The plot: In 1970’s Australia, on a beach-side cul-de-sac, a
200-ton whale has beached itself. As budding filmmaker Jeff (Atticus Robb) and
his young friends marvel at what has just happened, their parents begin to make
their own lives even more complicated by engaging in a swinger’s party. While
Jeff keeps himself occupied with his home movies and trying to keep on the
right side of the adults in the neighbourhood, he is forced to learn certain
lessons about his home, his culture, his sexuality and his place in the world.
Atticus Robb as the main kid works very well with his
“clearly written by an adult” dialogue. Darcey Wilson as his sort-of love
interest handles a lot of quiet dread with astounding efficacy. Jeremy Sims is
very good as the adult voice of reason, ditto for Asher Keddie as his wife. Guy
Pearce has a lot of fun on-screen as the rather openly lecherous dad, with
Kylie Minogue rounding him off as the sloshed and simmering housewife. Julian
McMahon (yeah, easy to forget that this guy is an Aussie, even for us) brings a
lot of winking smarm to the table, with Radha Mitchell playing his wife
handling her place as the main swinger of the group rest easily on her
shoulders. Jack Thompson as the Mayor brings some for-the-cameras charm to his
scenes, Chelsea Glaw as the “active” teenager handles her rather prominent
sexuality with ease, managing to outdo even the grown-ups at their own game,
and Richard Roxburgh as the narrator brings a lot of retrospective warmth to
the overall production.
This film operates squarely between retro cringe and cultural
cringe. Retro cringe comes courtesy of the 70’s period setting, with all the
ugly fashion and overblown facial hair that comes with it. Hounds Of Love used
this same sense of kitsch to establish setting, whereas this saturates itself
in it to rather garish and humourous effect. The cultural cringe comes out the
focus on suburban Australia, particularly the rather erroneous “Aussie
upper-middle class”, parading around their own self-supposed sophistication to
make the eventual downfall of the adult friendships feel like an inevitability.
And then there’s the children, who exist in a coming-of-age
story seemingly disconnected to the suburban mayhem going on around them. As
much as Jeff’s ambitions of a filmmaker could have easily come across as
somewhat pretentious, bear in mind that this is coming from the same director
as The Adventures Of Priscilla: Queen Of The Desert; the man has earned a bit of self-reflection,
especially when dealing in a film with a certain amount of autobiography
between the lines. It operates under the usual tone for coming-of-age stories,
particularly the lingering fear that the rampantly irrational actions of their
parents is a blueprint for their own future.
This is balanced out by Jeff’s
filmmaking antics, which show a free-spiritedness and sense of liberation that
makes the final words of the production, ones that show a remarkable lack of
direct attack towards the mindset of the era, sit a bit easier. That, and it
shows a frequent willingness for the children on-screen to embrace total
anarchy, something that their parents are all too eager to ignore. Even today,
this applies to the mindset of middle-class Australiana in rather embarrassing ways.
Considering the aforementioned connection to Priscilla, the
crown jewel in our cinematic Mardi Gras tiara, the way this film looks at
notions of sexuality is at once expected and rather nuanced. It shows a certain
all-or-nothing approach to sex education for the younger characters, an
approach that is only growing in antiquity thanks to last year’s heavy sigh of
relief as far as legalising same-sex marriage, but also enough salience to show
group sex, the titular Swinging Safari, as something that very easily can go
awry. These two aspects combined give a depiction of the cultural approach to
sex as being something definitely influenced by the liberated air of the time
but also something that we haven’t really gotten much further than.
A telling
example of this is how, when two of the kids show interest in each other, their
parents show relief that their kids aren’t gay. I saw enough nonsense over the
last few months to prove that that is a fairly familiar idea, even today. Of
course, hard to take that kind of sexual prejudice seriously when, as the
escapades between the adults reaches a boiling point, we see them as being just
as confused and looking for closure as their children. They’re doing the best
they can with the bent tools they’ve been given, as the narrator aptly puts it,
and everyone in that cul-de-sac is following suit.
All in all, a decent slice of quirky Aussie cinema, with a
solid cast, beautifully sun-kissed cinematography and a script that is equally
willing to submerge itself in Kitsch Triumphant as it is to look at just how
much the soul of the age was eating away at people. Knowing how much self-aware
cringe plays into the Australian cultural identity, this brand of coming-of-age
story holds true to that legacy by showing a certain knowing laugh at its own
contents, but not to the point where it gets mean-spirited or self-loathing.
Oh, and bonus points for being one of the goriest non-horror films I’ve sat
through.
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