Even in an era when distaff revamps of older material are quite commonplace, this one is more out-there than most. It’s a reinterpretation of a 17th-century puppet show (itself an ancestor of mature puppet capers like Meet The Feebles and Avenue Q), directed by first-time filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes, one of many, many actors who got worldwide attention after featuring in David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. I swear, that movie was designed to break games of Six Degrees To Kevin Bacon.
And that reinterpretation starts on a pretty powerful note
by doing something disturbingly simple: Slowing the play down. Traditionally,
the show is meant to be done with a lot of manic energy, like a proto-Looney
Tunes cartoon, so that the madcap pacing makes everything from the infanticide
to tricking a hangman to hang himself to fooling the Devil into the stuff of
zaniness. But with the opening performance, that speed is toned down to a more
contemplative pace, a fitting introduction for a story meant to make the audience stop and think about the show in question.
From there, it takes one of the more face-value aspects of
the show, namely the titular Punch beating his wife Judy as the first scene,
and does two things with that: Applies it to the puppeteers of the
same names, and applies it to the society they live in. On the first front, the
story takes on a fittingly dark comedic tone through Mia Wasikowska and Damon
Herriman’s performances as Judy and Punch respectively, as Herriman’s gleefully sadistic energy as the drunken abuser sets up a quasi-Kill Bill
scenario for Wasikowska’s victimised artist. It weirdly gives her room to flex
more preternatural feminist muscle like she did in the Alice In Wonderland films,
adding a fair bit to the film’s bigger points.
And on the second, more societal front, the depiction we get
of their home town of Seaside (a town nowhere near the sea, in one of the odder
duds in the film’s comedic track record) is one embroiled in literal
witch-hunting, right down to stoning them in public. The many iterations of the
play throughout history end up reflecting the era they’re performed in, here
presented as an extension of the audience’s want to turn the abuse of women
into a public spectacle for the whole family. It’s a rather #MeToo-relevant take, and a fitting one
considering how the story of Punch plays out in the ‘real’ world, but… there’s
still a problem with it.
Yes, with how much this film gets right in regards to
analysis of the original text, not to mention the visual design, I still found
a pretty major barrier to entry with this one. Namely, the tone. Now, that’s
not necessarily in terms of the juggling of drama and comedy, although it is a
bit disconcerting when baby death makes for one of the biggest laughs of the
entire film, but more with that of the text itself.
It can’t seem to find a good middle ground between being a
period drama portraying the unfortunate timelessness of the atrocities on
display, and being a dark fairy tale built on images of witches, outcast
children and even the spectre of death. Kind of like how François Tétaz’
soundtrack can’t find a middle ground between sounding rustic and
contemporaneous to the story, and sounding like something out of an old MS-DOS
game. I kept expecting King Graham to stumble in.
There’s also the ending, where Judy boils the film’s finer
points about the treatment of women and witch-hunts into a speech that ends up
taking the sting out of the subtler showings of the exact same talking points.
When your film shows more than enough visual prowess, a solid understanding of
the puppetry involved, and starts off with a finely-tuned understanding of how
to retool the original story, something that obvious saps away at quite
a bit of all that.
But even with that said, I have no desire to take away what
this film actually gets right, especially when it’s this potent. It may not
completely stick the landing, but it definitely shows that Mirrah Foulkes has
some major potential as a filmmaker if she’s able to accomplish this much while
in the air.
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