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Nirvana Street Murder
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Aleksi Vellis’ Nirvana Street Murder made its premiere appearance in public as part of a Melbourne International Film Festival 1990 spotlight on new Australian films – such group-packaging always a risky endeavour but, this time around, the company included Ray Argall’s sensitive and moving Return Home (1990) and the unusual documentary On the Waves of the Adriatic (1990) by Brian McKenzie, the nation’s most consistently neglected film artist. All three of these films, in fact, fit Susan Dermody’s profile (elaborated in the book The Imaginary Industry: Australian Film in the Late ‘80s) of the positively eccentric Australian movie – a veritable mutant gene in relation to the dominant, industry strain. Nirvana Street Murder is a different kind of Australian movie – one that grips you from the first frame, and never lets go. Short (75 minutes) and made on an astonishingly low budget, it is a quirky, very physical film. The mix of broad comedy and streetwise violence, and the fun had with the stereotypes of multicultural Australia, recall John Ruane’s Death In Brunswick (1990). But Vellis’ effort is far more accomplished and distinctive. The plot builds up from seemingly slight, faintly ludicrous inner-city events: a little girl blackmailing a young couple (Ben Mendelsohn and Mary Coustas), bumbled dope deals, jostling between Greek and Australian tough guys (it’s a very male-centred tale). Inexorably, the various strands intersect and the pressure escalates, leading to a powerful, almost tragic denouement. Nirvana Street Murder really rocks the house. It must be among the very few Australian features that exhibits not the slightest qualm about ransacking and reworking the great archive of movie genres, old TV shows, and a general repertoire of pop culture iconography – my favourite bit being the crash-zoom into a Mickey Mouse watch worn by a ten-year-old blackmailer. The wonder of it all is that, while emulating some of the best aspects of the American action-drama style (of which Vellis is, clearly, a keen student), it still manages to marshall many endearingly Aussie elements of sensibility – fragments of our media history, especially (such as the 1960s TV series Homicide), as well as an already highly mediated social history (Greek/Australian relations). Compressed into an unbroken line of vivid cinematic and emotional moments, the film announces the arrival of a major directorial talent. (His earlier, 38-minute, VCA film school short, Love Me Stupid … A Story of Blood [1984] is viewable here.] But will the industry allow Vellis to survive intact, and develop accordingly? In particular, it will be intriguing to observe if the richly multicultural aspect of his work gets pushed (as so often happens) into either reassuring social-issue TV-style drama, or broad ethnic comedy. If he can keep the tension of tone, mood, content and reference that is evident here, his future augurs well. [2024 Postscript: Vellis’ subsequent directorial career went mainly into 1990s TV and advertising spots, apart from the ‘ethnic comedy’ commercial hit The Wog Boy (2000) starring Nick Giannopoulos. His IMDb credits end at 2000. He also teaches acting for film.] Nirvana Street Murder is eccentric, inspired and beautifully controlled. The American director Samuel Fuller once said that “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death – in a word, emotion”. Aleksi Vellis appears to have heeded that message. MORE Vellis: The Life of Harry Dare © Adrian Martin July 1990 / April 1991 (+2024 update) |
