The Quiet Room

(Rolf de Heer, Australia, 1996)

In the book Australian National Cinema (Routledge, 1996) by Tom O’Regan [1956-2020] – who worked on the topic for at least 20 years – there is a particularly jolting section about multiculturalism in Australian film. As I’m sure a lot of people feel – certainly, many cab drivers say this to me – there are two basic forms of multiculturalism in Australia.

There is the official or sanctioned multiculturalism, the kind that is instituted by government policy – with its own aims, agendas and priorities. And then there’s an unofficial, melting-pot, on-the-street multiculturalism – the volatile, sometimes fractious, sometimes utterly joyful combination of diverse people and their cultures. That’s certainly been around for all of my time spent in Australia.

O’Regan’s discussion reflects this commonsense division of multiculturalism in Australia. When we consider multicultural film as a government-funded category, we tend to think of exemplary cases like Tracey Moffatt’s films about the indigenous experience, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1900) and Bedevil (1993), or Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996) about the generations of a Chinese family in Australia. We may also think of Ana Kokkinos’ portrait of Greek-Australian teenagers, Only the Brave (1994). Or movies from further back in time about the travails of the migration, like Sophia Turkiewicz’s Silver City (1984). It’s intriguing to realise that all these films are made by women.

O’Regan describes, and largely embraces, the largely unofficial line of multiculturalism in Australian film. He reminds us – and this is the jolting part of what he writes – of a more fundamental cultural diversity underlying Australian cinema, certainly at least since its much-vaunted renaissance in the mid-1970s. He counters the idea that Australia then and since has produced a mainly Anglo-dominated, homogenous, white-bread cinema, by reminding us just who made some of the most influential and important and successful films of the previous 20 years.

O’Regan draws attention to the many deep and diverse ethnic mixes that characterise the people who work in our film industry. He cites, for instance the Hungarian-Australian Carl Schultz (Storm Boy, 1976), the Jewish-Australian Ben Lewin (The Watch, The Favour, and the Very Big Fish, 1991), the Polish-Australian animator Yoram Gross (1926-2015), the Greek-Australian Nadia Tass (Mr Reliable, 1996) or, further back, the pioneer Giorgio Mangiamele (Beyond Reason, 1970) … and those intriguing Dutch-Australians, Rolf de Heer and Paul Cox (not to forget the avant-garde Dirk de Bruyn).

There is a great deal that unites De Heer and Cox. They are both regarded as two of Australia’s most eminent art-film directors – both of whom resist base commercial imperatives and strive to find ways to make personal, somewhat experimental work. Both are models of survival in the Australian film industry – reasonably prolific, having figured out salutary ways of raising finance and maintaining a supportive team of regular collaborators. There are mutual back-slapping references from one to the other: The Quiet Room’s credits thank Cox, and the contemporaneously released Lust and Revenge (1996) has a character of a New Age guru, seen only in a Polaroid, who is incarnated by de Heer.

Last, but far from least, both directors have been greatly championed by one of the Australia’s most media-visible and influential film critics, David Stratton. He gave two de Heer films, Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room, his highest 5-star rating on TV’s The Movie Show. And he boldly wrote of Cox that he is not only the “voice of conscience in Australian cinema”, but also a “deeply committed, sometimes misunderstood and neglected, artist”.

I have not exactly been a champion of these two artists in the past. I voted Bad Boy Bubby the worst film of its year, and have frequently been critical of Cox’s work, as well as his somewhat deluded public posture as the underfunded victim of Australian cinema. But if there’s one thing that strikes me above all else in the positive claims made for these two filmmakers, it is the notion that they are masters – directors in complete, virtuosic control of their art and craft.

When someone is acclaimed as a master, the least that I expect to see is some evidence of mastery. But there are many moments in the work of these two gentlemen – huge chunks of them, in fact – which are astonishingly unformed, oddly clumsy, as if they were aimed for an off-hand, sloppy effect, or were not fussed about getting rid of such sloppiness once it was there. To my mind, such rawness puts the films of de Heer and Cox substantially at odds with the ethos of art cinema as we know and love it – a cinema that prides itself (and Stratton himself would surely agree) on its professionalism, smoothness and classicism.

The lumpy qualities in Bad Boy Bubby or most Cox films happen on every level: in the the conception, the script, the execution, the direction of actors. Bad Boy Bubby lurches from one ham-fisted, overwrought set-piece to the next, each one blaring out its banal message: nuclear families are bad, television is bad, society is bad …

Is a more positive, generative approach to the films of de Heer and Cox possible? If they belong to the realm of art cinema, then they more truly inhabit its slightly ratty fringe. I would go so far as to say that they are both best appreciated as naïve art filmmakers – in the same as we speak (often fondly) of naïve painters.

Although it has been rarely recognised or celebrated, naïveté has a rightful place in the history of art cinema. Naïve art cinema forms a tradition that runs from Roberto Rossellini to Werner Herzog, from Spike Lee to Clara Law. It is distinguished by those qualities of sloppiness, rawness and off-handedness I have already mentioned. And also by an earnestness of emotion and message: big, broad brush strokes of meaning staged in an almost teacherly, theatrical, point-scoring way.

These films may have irony, but a heavy irony, unsophisticated – again, Bad Boy Bubby is the supreme example. I would describe the films of de Heer and Cox not as artful in any conventional sense, but as eccentric, difficult, obstinate, unmanageable. And if you can take that in a positive light – as I do – then, from that angle, their films can suddenly become quite intriguing.

Of the two directors, de Heer is the one who has more obviously embraced certain aspects of the naïve art project. Several of his films have attempted to adopt the supposedly innocent, outsider’s viewpoint of a crazy man, an alien and or a child – as in The Quiet Room. He gears the form of his films to this raw, misshapen, constricted viewpoint – a viewpoint which sees the world strangely, and thus reveals its ugliest truths to us.

The Quiet Room is the story of a character identified in the credits only as Girl (played at different ages by sisters Chloe and Phoebe Ferguson). She withdraws from speech because her parents (Celine O’Leary as Mother and Paul Blackwell as Father) are breaking up. We hear her thoughts, and we also see the cascade of mental images in her mind – images from the past shot in video, and dream-images of the life she wants to lead in a rural area.

One of the beguiling strengths of the film is that Girl thinks, sees and feels in a kind of eternal present where everything is mixed up – phrases such as like “things were better now” pass through her head as she escapes into some inner realm of her imagination.

Naturally, like everything in movies, that voice-over track is a conceit, an artifice. There has been much criticism of this narration as scripted by de Heer – a narration that seems overloaded with message-bearing meaning at almost every point.

But I went with the artifice of this narration; it’s literary, poetic conceit. If Terrence Malick can do it, why not de Heer? A naïve conceit in the latter’s case, maybe, but an effective one – producing numerous, intriguing plays of word against image.

Ultimately, The Quiet Room is a bit too soft and sentimental. Its belief in the need for a perfectly happy and peaceful Holy Family unit of Mother, Father and Child rings hollow, prefabricated. But, as experiments go, it succeeds more than it fails.

MORE de Heer: Dance Me to My Song, Ten Canoes, Alexandra’s Project, The Tracker

© Adrian Martin May 1997