Just before the opening film, Gracie Otto’s Seriously Red, officially kicked off CinefestOz 15th Film Festival, the annual Australian celebration of film that takes place in the sea-side tourist destination of Busselton, Western Australia, the parade of speeches and well-wishes from the festival staff, film talent and jury boards all emphasised one thing: a return to “normal”. After 2021’s rocky roll-out, one that saw the crews behind the four films fighting for the festival’s milestone $100,000 film prize – competed by four diverse features every year – visiting the event via Zoom, this year’s proceedings saw a major return in visiting tourists, celebrities, media and just movie-lovers alike.
Under the purview of actor Richard Roxburgh and his jury of film professionals, this year’s contending films were all fictional film debuts; Matt Nable’s Transfusion, Jub Clerc’s Sweet As, Gracie Otto’s Seriously Red, and Goran Stolevski’s Of An Age, that presented a nice variety of titles, with Stolevski’s queer coming of age title taking the top prize. I had the pleasure of reviewing the three runner-ups:
Transfusion (Matt Nable)
Before the opening credits even finish rolling out for Transfusion, three bodies have already hit the floor; two enemy soldiers and the slumped frame of Corporal Ryan Logan (Sam Worthington), the only one of the trio to survive the tense, Iraq War prologue that plunges us into a dark, hostile world built by Matt Nable – and that’s just the beginning. Making his directorial debut with this Stan Original film, Nable, the hard-edged Australian character actor whose steely demeanour always vibrates with an intent focus, incarnates his self-written script with a similar texture, a jagged, confrontational drama that bristles against its pot-boiler plot beats, as he’s determined to twist this sparse crime drama into a more viciously knotted family affair.
After losing his wife and unborn son to a drunk-driving accident, Logan finds himself lost, swerving in and out of different jobs, homes and relationships, whilst his troubled son Billy – who survived the fatal car crash – struggles with his own demons related to his childhood tragedy. This slow burn finds its spark once Johnny (Nable), Logan’s old army buddy, re-enters his life, offering him an opportunity to use their militaristic skills for criminal gains, a regretful decision that leads these three tortured men down an unforgiving cycle of violence. While Transfusion wears its blood-soaked, tattered heart on its sleeve, it understands that these men and their spiralling decisions are products of their social pressures and this nasty suburban drama acts as a river of personal expression for its writer-actor-director, who paints an aesthetic correlative to the stifled resentment shared by the suffering fathers who only want the best for their sons (whether they be by blood or bond).
It’s a noble effort, but this film suffers from trying to balance its blunt, polemic nihilism with its earnest melodramatic ambitions, as its difficult, patient nature starts to grind on the viewer as it calmly smoulders on. The brief, crackling moments of action suggest a more tighter, brisk version of this story, as clocking in at nearly two hours, Logan’s haunted fall from grace takes too long to get going, and in its unsmiling nature, depicts itself way too seriously. Anchored by determined performances by Worthington and Nable, and hindered by a torturously elliptical flashback structure, Transfusion is a film caught between his heart and its fists.
Sweet As (Jub Clerc)
Coming off its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival earlier this year, Jub Clerc’s long-gestating debut Sweet As is a Western Australian-based road-trip comedy splashed with local colour and regional specificity but its hokey scripting is marred with abrupt tonal shifts that dart from surface-level insights of the importance of creative expression crammed between more thornier subjects of teenage suicide and domestic abuse but without the delicate modulation needed to camouflage its oft-simplistic plotting.
After being abandoned by her alcoholic mother once again, Murra (Shantae Barnes-Cowan, whose emotional integrity remains the film’s strongest asset) finds herself on a “photo safari”, a week-long team-building exercise for at-risk youths who head into the Pilbara region, armed with only cameras and their imaginations, which is the last place the young Indigenous teen wants to be. As she gets to know the team’s dual leaders and her fellow juveniles – a chorus of caricatures who rapidly alternate from friend or foe dependent on plot convenience – the traumatised teen slowly discovers that the best way to discover herself is to ironically start by losing herself.
Anybody who has seen The Breakfast Club – or similar teen-bonding films that followed John Hughes after the 80’s – has a roadmap of what to expect here, and while the first hour clicks along with an amiable sense of texture and temperature, a bizarre narrative decision late in the game related to a “team-building exercise” is so misguided and borderline incomprehensible, that the wheels fall off faster than the travel bus that carts around the camera-wielding group of misfits, and the rousing climax never quite recovers from that dashed-off detour, culminating into a modest but conventional coming-of-age tale that doesn’t ask for a lot but neither gives much back in exchange.
Seriously Red (Gracie Otto)
It’s hard to imagine a film this year that shares a wider schism between the director’s perspective on how its quirky protagonist should be perceived and how the audience actually accepts them than in Gracie Otto’s wafer-thin Seriously Red, whose central Dolly Parton-obsessed title character is aimed to be an emblem of progress, but poetically winds up delivering the exact opposite. As a firehose of coffee-mug level, Dolly Parton quotations engulf Krew Boylan’s passion project, the writer-actress’ rendering of a toxic Parton-impersonator’s quest for fame never quite clicks with the winking, care-free sensibilities of the saintly oft-parodied figure whose angelic kindness extends to her blessing this feature with her music, image, and goofy paraphernalia.
Boylan plays Red, an insecure real estate appraiser whose impromptu performance of Parton’s cinematic-powerhouse single “9 to 5” at a work function catches the attention of a touring band of celebrity impersonators, embodied by the mysterious ‘Elvis’ (Rose Byrne in a confounding, underused cameo). As she begins this pursuit towards becoming the woman that adorned her bedroom walls, Red’s dogged dreams manifest themselves in the mistreatment of her hippy mother, her long-suffering best friend Francis (Thomas Campbell, whose abrasive treatment by his supposed childhood pal borders on abuse at times) and falling in love with her own “Kenny Rogers” (Billy The Kid’s Daniel Webber) in a series of conflicting, meandering sub-plots that never cohere into an actual streamlined narrative.
Often lapsing into cheap melodrama as it tries to form a facile rise-and-fall story, Seriously Red lacks purpose; this isn’t about someone finding solace in a closed community, as the celebrity impersonator racket is pretty quick and swift to accept her without any struggle or consequence, it doesn’t find a healthy balance between artistic and business ambitions (the film accepts a tired “all or nothing” approach to creative initiatives) and Boylan’s Parton impression isn’t even good enough to sell us that her Red would find any success as a touring imitator (even in the crowded Australian scene), capping off with an insane denouement that sees something akin to a mental breakdown applauded by family and friends that highlights the severe gap between the film’s hagiographic audience expectation and the actual viewer reaction – but at least somebody’s cheering at the end.
CinefestOz Film Festival 2022 took place in Busselton from 23rd to the 28th of August this year. Details about other CinefestOz-related events and next year’s festival can be found here: https://cinefestoz.com/
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