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Melodrama / Random / Melbourne!
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Melodrama / Random / Melbourne! (which had its Australian Premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on October 14, 2018) is an 80 minute feature built up as a mosaic-collage; some parts
intersect and overlap, others don’t. In a sense, it’s a street-life film: it’s
on the street that people wander about, shop, talk, commit crimes, get
assaulted, shoot footage (whether as social media selfies or for documentary
projects).
Not content to have merely a multiplicity of
characters and plot situations, Pastor also generates multiple filmic styles:
the rendering of its many scenes and events ranges in tone from naturalism to
Wong Kar-wai-type neon lyricism, and from first-person-diary to mocked-up video-musical
(or rather ‘Cinema-o-ke’) segments. There are documentary scenes in
black-and-white, and dictionary definitions imprinted on screen. Throughout,
Pastor maintains good control of the material, of most of the acting
performances, and of the image/sound montage – the film has an overall clarity
that is often scarce in ultra-low-budget productions. It’s full of social and
personal rage, but it’s not punk cinema per
se.
It’s also a film with a multiplicity of voices, of
points-of-view. Angry monologues jostle alongside considered voice-over
reflections; testy interview segments give way to an editing-room discussion on
how to best represent issues of gender and race (conclusion: nobody knows).
Pastor gives us – and this is fairly unique – a breathless panorama of
Asian-Australian experience, much of it far from pretty.
From the outset, Pastor’s vision – especially as it
pertains to masculinity and female/male relations – projects a bleakness that
is hugely reminiscent of Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993). The motor
of much of the action is an unlovely little entrepreneurial business for the
Internet age named TMD or Tru Male Dynamics: here, the obnoxiously self-styled
‘Garistar’ (Elliot Ng) imparts his wisdom on how guys can be expert pick-up
artists, targeting any stray woman on the street for casual and completely
alienated sex. In one of the film’s most strikingly achieved moments, a TMD
client wanders off after a chosen girl; they cross paths with another woman
whose path the camera picks up and follows; then that second woman is suddenly
hit on by Garistar.
There are many traces of Jean-Luc Godard (new and old)
in this film – beginning from its division into three parts and topics,
although (also Godard-like), the topics spread across all parts and the section
headings are largely interchangeable (because it all happens in Melbourne,
random violence spreads everywhere, and it’s all a melodrama of one kind or
another)! Masculin féminin (1965) is another big
influence here: not only in its gender-divide theme and the constant spectacle
of senseless street violence, but also in the gunshots heard on the soundtrack,
and the play on tense durations of waiting, solitude, frazzlement. Bande à part (1964) may have suggested another of the best
moments, very early on: the time-coded countdown of a guy waiting (for exactly
three minutes) for his Internet date to show up – with, all the while, that very
woman (Bridget O’Brien as Aries, the documentarian) spying on (and timing) him
from around a nearby corner.
Like many mosaic films, Melodrama / Random / Melbourne! encounters problems sustaining
itself – the overall structure, while avoiding predictability from moment to
moment and scene to scene, nonetheless falls, eventually, into a kind of static
groove (and I did think there were a few too many cinema-o-ke scenes,
particularly when the same songs by Fergus Cronkite come around again). By the
mid-way, 40 minute mark, it’s hard not to feel that the film has already made
most of its strongest points, and is now stretching itself, playing for time.
Happily, the third part (Melbourne!) takes a different tack: more contemplative, with long,
wide takes and a dance sequence, it weaves (Tsai Ming-liang style) the
intriguing family tree of Aries, her sister Angela (Celina Yuen, also
co-scriptwriter of the project), and their mother Agnes (Rachel E. Javier) –
all of whom seem more-or-less unaware of each others’ intimate lives and
involvements, and particularly the sisters’ shared connection to the TMD
monstrosity. As Aries states in a slightly too-spelt-out monologue, in this
always-connected world of communications, we are still all too confused and
disconnected.
Along the current wave of interest in a ‘new
Australian cinema’ rising up from the underground, Melodrama / Random / Melbourne! rides high. Pastor is an energetic
and prolific filmmaker worth keeping tabs on.
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Last Time
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Also screened at the Adelaide Film Festival session
of 14 October 2018 – curated by this site’s webmaster, Bill Mousoulis
– was Allison Chhorn’s short film Last
Time (2018), which had its World Premiere screening. I shall be returning to Chhorn’s body of work as a whole,
because it is very impressive. The tone and approach of Last Time could not be more different to Pastor’s feature:
crystalline, poised, wordless, highly condensed to the point of elliptical but
suggestive mystery.
‘Last’ as in the previous, or the ultimate? That’s the
question for a woman and man (Bianca Conry and Russell Lucas) who meet up in a
car park: she waits in the vehicle, while he approaches, holding a dress that
belongs to her. The sight and thought of that dress instantly trigger memories
of touch, traces of intimacy, an everyday togetherness (enacted in that same
park) now clearly dissipated, gone. It is, in its own hushed way, a moment of
reckoning, of cleaning-up and giving-back after a relationship has ended. The
pause of the ex-boyfriend outside the car – the view is angled down onto his
shoes – speaks volumes about the awkward intensity of this all-too-familiar
situation. Chhorn takes what is mundane and universal in this scenario and
knocks it off-kilter with her finely chiselled cinematic style.
The flow of images across different moods, temporalities
and intersubjective sensations suggests an immersion in the cinema of Alain
Resnais and Claire Denis; while the remarkably composed and staged images push
into Antonioni-and-beyond territory, reminiscent of Teresa Villaverde: deframings
of bodies, blurred focus, enigmatic views of the backs of heads, reflections on
the car windscreen that overwhelm the human figures within. The ambient noises
of the park are crisp and well-placed, intermingled with spare musical tones (I
assume that virtually everything on the technical plane, cinematography and
soundtrack alike, is due to Chhorn herself). And all in four and a half
minutes. Last Time is a gem.
MORE Chhorn: Unslept & The Plastic House © Adrian Martin October 2018 |
