The best handjob in literature...

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9817.Ten_Days_in_the_Hills">Ten Days in the Hills by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1339.Jane_Smiley">Jane Smiley
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/248716399">3 of 5 stars

Copies of this novel sold out at the Melbourne Writers Festival after a session with Jane Smiley in conversation with David Francis. He described this novel as having the best headjob (or was it hand job) in literature. As it turns out, I think it was hand job. There is a little sex in this large novel - generous easy sex between a range of consenting adults. The opening is lovely - two of the main characters in bed musing on whether they should make a film about being in bed together along the lines of My Dinner with Andre. I felt lulled into something promising in terms of a range of interesting conflicts, some stuff about relationships and a real go at unpacking American reactions to their country's foreign policy.

The story is set against the backdrop of the beginning of the second Gulf War, although the characters are in Hollywood rather than Baghdad. The war is a springboard for debate along with the shifting values and ambitions of people who occupy the large house temporarily (for part of the ten days). Smiley says that she was inspired to write the book by The Decameron, which I have not read. It is described in A O Scotts review of Ten Days in The Hills: "In that book, 10 privileged Florentines — seven women and three men — took refuge from their plague-ravaged city in the accursed year 1348 and passed the time telling stories, a hundred in all." This review, titled 'Kiss Kiss, Talk, Talk' accurately captures the ways in which this large novel runs out of steam - I wanted it to be so much better than it is.

The dimunition of conflict over the course of the novel is in stark contrast to the faint news of the Iraq War that filters occasionally into the lives of these characters, reminding us of how privileged, middle class and languid they (we) are. Ultimately, not the most interesting thing to read about.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

A crying shame?

What have these two films got in common – The Burning Man and A Single Man? Two things. The actor Matthew Goode and the theme – grief. (I don’t want to spoil the plot of The Burning Man for you so I will try to avoid saying much more about it here but it may be hard to be totally oblique so don’t read any more if you plan on seeing it.)

About half way through The Burning Man I started to think about the best films about grief and A Single Man was the first film that entered my head. It’s in the acting; Firth manages to convey grief and anger with a look or slow movement of the body or delivery of a sentence and in the degree to which it explores his character and that of the female lead in the film (we care about them, dysfunctional as they are). Both films are also highly stylised but this stylisation works in one film but not in the other. I thought about the reasons for quite a while after watching The Burning Man.

I am the person in the dark in the cinema who reaches first for the hankie. I am often embarrassed at how easily I cry (I find it difficult to watch any of the Olympics without tearing up. The ABC news can be an emotional whirlpool.) So why no tears over this one? The Burning Man opens with a series of fragmented scenes. We see chef Tom (Matthew Goode) in road rage, in his restaurant, running down the corridor of a hospital yelling, being escorted by two men in security uniforms. He is a man filled with rage. (And libido – the opening scene is of his bottom quivering as he masturbates.) The reasons for the rage are not clear – the film moves back and forward in time forcing the viewer to really concentrate.

Rage is an unattractive thing – unless we can empathise with it – (The “I’m Mad as Hell and not going to take it any more” scene, almost any early Jack Nicholson, George Kostanza on a good day). So there’s a man, out of control with anger. When he’s not being angry, the camera gazes soulfully at him. I use that phrase deliberately – the camera person (or maybe the editor) is in love with this actor and the gaze of the camera lingers often and unnecessarily on Goode, who is very good looking in a tragic wild man careful one-day growth kind of way. He’s sad, he’s angry, he’s dysfunctional. Interestingly (for what it says about me), I empathised with the main character Tom only three times in the film – and most strongly when he runs amok at a picnic of strangers and throws their food all over the park. I should have felt more for this character but was unable to.

There was something missing from the film and I think, oddly, that the element is tension. Where a film is an “emotional journey”, as this one is, there is usually an element of tension, of waiting for an outcome or for something to emerge. The first part of the film has this – as we strain to make sense of the fragments. But once the storyline is clear, there is almost nothing there. What happens is predictable. Typing this makes me feel like I’m not doing the film justice but the main character is not interesting or conveyed in enough depth to pull the story along. We don’t see enough of pre-angry Tom and his life to feel the contrast. There are anodyne scenes with his wife/ girlfriend where they go mussel hunting which look a little like Tourism NSW ads, they are not particularly interesting or convincing. His pre-angry life is annoyingly good looking and bland. I would have preferred Goode to be a little more haggard as well; his looks and the lingering gaze of the camera distracted from whatever emotion he was trying to convey. Many shots were very self-conscious, look at me, look at the art kind of shots. This film maker needs to go look at some Kelly Reichart and Koreada films to learn how to tell an emotional story minimally.

A lot of reviews have talked about the initial non-linear mode of story telling (popular this year – Jane Eyre, We Need To Talk About Kevin); Leigh Paatsch, a reviewer said: "It might be an unfair comparison, but another new release this week, We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers a virtual masterclass in non-linear storytelling." Paatsch is right about this; the Kevin film works very effectively fragmenting the plot to build tension and to delay the ‘money shot’ of that film (which incidently is also about grief and anger and where Tilda Swinton looks completely frumpy and undone by these emotions). The director of The Burning Man Jonathan Teplitzky said that he wanted the fragments to resemble the kind of chaos that might plague someone like Tom. In this way it is effective although Paatsch also says “Burning Man features an audacious structure that makes it seem more interesting than it is.” The director says, in an interview with The Australian, "I wanted the film to be visceral and emotional over a heavily plotted film," he says. "I was very conscious of writing like that because I wanted the structure of the film to tell as much as anything else about the emotional and psychological state of the character." Visceral, this film isn’t, despite the actual offal that plays a bit role in the film.

In summary, I agree with this assessment from FilmInk: "Unfortunately, he's (Goode) undone somewhat by the film itself, which is over directed, too proud of itself, and utterly enamoured with its main character's destructive personality." It's a shame - I wanted to like it more.

What kind of Melbourne would you write about?

What would any Melbournite wish to write (or read) about Melbourne? What would the reading experience be if you were not from Melbourne? Sophie Cunningham's book is one of a series about different Australian capital cities - Delia Falconer wrote a similar book about Sydney, for example.

It is a beautiful book to handle - a small hardback with rough-cut old style creamy pages and a silky finish to the cover shot of a murky Melbourne laneway. And this book is SO laneway.I felt like I was in a very small club (of people) reading in a very small and hidden Melbourne bar. You will know if you are in the club if you open the book. Its about (and for?) people who live on the map which is printed on the inside cover. Like me - middle class, university educated, inner-city bleeding heart liberal (lower case).

So it was a book of confirmation, rather than surprises. I liked it but found it faintly irritating for that reason. There was nothing new in it for me. So that's why I'm wondering who the predicted audience is for this book. I read a lot of Kristin Otto's book 'Capital' last year and found it a whole lot more interesting - it is a different beast of course as it's about time when Melbourne was the capital of Australia.

If you want to see if you're in the club or not - make a list of the five writers most likely to be referenced in a book about Melbourne, about the top five topics that would be covered (the 'action' of the book takes place over a year in 2009), of ten iconic leisure activities....
I'll start you off - Garner, Tsiolkas, Flanagan, Brunettis, Crystal Ballroom, Skyhooks, MIFF, the G, Paul Kelly - need I go on? (Apropos of nothing I had a taxi driver yesterday who needed directions to the MCG. He shyly confided at the end of the trip that it was his first day. "Yeah, I gathered that mate," I said).

I like Sophie Cunningham's writing - I enjoyed Geography when it came out. I like the club I'm in - but probably don't need to read about it.

The Bad Cunt ambition

Like Samson and Delilah, Toomelah opens with a “waking up” shot. I’m beginning to feel like it’s a bit of a cliché in these kinds of low socio-economic contexts (also used in Blessed). It enables the cinematographer to pan around the home surroundings and give the viewer quite a lot of additional information before any of the action begins. The camera pans over cheap trophies won by a boxer (Daniel’s father), tracks along the cracked plasterboard and the rumpled bodies sleeping in the house. We see 10 year old Daniel wake up slowly and begin his day searching fruitlessly for money in his mother’s wallet. Toomelah is a real Aboriginal community on the border of NSW and Qld. The mother of the film-maker, Ivan Sen, grew up there so he had good links back into this community and it shows.

I wanted to see this film because I thought it might fit into the neo-neo realism genre. Relevant examples of this genre include Treeless Mountain (Korea) and Nobody Knows (Japan). Both of these films are concerned with the idea of children who have been abandoned by their parents. In both films, the children have a “problem” to solve that ensures that the audience is drawn into the film. A lot of the dramatic tension is in their management of the problem – surviving without appropriate adult support.

There is not the same sense of urgency in Toomelah, though Daniel is at risk because of the remoteness of his mother and the incapacities of his father who is an alcoholic. In almost all ways, he is more at risk than the children in those other films because his immediate environment is filled with trouble. He is disconnected from school, the elder in his family who is capable of providing support (his Gran) has other family business occupying her head space, and the most welcoming ‘family’ in town is a group of small-time drug dealers. Constantly in the film Daniel is asked “Where you goin’ bro?” “Nowhere.” Correct. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. The urgency of those other two films cannot be sustained in this aimless, deprived backwater. (And yet the question of deprivation is problematised – the school is modern and appears caring and other children appear with protective adults.)

As with the other neo-neo realist films, the camera lingers over landscape and character. Nothing happens fast – we can soak up the ennui of the day. Daniel was not a professional actor but manages to fill the screen with his personality – a withdrawn but feisty mix of bravado and deprivation. He wants to be a “bad cunt” but also yearns for contact. Reviewers have compared this to Samson and Delilah (this film is much better in my view because, as this reviewer says, “Toomelah has issues that Sen can tick off, "from deaths in custody to education to cultural extinction, unemployment, substance abuse, stolen generations". But although these are all woven into the fabric of the film, Sen has no interest in setting an agenda. "I wanted to make a film that was truthful to a little boy's experience of his world." (Read more) That lack of an agenda makes this a better film. It has a documentary-like quality that is deepened through the use of many non-professional actors.

Paul Byrnes, writing in The Age, said “The more recent films by Aboriginal filmmakers such as Here I Am (Beck Cole) and Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton) are noticeably internal. They do not look for outsiders to blame. There's a subtle reduction in the politics of victimhood that many black films used to carry as freight, unintentionally or not. There is more humour too, at least some of the time. Toomelah is like that. It offers us glimpses of a world most of us can never enter. That's the kind of thing that only film can do.” The school library has a large pin-up board with photographs of indigenous people through the history of the town and the mission which preceded it. Daniel’s gaze lingers on the men, proud looking men with shields and hunting materials or men loaded into a truck, clearly on the way to work somewhere. It is unclear what the modern context has to offer Daniel, except life as a bad cunt.

There is no sentimentality or manipulation in this film; things are what they are. The outcomes for Daniel are unclear. But for a short time, we’ve lived in his space.