Ben Hackworth, 2007
I actually have (had, actually; I lost it!) a badge that says “I Love Anthony Carew“. Why? Because I fucking do. He is one my favourite writers, and is absolutely my favourite film writer. One of my most treasured Carew moments was his review of Joanna Newsom’s first album The Milk-Eyed Mender, wherein he spent the better half of the longest album review to ever run in Inpress inquiring into the very nature of actually telling us that it might be, even at all of a fortnight old, the most perfect album he’d ever heard.
Ben Hackworth’s near-revolutionary debut film Corroboree is possibly the most interesting and affecting “Australian” film I’ve ever seen. Now, obviously you don’t know me. I’m a young man but I’m in good shape. It is indeed a full-time job for me. I have seen a lot of films, and I’ve seen a lot of Australian films, from this decade and the indie-nineties to the 1970’s and 1980’s New Australian Cinema touchstones that Australian cinema’s (little-)remaining critical respect was founded on, and even earlier; the Paul Cox-led late 70’s being that all-too-brief moment in the sun, a period of relevance for Australian cinema as recognised by its peers as being important to the medium (as opposed to the current struggle to merely even financially justify its own meagre existence to itself). Interestingly, it is this very international context that underscores Corroboree’s astounding uniqueness.
It is, in an international sense, part of a larger movement away from the expositional narratives of Robert Mckee and – dear god – the fucking three-act structure. Hackworth has openly acknowledged the influence of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang, but remains both far from aping them and entirely in their class. It has been a long time since an Australian film actually warranted a contemporary formal critique (Praise, maybe?), and it has been even longer since it happened to a film as rooted in, not so much a “cultural”, but an actual Australian sensibility.
As far as the beloved Australian landscape is concerned, it is indeed a presence in the film; a breezy, hazy, yellowing late spring that anyone who’s ever been even a little inland would recognise. But moreover, its tale of an inexperienced actor travelling to a dying theatre director’s retreat in order to “re-enact” with said director’s actress friends (themselves playing the roles of prominent women in the director’s life) necessitates the use of both a definite Australian verbal language and, fascinatingly, a more complexly experiential one.
Thus: as mentioned, it is formalistic. Hell, with what could only loosely be described as a protagonist required to act as someone else for an entire film’s duration, it almost necessarily becomes an exercise in deconstruction, and somewhat abstractly at that. But amazingly, at a feature-length 95 minutes, it is both poetic and compelling, visually dynamic yet static and stylistically oneiric. Beautiful. Morbid. Humane. Elliptical. Fucking confronting. Warm as the sun, and at times as inscrutable.
Exciting, no?
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15/1/08 – HERE you will find an updated opinion; one no less enamoured, but more certainly quantified.
