The main people Grant meets are types, just as he himself is a sacrificial city-lamb. The semi-legal details of towns like Bundanyabba are a fact of history nevertheless, the stunning gambling and bar settings in the film double as caverns of the underworld, scenes for a metaphysical wager. That exaggerative forces are at work, though, is clear in a number of ways.
FILM SEMI AUSTRALIA FULL
It’s standard for pub-going men down under, as in the rest of the world, to push one another to keep up, but was or is it normal in such isolated places to shout people beers while they’re obviously working on nearly full ones, as happens every other minute in “Wake in Fright”? While it all looks convincing enough, even Australians can be unsure of when exactly the mirror being used is warping. At the same time, to attain his vision, he had the inspiration of shipping in more red dust, and even actor-flies expressly generated for the purpose. Sulphide Street, advertised with nicely odorous symbolism when Grant steps off the train, is no invention, and Kotcheff drew from his own eventful experiences in the town. The outdoor Bundanyabba scenes in the film were shot in the western New South Wales mining town of Broken Hill.
Tempted by the thought of buying his way out of debt and the outback itself, Grant gets sucked in. He tells Grant about the town (wonderful place, just a few suicides), and introduces him to two-up, an old game where pennies are thrown in the air and which can make a person a lot of money very quickly. The cop serves as a sly and hospitable Charon, giving off just a whiff of threat. (“Yabba” stems from a Koori word for “to talk,” something the town’s locals do a lot of, but Aussies will also think of the small nipping crayfish called yabbies.) Winding down at a massive pub that by law should be closed, Grant is approached by a policeman (the veteran actor Chips Rafferty in a last and bravura performance). His stopover in the intense and insanely proud mining town of Bundanyabba is supposed to be for a night, after which he’ll fly home, to embrace the comforts of a big city, the soul-cleansing sea, and an impossibly alluring girlfriend.Īlas, “the Yabba” gets its claws into him. Grant is indentured to his job in the outback for another year-he must pay off a thousand dollar bond before he can leave-and loathes everything about life in the plains. The film follows a few days in the life of John Grant, a refined young teacher from Sydney. The restored print, completed in 2009, will screen this week at New York’s Film Forum. For decades the film’s original negative was missing, only to be discovered in Pittsburgh a week before a scheduled incineration. The response in Australia at the time, though, was much less enthusiastic. When a young Martin Scorsese first saw it at Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, he is reported to have continually erupted, unable to contain his delight. under the generic title “Outback,” and running in Paris for five months. The film, starring Gary Bond in the lead role, was well-received by critics abroad, appearing in the U.S. Cook was from Sydney, but the director of the film, Ted Kotcheff, is Canadian, and its scriptwriter, Evan Jones, is an Anglo-Jamaican who had never been to Australia.
FILM SEMI AUSTRALIA MOVIE
The movie is based on the Kenneth Cook novel from ten years earlier. But the film is as subtle as it is brutal, and it was largely the accumulation of casually eloquent little details (like the one above) that left me stunned after a first viewing.
There are culinary horrors, packs of grunting, shirtless frontiersmen getting blotto, and genuine kangaroo-hunt footage. It is routinely and very justifiably described as “disturbing.” The novelist Peter Temple has joked that it probably set the course of tourism in the country back twenty years.
The scene is from “Wake in Fright,” a film directed by Ted Kotcheff, and released in 1971.
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