love (2005), reflecting on the director’s family roots; Neon (2015) and Night (2007), both in the vein of Eternity (itself restored by the National Film and Sound Archive to its full image-and-sound splendour in 2019); and Fallout (2013), which delves into the juicy production and reception history of Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959).

© Adrian Martin 26 October 1996 (+ 2025 update)