BILLY LIAR @ 60

A DJ reads out requests from listeners as women burst out of their north English houses to glory in being chosen. Cut back to the DJ whose boredom with his job is clear. Meanwhile, in just such a house under the eternally overcast sky, Billy Fisher is still in bed because his daydreams are more compelling than anything in his real life. That is crammed with nagging parents, angry concurrent fiancés, a stifling job in a funeral directors, and the whole stodgy dampness of a modern world that is still being designed by old people who can't forget the war. In his mind Billy is winning wars, marching in victory parades and giving speeches to crowds grateful to hear them. But the world he's escaped just keeps coming back to drag him out of bed and push him into the street.

Billy has spent his life plummeting into trouble. When he is forced to see that he's done it to himself he sprays the messenger with machine gun bullets from his fantasy life, turning suddenly from a small town youngster into a smoky faced commando. In moments away from these hazards he falls into self grandeur; walking past a football stadium he uses the roar of the crowd as the feedback at a political rally over which he presides with Churchillian speeches while dressed as a white-tunic dictator.

But can you blame him? At home he gets nothing but more pressure to squeeze into the breathless mediocrity of his job and there is under the thumb of his control freak boss. When he can't avoid one of the women he's engaged to, the other one is around the corner to harangue him. He's running around an England about to turn into the centre of the universe and he just seems to be going in circles, tied to a nail.

Then there's Liz. He sees her almost levitating along the street and lights up. He backed away from her offer to run off to France before and he's probably thought of it daily since. There's a dance on that night and he knows he'll see her there. She's not just there but waiting for him. They flee the stodgy conga line throng and talk in the dark of the park, It sounds like another daydream but it's real this time and she is ready to guide him away from the sandpit and into what is rapidly turning into swinging London. But this is a story not a documentary and nothing happens that simply. 

It wasn't until I was an adult that I saw this film. I'd seen the '70s tv show which was hilarious and hadn't known there'd been a movie. A flatmate in the late '80s was a big fan and I made a point of taping it when it was run on tv. It fed directly into my own life as a younger fantasist who escaped every situation, fuming and formulating impossible revenge for things I'd either shouldn't have been surprised by or had set up myself. John Schlesinger realised the novel and play that preceded his film with a story made for the screen with lightning flashes to fantasy sequences that feel exactly as a Billy Fisher would have experienced them. And then he keeps the timeline (of a single day) busy, the comedy timeless and punchy and the swelling sadness underneath it increasingly visible through the cracks.

He is greatly aided by a cast of emerging and established British talent, led by the perfectly chosen Tom Courtenay whose beat group looks are extended into such a restless creativity that demands a face, gait or accent for every turn. It is such an energetic and protean performance you can't help wonder how it all seems to settle without him seeming bratty or cute. It's that sadness again. As Billy is cornered by the dour longfaced world he instantly transforms into a machinegun wielding soldier, spraying bullets over every messenger of truth or responsibility he meets. It's hilarious but there's a cost to it, as well. 

As the embodiment of the freedom he has had to invent, Julie Christie dominates every scene she's in. Liz is a writer's conceit, an antithesis for the hero to draw him to heroism but Christie's luminous lightness veils the dangerous part of adventure and its danger that is far worse than the punishment doled out by the drab locals Billy pisses off. Her urbanity, world citizenship is intimidating through that very effortlessness which with she offers the keys to the wider world. British cinema at this time was growing into its role as social soothsayer, the era is even referred to as kitchen sink cinema, by which the persistent inequalities of U.K. life were examined to the point of cultural pain. Julie Christie's Liz is not the primarily sexual escape she might have been in another film, she is the future that was happening as the credits were rolling.

Months after its debut in British cinemas, Billy Liar had a kind of essential oil cover version in Dick Lester's film of Hard Day's Night. The black and white Beatles larking around might have been scripted to appear as a slightly heightened version of ordinary blokes but, really, the movie is everything Billy Fisher could dream of. And of course, it wasn't just them as the numbers of classic rock making groups rose, invaded America, and bloomed in a culture of youthful affluence minus national service, mini-skirts and discotheques, the pill and all night clubs. It's poignant that the song that Billy wrote with his friend is sung at the dance, it's a real thing he's done that could make his real life soar. It's an occasion for a visual gag of getting spotlighted as he's trying to hide but there is a real singer on stage and people are really dancing to Twisterella. We think of this as he is eagerly whispering plans to abscond to London with Liz. Shift it a few months and it would be on the same train as the Fab Four.

But Billy Liar is about how boring responsibility is or how stultifying the dreams used to escape it really are. There is a speech about gratitude that Billy is driven to shout as he counters his parents' oppression. It's a youthful response and an honest one to the constraints of a social order that requires a flat mouthed conformity. But if he keeps rerunning those same daydreams they will sour and turn bitter and by the time of his retirement sendoff he'll be creaking off home in a blackened rage. Tom Courtenay in an interview among the extras on my Blu-Ray of the movie revealed that he got to those lines about being grateful and found they filled him with such familiar anger that could dry up completely on stage when he approach them. It is to this film's strength that they bear the same weight six decades on.

This is a favourite of mine and, like Harold and Maude or Network, will always command my attention from opening to closing. It is made of the same truths that your favourite childhood books were and its sense of youth, playing, screaming and kicking at walls, is ageless.

Review: INFINITY POOL

James and Em fall in with a bad crowd among the holidaymakers at a luxury island resort and run over a local after one of their heavy drinking picnics. This is not any island resort, it might look like the Aegean version of the Maldives but it's run by a dictatorship with a brutal police force and a psycho justice system. James was at the wheel so he's up for the charge and, after a self damning session with the local detective he's also up for capital punishment. Well, there's a loophole. People in his position can have a surrogate, a clone, killed in their place and go their ways free as a vulture. James leans back on his wife's wealth and then watches on as a family member of the deceased knifes his clone to a savage death, and smiles faintly at the spectacle. One of the bad crew, Gaby, lures him from his marital bed to party with a group of others who have all watched themselves be killed in revenge. They're not just survivors, they're thrill hounds. Watching your own execution? Bet you can't eat just one.

This tale of purchased indulgence in the arena of the one percent brings wirter/director Brandon Cronenberg back to the persistent theme in his work of identity. Again, there is a mechanism of distance at work and this allows further and deeper examination than he's done before. Adding a sense of boundless entitlement to the stew he tells a story of limit breaking in a scene that allows capital crime without real consequence. The "executed" are presented with urns of the ashes of their clones as souvenirs. This is only a few steps on from the celebrity meat or assassination by proxy of his previous two films and, at a time when eat-the rich satires are forming their own subgenre of black comedy, is presented without knowing winks. Cronenberg is punching hard and all of them are landing.

The cloning prep, which owes more than a little to Matthew Barney's weirdness, lets rave culture imagery in and a later hallucinatory sequence among the death hedonists is ripped from pornography. The handjob in an early scene might be legitimated by some mild blurring but we get a money shot. Weapons as well as rarefied drugs are procured from the resort staff. Like the infinity pool of the title, one appears in passing in a scene and another is the basis of an anecdote about an early execution experience, there is no discernible limit from the swimmer's point of view but there are always limits and those who worry about them are liable to hit their heads square on.

Add a series of bizarre masks to the cloning and the thrill kill violence, the pretensions to personal worth blurring with morality rapidly redrafted on the fly are on frequently queasy display. Unlike something like The Menu or Triangle of Sadness, Infinity Pool asks you to consider the pleasures of this amorality as they are shown to go beyond sex and drugs and rock and roll to spectacles of physical self-annihilation without a single thought of any kind of cost. We're not being asked to jeer or boo the indulgent few, we're being invited to feel their skin. 

Amid all of this, we might find ourselves surprised to empathise with James, even as he surrenders to the rush of it. He's a failed novelist who married rich and his wife admits, when asked if she loves him, that she chose someone her Murdoch-like father would hate. So when we see James begin to struggle with this bizarre culture of normlessness, we see his failure to fully integrate and the punishing grind of resisting the temptations. Alexander Skarsgard brings all the appeal of his easy physicality and tempers it with the guilt of the hanger-on and the outrage that brings him so at odds with the gang. 

His counterpart is the increasingly dazzling Mia Goth as Gaby. Using her own expensively clipped wellborn London accent rather than the various American voices her roles have served her (e.g. Pearl) she presents a compelling force, unwritten potential and intimidating control. She is at the other end of the spectrum of Andrea Riseborough's conscience-struck assassin in Possessor and her final lines of dialogue take her into the person at the base of her lethal party girl persona such that we feel the same shock as one onlooker.

Brandon Cronenberg has been criticised for falling too close from his dad's tree. He's now made three sci-fis of deep speculative fiction involving David's tropes of body horror. Why doesn't he go his own way and make a rom com? Well, because he has found his own way. This is it.

Viewing notes: The cut I saw is, on investigation, the uncensored version with explicit sex and more graphic violence. While this can be visually very strong it is pretty much always very brief.  Brandon Cronenberg himself has commented (rightly, I think) that the cuts which lessen the effect do not change the film fundamentally. The screening I went to rates the film as R18+ which suggests that it will be strictly adhered to. 

PONTYPOOL @ 15

Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy drives into work at his nowheresville radio station, arguing with his agent. His car is approached by a woman who is trying to say something but can't quite get her mouth around the words. She bashes her head against the passenger window and then disappears into the blizzard. Rattled, Grant drives on to his night shift gig, bickering with his producer and drizzling sarcasm over everything presented to him as news. But then the reports start going strange. There is a hostage situation. Herds of people gather to destroy cars and buildings. Even the BBC has heard tell of the strange events in the tiny Canadian town. If you've seen enough zombie films you are already guessing about this one. Then again, when we see the first symptom as it begins we wonder about that, too. A local theatre company comes in for a guest spot to sing a song from their cringey musical and one of the girls goes dead eyed and can't finish a word, repeating the sound prah over and over. The station receives government advice that includes avoiding the English language and even translating the French text. It's going to be a long and strange night.

Pontypool arrived under the radar in the late 2000s, I don't remember it from the MIFF program from that or the next year and the art houses that might have given it a screen were in the last stages of their lives in Melbourne. Like REC or Martyrs, I could only see this popping up repeatedly in overseas DVD retailers' pages. What I would do was simply wait until the prices fell and do a smash and grab click fest. Of those mentioned in this paragraph the only one I didn't screen at Shadows was Martyrs (it's a masterpiece but not for everybody). For the Pontypool screening I chose a cold Friday night when the host Milos brought out extended heating and we collected a decent turnout for a cold weather event. It went down a storm.

It generally does. I think the reason is that while it telescopes its narrative points from the word go (an arch monologue of wordplay spoken by Mazzy in a prerecord) it reveals them sparingly until the terrible truth comes out. It's no great spoiler to say that the cause of the violent zombie outbreaks is a language-borne virus which will require something a lot more sophisticated that a shot to the skull to defeat it. Do they defeat it? A post credit sequence (which annoyed me until I finally got what it referred to from earlier in the film) makes its own suggestion.

As arcane as it might seem this film does deliver as a horror movie. On the one hand the sense of apocalyptic doom mounting is worrisome and the localised violence is a grim proof of threat for the infected. And this is the point to talk about the staging. Apart from a very few outdoor shots, this whole story is told within the snowbound radio station with accounts of the atrocities and weirder developments almost entirely relayed through spoken accounts. For any other story this might feel stagey and cheap but when your threat is all about language and its dangers it feels gratifying that we hear rather than see most of the action. There is a clear sense that Grant and his coworkers are helpless to stop the carnage. Also, it means that when the horde makes it to the station, Night of the Living Dead style, everything we've learned is about to squeeze our people to the wall.

The station itself is all localised light and manipulated communication as voice feeds are variously opened and closed, advice given or ignored. What is happening with conversation is what happens in the greater world but in highly concentrated form. As each of us is unto ourselves a centre of information feeds the whole building is, here, and the players must negotiate its flow with a sense of urgency. Taking the action outdoors for big set pieces would shrink the enormity of the situation and trivialise the story.

And then you have a cast that keeps your eyes and ears on them. Lisa Houle's long suffering and patience-stretched producer shows what she has already gone through to keep this big city prima donna in his exiled state. Georgina Reilly is full of knowing pep as the assistant engineer. B ut it is the mountainously cragged Stephen McHattie who must shoulder the weight of the end of the world as fallen star Grant Mazzy.  His face is a constantly shifting display of one who has learned to say one thing with his mouth and its opposite with his eyes. With his radio perfect gravel and balm voice  and his urbane stetson-ed confidence he keeps us where he wants us for the entire time. The DVD I bought includes a radio play version which you might think would go even further than the film being constrained to the audio realm but (having not heard it) I would miss McHattie's double-thinking performance. He does the most out of all the elements of this movie to keep it cinematic.

So, fifteen years on, does it stand? Well, it was released at the dawn of social media and over a decade prior to the pandemic which applied hot and steroidal compresses to the use of language in tweet form, video bite, memes and gif animations. The world has exploded its communications and rendered the least qualified claims on everything from vaccines to climate change appear equally valid with the science, rendering the expanded opportunities of communication into a maelstrom of bullshit in which it only gets harder to find and promote the value of provable reality. What would a language virus make of a world that has already described itself  as post-truth? Would it give up and go find a market where it might at least be noticeable? Maybe the time for a genre wonder like Pontypool has been defeated by its future. But maybe, also, the solution reached through desperation by these remaining few might be worth considering. It is a confusing solution and it involves a lot of muscular self-contradiction but it did work for them. Or did it?

Pontypool is hard to find at time of writing (both dvd and blu-ray releases seem to have fallen from all catalogues) but you could try YouTube or keep your eye on the local streamers (it was available breifly through SBS on Demand). If you come across it, give it a big loving spin.

Review: BEAU IS AFRAID

After a prologue of Beau's birth seen from his perspective we get the scene in the folk tale where the elder (his analyst) gives the quester (a middle aged Beau) a magic object (pills) with instructions that must be followed on pain of peril. Then we follow Beau through his bizarrely dangerous neighbourhood to his apartment where his neighbour sends him increasingly threatening notes about the noise he's making (Beau is actually in bed trying to sleep). The neighbour retaliates with a massive techno track so loud it shakes the walls. Beau plugs his ears which makes him sleep through his alarm with only a tiny margin to get his plane to go and see his mother. Small mounting disasters keep happening until he has to call his mother who hears his plight as a contemptuous excuse. And then he takes the pills. This film is given a running time of 179 minutes, 1 minute short of the full 3 hours. There's a point to that and it has to do with this moment. That's the depth of the jokes in this sprawling absurdist epic. That's why the jokes are never that funny. And it's still three hours long.

Could it be shorter? By half and it would still tell the same story. But Ari Aster's third feature film plays a delicate balance, plunging into bleak fantasy here or restraining everything when the long and verbose explanations are running (because, boy, do they need grounding). If you've seen the poster art with Beau at different ages and you might have assumed it was a kind of Benjamin Button deal or a Terrence Malik stretch but Aster is determined that it would be neither. If you're still worried, there is a clear narrative line all the way through and not a moment of this movie is boring. However, just as the post climactic scenes start dragging you do start wondering how much longer you'll be waiting for the credits. See also both his previous feature films. He's just a film maker that can't just say goodbye. But if you do get through all that you will feel a strong satisfaction ... at the same time as wonder if you really did spend all that time just for that.

What helps is that Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Beau is masterful. Most of his dialogue is slurred through medication or the effects of violence and he has far fewer lines than most of the other central characters. This is a physical performance and, when you stretch your appreciation of it over the three hour running time you will know it as a muscular and highly refined act of clowning. This is a comedy in the classical Greek sense in that it tells the workings of the cosmos as a joke by wrenching a basic theme (mummy issues) and wringing it dry before us. Phoenix has to play this role rock solid as that clown as the story itself is fighting him. It is very hard to empathise with him (and so share his sense of hazard that all protagonists must convey) until the film is well into its second hour. By the end we feel nothing but empathy and it is almost entirely down to his stony restraint. As film performances go this is much Brando than Buster Keaton. As the universe shifts around him from hard realism to painted cardboard landscapes he compels us to keep our eyes directly on him. This, finally, what makes three hours feel relatively breezy.

I'm keeping this review quite short not just to be cute (although that is a motivation) but simply because relaying so much plot for a film that continually circles back to its theme rather than significant action seems like a diminishing return. When it was about half way through I thought of a line: this is what you get when you let Charlie Kauffman remake After Hours. But then the pieces began to suggest themselves and take on more definition. Before, when I described this as an absurdist film and said that's why the jokes aren't funny I didn't mean that absurdist humour (my favourite kind) wasn't funny. If anything the jokes and sly references here are very sensible and tend to jar because they feel too conventional. By the end I ditched the line about Kauffman doing Scorsese trying to be funny and thought instead that it's much more like Malik done right. There is no mysticism here, not even the vague and useless deity that Malik paints with watercolours. Beau is Afraid is set firmly on the tough dark earth. And that's why it works. And it's still three hours long!

THE WICKER MAN @ 50

Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police travels to Summerisle in pursuit of a girl reported missing. The locals are cagey about whether they recognise her photograph and many deny knowing of her at all. A sawdust and porridge protestant, Howie is increasingly disturbed by signs of runaway paganism on the island with kids dancing around maypoles singing songs about turning into trees after death and kids in class reciting lessons about phallic symbols and circles of girls jumping over fires in the local stone henge. Local patriarch himself, Lord Summerisle, is not only fine with all of this, he's a willing leader of it. The local church is a ruin, overgrown with weeds. When Howie finds the grave of the girl he's seeking, it has a shrub growing from it with her umbilical cord dangling from the twig. He emerges from a night of grinding temptation still pure and ready to take his administrative disgust back to the city from which he will see to it that the whole island is wracked by nukes of Christian law. Do you like his chances?

Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man has travelled through cinema history in an exulted state, being anointed as one of the Unholy Trilogy of folk horror (along with The Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General) and the kind of movie that horror fans can show to those who are not with confidence that it will be enjoyed. One of the reasons for this is that, outside of expected protagonist/antagonist empathy, you really don't have to take sides or, if you do, you can choose pretty freely which one you're on, the pagans in cardigans or the law of the land in its stiff uniform, and the big ending will still pack a punch. A Britain rendered effectively secular by generating a great deal of the swinging sixties would have found this situation already terrifying by the bones pointed at both approaches to religion on show here. It allows, nay, encourages, a critical response as the plot tightens into reckoning and we are left with devastation before us and another suggested one to come.

Until they see the ending, many people who see this film for the first time wonder at why it's deemed a horror tale, perhaps expecting something witchy to leap out of the shadows. But this tale of the clash of beliefs that masks the futility of all of them carries a horror beyond the finale of the story: what if all of the things we hold sacred are just hobbies we paste over inevitable doom? Whether it's the big stodgy hymns on Sunday for the Sergeant or the live-in musical of the rustic hedonists the final images which could be interpreted (regardless of how it was intended) as cosmic heat death awaits everything that ever lived or will live on this planet.

I just mentioned the songs in the film and they're worth a thought in their own right. The performances range from the music being played on site (in the pub or outside) to some that lean closer to more conventional musicals where the singing is supported by off screen players. The seduction scene appears to be the landlord's daughter singing to the accompaniment of the musicians below in the bar but this could not be so in real life.  But this is key to the world building on Summerisle. The music is part of daily life whether it's around a maypole or at the pub and the film delivers it with a whimsy on the warm side of charming. Part of the magic of that holiday or where you grew up was how everybody was so involved in the life that they would strike up a bawdy ditty here or offer a sensitive love ballad there. The songs put the viewer into a strange position that bypasses the usual shock of any musical where someone starts singing the first song. These ones come from people who appear to have absorbed the passed life of one of their own as part of the overall continuum of living and part of that is to sing about it. It strengthens the claim that the islanders live like this rather than ever feeling shoehorned in.

(Quick aside: in the late '90s I'd stop by a record shop on the walk home from work, barely expecting to hear anything stimulating being aired when one day I liked the music so much I stayed around for the whole album, pretending to look at CDs. I asked the guy at the counter about it and he told me the band name and that I was hearing the last copy in stock. I bought it, Becoming X by The Sneaker Pimps. It's a great tight album from the rock end of trip hop but the track that got me was the last one, a stunning rendition of the seduction song from this movie, How Do. I still listen to it. They include some sounds form the film and last night I heard the word "Sergeant" uttered which they'd sampled for the song. It was a small but real thrill. Here it is.)

The casting here is superb. Edward Woodward as Sgt. Howie casts off his world weary Londoner spy in the tv show Callan and assumes the mantle of a permanently uptight Scottish cop. He must carry both the tabloid style outrage from his civilised city as well as his own disturbed bewilderment  and still invite us along with him. The empathy we afford him comes from his stance against what might as well be the whole world where he finds himself and that his fight might well be one for his life.

The trio of exotic women central to his investigations are variously putting on accents or dubbed which adds a layer of alienation. It would be a mistake to blame the saucy '70s of Benny Hill for their appearance as sexy functionaries when there is so much nuance on display. Even Britt Ekland who only mouths her  Scottish accented lines is given space to develop depth in a role that might have stopped at her being buxom and smiling salaciously. Ingrid Pitt adds a kind of felinity to her otherwise stiffened character as the island record keeper. Diane Cilento dusts off the peasant girl smirk she gave in Tom Jones and stretches it into the articulation of a teacher defending the education that so offends the intruder policeman. Surrounded by Carry On movies and the blurred lines of UK movies and TV of the time, the women of Summerisle, for all their salacity, hold down jobs and live day to day.

At the social apex of the island is Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle. He is physically imposing, credibly aristocratic, urbane and charming and looks untellably relieved at not having to grimace with the fangs of the role that brought him most fame. His lines about the origins of the island lifestyle are delivered with such smooth confidence you want to book your tickets before he finishes. His single moment of vulnerability is almost shocking as it is the notion that gives the audience real pause as well, As much of a fan of Hammer movies as I am, Lee was allowed nothing as profound as that moment.

There are three versions of this film available on home video. The one most people saw before the '90s was the cinematic cut. That was the one you saw on tv as I did when it came on one night in the early '80s and got all of us talking about it the next day at uni. It was already an old film by then but its power held us. Extra footage was discovered decades later and incorporated into the film as was the fashion at the time as the Director's Cut. Like Apocalypse Now Redux or The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen, this director's cut added scenes that only dragged the pace and served to obscure the central narrative. The one I saw last night was the one I hadn't yet seen which is called the Final Cut. This incorporates the more striking of the found material and doesn't hurt the flow too much. All three are available on a blu-ray available locally that also features a CD of the songs from the film. My recommendation is to watch the Theatrical Cut first which has the tightest telling of the story. Then try the Final Cut which does one thing right in that it plays the seduction as an event from Howie's second night on the island and gives the attempt on his virtue and the results much more weight. All of the cuts have the same ending.

The Wicker Man feels timely in this current climate of religious minorities blowing themselves into undeserved proportion simply by being louder than the society around which is claimed to be soullessly apathetic by comparison but is really a culture outgrowing its bronze age tenets. This extends into the public redistribution of garbage thinking which the plague and its social conditions have inadvertently given voice. The Wicker Man reminds us that the living of life in the present for the future exceeds in value against the obfuscations of the current crop of prominent bullshitters who think they can keep propping up the status quo regardless of how well our crops do or our self image feels comfortable. The Wicker Man is more of our time than its own. Let's hope it can just be an entertaining ride of a movie in the not too distant future.

1983 @ 40: MAN OF FLOWERS

Ageing Charles Bremer spends his days using beauty to heal the persistent pains from his childhood. His house in one of Melbourne's leafy suburbs is palatial and filled with seasonal flowers. Flowers are so important to him that he confuses them with the artist's model whom he pays to strip for him as a duet by Donizetti pours into the golden light. Charles's life has given him a cushion in his inherited wealth. His soft and well spoken narration is formed of excerpts from letters he is writing to his long dead mother. This should creep us out. It doesn't.

Charles is given to us as a naif, a tap for the best and worst of the world around him. Depending on their capacities for self reflection those agents of the world variously learn about themselves or harden further into narcissism. Lisa the model almost feels guilty taking his money for her stripping performances, struck by his line drawing at the act. She knows there is more there to understand. His psychiatrist, venal and oafish, is drawn to Charles's stillness and opens up to him more than the professional reverse, but still fleeces him with extra sessions at heightened rates. And David, Lisa's boyfriend, the Neanderthal junkie action painter can only see Charles as an exploitable old square but even then lowers himself to paint what Charles prefers. The minister at the church across the road where Charles goes to play improvised twelve tone fantasias on the organ, sees Charles as a good man. The postman, bursting with facts and his interpretations of them to prove that the world is as "fucked" as he believes it is, agrees with the minister. Increasingly throughout this effortlessly areligious movie we are given Charles as a holy fool. 

If we see Charles's candle light toned sanctum as a utopia we understand that it is ripe for invasion and sacking. How this happens and how it is met are matters for spoilers which I won't give here, regardless of how difficult this film is to find. What I will say is that the astute writing that pits antagonists against each other along with all they represent is done with great craft and singled this film and all the earlier titles of its director Paul Cox against an Australian film industry that was largely directionless and low on substance.

Two elements make this so: characters so well written that even those of fewer dimensions come across as parented, and the canny dialogue written by Bob Ellis which is almost constantly funny. There are flaws, here and there. The hilarious self exposing radio preacher's hypocrisy is subverted by the clumsy choral jingle. The naming of the object which consolidates the conclusion is needlessly silly. But then there is the world of Charles's memory, presented as saturated silent cinema, glorious to see but constantly unsettling. His mother's hot/cold relationship with him and his father's often creepy attentiveness to the high tea realm of Charles's childhood as a boy rejected in an environment of material comfort. Poor little rich boy? Well, the blaring Donizetti singing links everything to do with his childhood, mother, assaulted self-esteem and his current daily attempts to address his departed parent becomes a kind of cosy straightjacket. If Charles's development was arrested at childish naivete it might just be that he had reason to fear pursuit of any knowledge. Will these turns of events be enough to break the torpor that prevents him from greater intimacy with the beauty he craves than just looking? 

Paul Cox was notable among his community of Australian film makers through his insistence on strong characters, plots with real working parts and rich dialogue. He came early to the attention of influencers like Phillip Adams and collaborators like John Clarke and Bob Ellis but if he didn't already have the discipline to fashion such complete films that would have meant little. I was drawn to Man of Flowers before its release by its immediate predecessor, the wonderful autumnal rom com Lonely Hearts (also starring Norman Kaye) and the tone that felt new in an Australian cinema context for being non-American and vaguely European (Cox is Dutch born). The settings and lines were all Australian but their finish had a more strident cinema craft to it.

I remember thinking it strange that one of my most respected tutors at Griffith Uni, Sylvia Lawson, grimaced when I mentioned that I was eager to see this film. On paper, it might look like an old man's tug fantasy including women stripping, lesbianism and an idealised kind of masculinity swathed in luxury and ready to take on younger alphas. I graduated that year and didn't see it until the following year when it continued to burn through the arthouses and campus cinemas, so I never did get to ask if she did finally see it. 

Would she have erased her resistance? Who knows? It did occur to me, though, that I might have been marvelling at it initially for the strength of its characters players and writing that set it so far apart from the rest of the local fare. Was I just celebrating something for doing the job it was meant to do rather than fall short through expectation? No, I think I would still have loved it, regardless. I know I saw it more than once, getting myself and small gangs out to the Schonell at UQ for more. Spotting the cameos was a fun foyeur conversation. Would any of us turn out differently if we'd had Werner Herzog as a dad? Are we sure that Patrick Cook doesn't do that with bronze? How much of the postie's rants were actually written by the playwright Barry Dickins who played him? And wasn't Bob Ellis --

Wait a minute. Bob Ellis' portrayal of the psychiatrist as a money grubbing Jew is a real sticking point, here. He's more east European than Viennese (i.e. he's not going for a Freud cliche) but his nasal toned callousness borders on panto. His dialogue would have been funny in any accent and the one he adopts is a clearly deliberate choice. Do we let the era forgive this? Was Ellis basing the voice on a doctor he had been treated by? You still shouldn't need the accent for that. Am I being too sensitive? Maybe I'm exposing my own guilt at finding it funny at the time. Maybe it really is just an imagined Euromash accent to make the lines funnier. It troubles me if I see it now and I think that would be the same with any comedy that tried something like it from the time. So, unresolved but needed mentioning.

Aside from that the cast offer characters that are both rich and real. Tony Llewellyn Jones's minister who can't look anyone in the eye suggests that has a history in his two brief appearances. Chris Heywood's boomy oaf screams internal insecurities that only a lot of cocaine can conceal. Alyson Best's Lisa uses her restrained performance to show us someone finding it hard to break from co-dependency and pursue something more like self-determined happiness. Without a word, Hillary Kelly gives us a woman who both comforted and alienated her son, giving too much regard to her husband's unimaginative authority. And finally it is Norman Kaye's movie; his Charles meets us as vulnerable as one of the petals on his beloved blooms meting out complications and hues that bring him to great depth while never raising his voice from its quiet, crisp, observational tone. He shows us Charles's damage through his gentleness which also proves his strength.

I fell off the Paul Cox wagon in the later '80s and really need to do something about that. He kept working up to his death in the mid 2010s, producing a new film or tv production annually, working with the likes of Isabelle Huppert and Irene Papas as well as his rep theatre cast of actors and writers. I haven't examined why I fell away from his audience but I think it was around the same time as I stopped anticipating new Peter Carey books or Hal Hartley movies and probably for the same reason that others had turned up on the block with different things to offer. But not everyone blands out the way Scorsese has. David Lynch just got more individualistic in vision. Back in the mists of poetry history, so did John Milton. For all I know, Paul Cox's strongest work was ahead of him after Man of Flowers. Maybe it's that. Maybe I just didn't want to risk finding out the opposite. Well, seeing this again and being reminded of its strengths and delights, I think I've just given myself some long delayed homework.

Review: EVIL DEAD RISE

After a horror prologue which gets right down to it we change scenes for a real opening scene under the title One Day Before. Beth is in the loo backstage at a massive sounding rock gig doing a pregnancy test. She's a guitar tech. Cut to L.A. where her sister Jessica is handling her young family (two girls, one boy) after the departure of her partner. When Beth knocks on the door, wanting help and advice, Jessica sends the kids out for pizza. When they come back the whole block is shaken by an earthquake. The kids in the basement carpark find a basement that has been exposed by the damage. The boy goes down to investigate and retrieves some dodgy looking old records and an even dodgier looking book. This is an Evil Dead movie. If you don't know what is about to happen, just go and watch the peerless first one from 1981.

If you have seen the original and its immediate sequel you might enjoy the subversion of the speeding low shot here which is cleverly subverted or the callback to the card reading scene or even smile at the spectacular title sequence. There will be plenty of things to enjoy along these lines which I won't be going through. There are even a couple of quotes from Kubrick's The Shining. Spoiler: no one says, "groovy". I'm getting this out of the way now as any fan of Evil Dead movies will be wondering how much they will be expected to smile or groan at in advance without spoilers. The answer is that the references are many but you can let them happen without getting too distracted by them. A moment with an elevator features a cute detail which made me wince. If you don't find yourself recognising these references, there's still plenty of movie to enjoy.

If I have a problem with this respectful and efficient late entry it is that it takes far too long to establish its theme of motherhood (that's a borderline spoiler considering how late it comes in). Before that, between the generic establishment of characters and the eventual gaining of gravity there are a lot of very good effects. There are so many and they follow so rapidly that you wonder if that's all there is going to be. It feels like a direct connection between the writers room and the screen with a massive list of "oh let's try this one" moments before a dialogue exchange clarifies stakes that were so incidental and localised that it was getting very hard to care about any of them.

But that theme is established and served with lean writing and big loud action. From that point the newer ideas enter, the drive to resolution speeds and the tightening and falling motion of the climax happens the way it should if it is to do what it said on the tin and it does. Then we get a coda which provides a circular closure.

While that makes it a satisfying horror film (when it gets going) how does it stack as a film with an ancestry? This is where the snags in the current start appearing. The Evil Dead from 1981 is acknowledged as a horror classic. It has a raft of fans that recall it for its comedic elements. Those are unambiguously part of it but that is too often used to mask how much genuinely eerie scenes there are, all the gore and thick atmosphere. This is complicated by the sequel which is essentially the same as the first with the comedy more pronounced. The third, Army of Darkness, takes it way out of the cabin in the woods and plays more as a macabre action movie. It's the 2013 remake that Evil Dead Rise most closely resembles and it does this while offering repeated DNA samples from the complete family tree.

So, we get a lot of references, wry or reverent, to the history of Evil Dead but when the movie plays as a horror piece it really only emulates the desaturated severity of the most recent one. While I would tend to argue against the shoehorning of comedy into horror cinema, there is a warmth missing here which echoes the lack of it in the 2013 version. Why? There's no Ash. Bruce Campbell and his iconic creation makes it into a seconds-long post credits cute bit in the remake but the first three, however far they journeyed away from their origin, were centred on Campbell's natural stardom which swung between hapless victim to absurdist action hero rapidly. This is the warmth of the original sequence and its absence from any revisit beyond it is felt acutely. As sturdy an action hero as this film's Lily Sullivan is (and she is rock solid) she is given nothing of Ash's opportunities to charm. It means she can't win for her audience as while you might be able to describe this story as an Evil Dead film it will only ever really be one in name only. And then its clear merits (see also the remake) will be lost.