Review: DISOBEDIENCE

In a London synagogue Rav Krushka delivers a lesson on the concept of choice. He tells the congregation that alone among the angels, the beasts and humans, humans have the capacity to disobey. His voice falters, his respiratory system fails and he collapses.

His only child, prodigal daughter Ronit, is in New York, shooting with a Hassleblad, taking portraits of a man whose torso is covered in tattoos, Diane Arbus style. She is interrupted with the news of her fathers death. She takes to the town, goes to a bar, has some distraction sex with a man whose face we (and maybe even she) doesn't see, and then, exhausted in a changing room, tears her top and reveals a challah necklace.

Still, as Jewish as that action and decoration suggest, her reappearance in her former community is tolerated rather than welcomed. Her father's obituary omits any mention of her as does his will. As she talks to Dovid, an old childhood friend, now a rabbi, in his kitchen as the mourners fill the rest of the house we get a hint as to why this is so. Dovid's wife appears and there is an instant and connection between the two women. Ronit is invited by the couple to stay with them while in London but while no one is happy about it no one can deny her the right to mourn her father. And no one forgets. That's the problem with open secrets, you can't erase them and you can't talk about them.

What is on the surface a romantic triangle melodrama keeps a steady eye on the opening lesson about choice. Shooting style is seldom other than soberly informative and the sobering pallet of London in winter dominates. If something is to break it will need to do so in secret. Ronit remembers this but her life in New York has allowed her to happily abandon it. Her childhood love Esti is not so free, removing her sheital and disrobing with a blank face before submitting to the conjugal ritual on Friday. She has never not been lesbian and the choice she made in childhood to realise it is brought to profound disturbance by Ronit.

Rachel Weisz as Ronit and Rachel McAdams as Esti play the taboo space for its every sharp sparking charge, letting the eroticism of a simple kiss transfer like a current through the lens. And then, when the tremendous release of their sex scene breaks director Sebastian Lelio breaks it into more manageable snippets for the most part and even keeps the pair partially clothed throughout. The thrilling abandon is clear but it is still confined to secrecy, to the very kind of arcana that their managerial end of their religious community demands of its members. Outside of that gasping freedom the two, once the line is breached, communicate in a small cosmos of tiny indications of affection and outright love that only they and the very observant would recognise.

One such from the last group is Esti's husband Dovid who must deal with what he fears might be inevitable. His position as the inevitable successor to the Rav will place him at one of the apex points of his community. If his wife leaves him for the perceived usurper the reconstruction toll will be ruinous. Alessandro Nivola plays him as a contained explosion, plausibly negotiating with the threats at the gates with a rationalism that might also pass for wisdom or at the very least patience. We know that when this breaks it will deafen. It does. A speech he delivers in the last act has him in close up, playing the fixed focus like a jazz soloist, giving us a perfect sense of panic and the nausea of knowing that the worst is actually happening before him.

This is Lelio's first English language film. He has plunged himself into a particular milieu but is careful not to do so as an invader nor to make those of us beyond its bounds voyeuristic. I had to look up the sheitel and the challah as they are offered in the film without remark. We only really need to know that the religious and cultural realm where the story lives might seem strict but also offers the freedom of disobedience in the title and the opening monologue. We need no special training to see the thickly rugged up clothing of anyone who ventures outside to know what its opposite is. And when Esti is alone in a rented room and the score is swelling towards atonality that what she is doing is serious. Lelio's approach gives us that overcoat and scarf to warm us but also to bind us. If I say that this felt like a festival film I mean it in celebration.

Review: MIDNIGHT OIL: 1984

I am not nor ever was a fan of Midnight Oil. Their big shouting sloganeering choruses felt purpose built for all the wrong reasons. The music was prog rock without the solos. Their singer danced like a hippy at a party. They were playing to someone else. So, I went to this one to see what I'd missed.

First a little about Midnight Oil for those who have forgotten or have remained unknowing.

This sober documentary does what it says on the label and addresses the events and issues that influenced the band at its peak. Peak or plateau, though? Midnight Oil's career is the story of solid effort sustained for over a decade by 1984 to the point that the Oils were the biggest band in Australia, massive sellers in the charts and a legendary touring outfit. they weren't just big, though, they were politically minded and committed to their politics. Ponder, this is the era of synthpop, orange boofy hair where Goth was forming, providing nations of teenage pariahs with justification for withdrawal. Midnight Oil were reminding us that the world was a hair trigger away from nuclear apocalypse and brought fist pumping rock to the message. And then their singer campaigned for a Senate spot with the tiny People for Nuclear Disarmament. A rock star stepped away from mass adoration in order to accept an armful of manilla folders and an endless schedule of meetings and to-do lists. To go from masses of people singing his words back to him to a public gallery that assumed everything he said was smeared with agenda. That's big.

Through concert and backstage footage that director Ray Argall shot at the time, contemporary and recent interviews with band members and other figures in the organisation around them and a lot of contexualising news vision we are told the story of how a band that achieved everything it attempted to do in rock music might have taken it one crucial step further. And it's believable. Why? First, by this stage Midnight Oil had jettisoned the lifestyle. They were constantly touring and had found a kind of communion with their audiences that transcended the sex and drugs prerequsites. They had found that their message resonated into the furthest reaches of the landscape. This was at the dawn of the Hawke years when optimism and activism could be adopted by the same person without attendant cynicism. This film shows why there was no great contradiction about the notion of the swap that Peter Garrett intended. It was a year before Live Aid and seemed to emerge from nothing other than his own conviction.

Important word, that. Garrett's and the band's convictions about how their society could be and how a public gesture might assist the individual in the crowd to act. I used the word sober before to describe the whole film but that shouldn't be read as dull. Actually, you might take it as relief when you consider how even the least engaging figures from rock music history are given the rags to riches with a line of speed as long as the Bruce Highway. What's blessedly missing from this story is the PARTY (well, the Party only gets sentence case when it appears) and what's left is the work.

And work is what we see. Tours are organised. Records are made. Success is recorded. And then infiltrating from within is Peter Garrett's go at electioneering. Considering his evident ease with bridging the two types of interaction and the band's support, it begins to feel like metamorphosis. You can Google or Wiki the result of the campaign and I'll let you go ahead as that is only one thing on offer here. The other is extraordinary and defied my expectations: humility.

This is a rockumentary we're talking about, here. A film about a band who ascended to great popularity in the '80s and not a single clip of Molly Meldrum making a fool of himself talking about them. There is a clear sense of satisfaction from the band members at their success as an act but it's never smug. Montages of the origins of the band are laced with humour and fondness but we don't get anything like an upward trajectory. From steamy clubs where the human condensation rose to fall again as salty rain from low ceilings to oceans of fans in stadiums to outback gigs the message is about work. It's true that a comparable documentary about Cold Chisel  might feature this maxim but it would be plagued by the kind of '70s rockism that they managed to sustain as though punk really was the flash in the pan that hindsight made it. Then contrast the superb The Go-Betweens: Right Here which works from a very different part of the spectrum where the anecdotes are all personalities and quirks but is tempered by the ghostly spectre of riches that never arrive. And I guess I've reached my point.

I smirked at Midnight Oil and why? I sided left, walked near the banners (if not actually holding them aloft) at marches in Joh Bjelke-Petersen's Brisbane, felt the same unease at the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, feared the threat of nuclear annihilation ... you get the idea. So why shouldn't I have gone to at least one Oils gig or shelled out for an album? Why did I and everyone I knew smirk at the sound of the big OzRock intros and shouty slogans that I wouldn't dare contradict? Maybe it's because I didn't want to be schooled by more oldies, because the jolly pink giant at the mic doing the funky chicken between lines just seemed like another teacher doling out industry doses of worthiness. Maybe. But do you want to know what it really was? We ridiculed Midnight Oil because for all our middle class posturing and the sloganeering of our own, because all of us with the Soviet Poster haircuts and op shop fashion, our crappily unrehearsed bands with their derivative songs and the quiet smiles of approval from friends in the audience, our fishbowl exclusivity and imperious campus pluck were not needed by the likes of Midnight Oil. We were scarcely visible to them.

Go and see this film and take a good look at the audience. There's not a gelled spike among them. They come from the burbs full of beer and war cries and punch the light or each other the same way. And above them in the solar blast of stage lights the tall bald bloke called the times in a wail that cut stone with perfect pitch and swung and flailed, hemorrhaging kilojoules by the second with movements that never looked like dance moves but blurred in the light as the same festive anger that drove the punters in front of him. And while we triumphed at the twenty people we dragged along to an inner city pub they were reaching into the bush, filling town halls with experiences no one who saw them would forget. And they knew all the words and sang the choruses like football chants. Sheep in a flock? More like a demonstration.

We didn't get it because we didn't want to. We didn't get it because sour grapes. Maybe we missed out on music we really didn't dig (I'm still not a fan even after the film) but we did miss out on the message the same way we did when we laughed at the advice of the old bastards who had reared or taught us. The ones who did get the point didn't care about any of that because they knew the full body experience of the greatest rock music event. We even thought of that as bullshit. I'm not saying we were wrong, I just know now that they weren't either.

Review: HEREDITARY

We begin with a blend of a house set in a forest surround and some exquisite dioramas including rooms in the house we've seen and a little tilt-shift here and there blurs the distinction so that we start wondering which is which. This weaves over an increasingly menacing electronic score that drones under dark corners and bright family portraits alike. This is how an unusual film plays fair. You wouldn't know that from the trailer which tries to sell the film as a kind of James Wan jump scare stravaganza when the film has more in common with Zulawski's Possession or '70s folk horror. The production house, A24, might be a clue here as it's given us such as It Comes at Night, The VVitch and Free Fire, films that crawl under the skin of genre in search of fresh veins. Well, this is another.

It begins like a brittle Scandinavian psycho drama as middle aged artist Annie juggles her torn feelings over her domineering mother's death with an exhibition whose deadline looms. She is the maker of the miniatures and burns concentration over them with jeweller's goggles. Her husband Steve is the calm gravitational centre with the easy smile and soft voice. Son Peter has hit his late teens and, while touchy and self-medicating, seems happy enough. The daughter Charlie is the spanner in the works. Slow to develop, she is withdrawn, scratching out severe depictions of the world around her on a sketchpad and constantly nibbling on chocolate. If the awkward tension of the funeral service is unrelieved all the way to Annie's fury at a grief support group isn't already ratcheting high there is one further disaster in store which will turn this hard play on grief into very dark and weird stuff.

That's it this side of spoilers (and boy is this film spoilable). The turns taken by the plot allow a lot of resistance by the film to easy thematic calls. The grief of the first act collides so rockily with rage that neither will serve as the bedrock. The power centre within the family is so unbalanced but the glimpses of warmth are so genuine that there's no easy bone pointing toward disfunction. Charlie is withdrawn and wilful but not beyond communication. The very deliberate physical casting of young actor Milly Shapiro aided by some unsubtle make-up (some shots look like her face is a loose mask) give her the alienating appearance of a young girl with the face of a grown woman. This is clearly intended as unsettling but is both so hard it seems to belong to a different movie and is a central part of this one.

The puzzling shift from the tense domestic drama of the opening act to the flights of grotesquerie of the remainder might remind the adventurous viewer of Ben Wheatley's Kill List. You might well find yourself mentally asking, "wait, when did that happen? Why is that suddenly like that?" While there are no jump scares of the crudeness of those in The Conjuring scenes from the last hour would only grind against earlier ones. So why does it work?

A story that is not afraid of taking sharp turns away from expectation nor cares much if its viewers will see some things coming too early helps. There is far less play on surprise, despite the violence of the changes, than a mounting sense of dreadful inevitability. It can be very clunky but if you're in for the ride (I can imagine many won't be; there were walkouts at my screening) you might even take these aboard as quirks of discovery. If you can go along you will be rewarded the same way that anyone who stuck through the whole Cremaster Cycle were. A film that trod ground similar to that is 2012's bizarre teen drama/body horror/performance art film Excision. Look what happened to that. Never heard of it? That's the point.

What might save Hereditary from Excision's unfair fate is the cast and their performances. Gabriel Byrne's sonorous gravitas makes us warm to him at every appearance. Alex Wolff as Peter gives us a victim whose sincerity burns through some scarifying moments. Ever dependable Ann Dowd shows us a believable folkiness that has another side (her scenes with Annie and seances are a masterclass of two-handed vignettes). Towering over this, though, is the force of Toni Collette who rages, coos, sneers, hisses and envelopes as no one else in a tour de force that is both showy and thankless. Acting like this can bid us overlook plot holes and logic leaps alike, reminding us that this is a story of characters rather than mechanical perfection. Again, not everyone will come to this but those who allow themselves will find real value.

In an interview Toni Collette mentioned without identifying it that there was a moment that audiences consistently laughed at. I noted it as I saw it and it is strange, a shot of puzzling cartoonish violence that vanishes as quickly as it appears. I wondered at it, thinking it was a misstep but then saw a later action that seemed to balance it with a winceable action that takes a little too long to stop (but then has an offscreen result that also might be comic to some). I don't know if that effect was a mistake or a nod to the notion of slapstick in horror and how uneasily it sits with the genuine, unironic grimness surrounding it. I like that I don't know.