MIFF Play #4: 2000 WEEKS

Will is thirty, married with child, and a professional writer. He's doing ok except the twenty-something woman he's having an affair with, his berating father, and the old university chum back from success in the U.K. are all reminding him that he really only has about two thousand weeks left of his life to do something more than exist. Time to do some thinking. For the next ninety or so Chabrol-like monochrome minutes we tag along with him and discover the difference between what is important to him and what he just claims is important while challenges from those quarters mentioned earlier move in.

Tim Burstall's debut feature has long been considered a lost gem of Australian cinema, a late sixties personal, urban story surrounded by a scattered few backward-looking moving postcards. I only knew it as a couple of stills in a film history book back at Griffith Uni. I encountered a very few others who were aware of it and the question of whether any of us had actually clapped eyes on it was one of those queries that you'd try like randomly buying a scratch lotto ticket (and always drew a blank). In the early eighties when the first stirrings of Australian movies with contemporary urban settings were appearing as a standard after half a decade of period dramas, and classic novel adaptations, the notion of an Ur film was enticing. But it was nowhere to be found.

And now, finally part of a MIFF lineup, how does it stand up? The first thing to note is its dating. The shooting style of high contrast black and white, post synched dialogue spoken with plummy accents and overstated drama put it one notch above the tv drama of the time. The Don Burrows flutey jazz score could be from any melancholy late swinging London tale of soft disillusionment. However, the central notion of realising one's youth before its gone is always with us and as an account of that it works a treat.

Mark McManus as Will gives us a character delighted and disturbed by his privileges and challenges. David Turnbull as the overbearing Noel Oakshot is a type Burstall would have known well, back from mighty Blighty to lord it over all the colonial commoners with a little success and borrowed sophistication. He's here to disrupt for fun and appears later in Burstall's career in the form of a chiding by a working class figure to the aging lefties in Don's Party where his type and ambitions are exposed as vanity. Jeanie Dryan as Jackie Lewis, Will's extra marital love interest plays a woman looking further than the void of being the affair of a man with only a few promises galloping toward a grey midlife. Eileen Chapman as Will's wife gives a tolerant but wising up middle class woman. Michael Duffield as Will's father overacts his angry patriarch from his hospital bed and from fraught flashbacks, but even this does the job.

At other moments we can see where the sympathy for the aging angry young man is given one too many breaks by his creator when in more recent fare he would more rightly be left ashamed. But that is key to understanding this character piece; it is of its time and unapologetically so. You'll find the same in the early plays of David Williamson (who collaborated serially with Burstall in the seventies. If it is a young urbanite's story then at least it admits it. The glimpses into the freedom of others that the central figure's selfishness would stifle prevent this from being the kind of rallying cry for young men that was still in the offing on stages and screens at the time. So, while not the great Ur text the younger version of me hoped for but neither the washout it might have been. Glad to have finally seen it.