The Safe House - Expositions

Cutline to pic: Darwin dweller ... Rogue star Michael Vartan

IN the portable toilets at last weekend's Australian Film Institute awards, posters above the urinals warned of the imminent arrival of a new Australian film called Kenny.

As I stood there, my immediate reaction was that whoever is behind this movie must have an almighty flush fund at their disposal. But the placement couldn't have been more strategic: Kenny, it transpires, is the story of a toilet delivery man who takes care of society's dirty work.

It wasn't so long ago that Australian film seemed to be going down the toilet. But as we head into 2006, a more optimistic mood has taken hold. The question is, how sustainable is it? Is the success of Look Both Ways, The Proposition, Little Fish, Three Dollars and Wolf Creek a mere flash in the pan or a sign of a genuine revival?

As always, looking at any year in isolation can distort assessment of broader trends. Despite a long-term decline in real levels of film funding, the upcoming slate of Australian movies offers an impressively diverse array of themes and genres. On paper at least, there is no sign of a repeat of the quirky-comedy binge that led to a spate of very unfunny and little-watched films.

Several high-profile Australian releases next year will provide the first real test of a new qualitative system of evaluating films that are seeking funds from the country's main funding agency, the Film Finance Corporation. Of all the films released during 2005, only Little Fish was given the green light through this procedure.

Some of the more anticipated of these offerings are adaptations of non-Australian material. These include Geoffrey Wright's modern-day version of Macbeth, which stars Sam Worthington; the murder mystery Jindabyne, which director Ray Lawrence has adapted from a short story by Raymond Carver; and The Book of Revelation, based on British writer Rupert Thompson's novel about a dancer who goes missing for 12 days.

For more overtly Australian stories, the coming year will deliver Footy Legends, about a young Vietnamese Australian in western Sydney with a rubgy league obsession, and Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, which has the distinction of being the first feature film to be made in an indigenous Australian language. Set in Arnhem Land, Ten Canoes stars David Gulpilil's son Jamie as a man who lusts after one of his older brother's three wives.

The film has the backing of the Adelaide Film Festival through its investment fund, which was also instrumental in the making of AFI best film winner, Look Both Ways.

Several new films, including Kenny and a cautionary tale about celebrity called Rats and Cats, have been made without any public funding. Indeed, Kenny, directed by Clayton Jacobson, has the distinction of being the first film to receive its entire budget from a toilet-hire company.

Meanwhile, comedian Mick Molloy is following his highly successful Crackerjack with Boytown, playing a schoolteacher whose former life as a pop star is reignited after he hears a cover of his hit song on the radio.

Teenagers in trouble will figure prominently in local releases. In December Boys, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe plays one of four orphans who leave their orphanage for a holiday by the sea. Paul Goldman (Australian Rules, The Night We Called It a Day) is directing Suburban Mayhem, in which an unhinged 19-year-old (In My Father's Den's Emily Barclay) runs amok and kills her father. And Toni Collette and Richard Roxburgh head the cast of Like Minds, a psychological thriller about a 16-year-old who is remanded in a juvenile detention centre after the shotgun death of a school friend.

Dark themes inhabit the screen in Candy, which, like Little Fish, features some of Australia's best-known actors in a drama about the ravages of heroin. In this case the stars are Heath Ledger and Somersault's Abbie Cornish as a pair of lovers who embark on a self-destructive odyssey.

Other dangers lurk in Rogue, a thriller involving a very large crocodile and some very unfortunate tourists, from the team responsible for this year's biggest local box office success, Wolf Creek. Cate Blanchett's husband Andrew Upton is one of the writers of the British-Australian co-production Middle of Nowhere, in which a young British couple travelling through the Australian outback become involved with a mysterious American.

Another anticipated highlight of the coming year is Irresistible, with Susan Sarandon in the role of a woman who develops an obsessive streak after becoming convinced that her husband (Sam Neill) is being stalked.

Although we won't see it on the screen until 2007, one of the most talked-about projects is an adaptation of Raimond Gaita's bestselling 1998 memoir, Romulus, My Father. The film, the first to be directed by Richard Roxburgh, will star Eric Bana.

One of the producers of Romulus, My Father is Robert Connolly, who directed this year's Three Dollars. He says that although there are some exciting films in the works, "it is like any other time in the past in our industry. We have to capitalise on the audience that has returned to Australian films this year and continue to raise the bar in the quality of the films that we're making."

Bana isn't the only high-profile star planning to work at home in the coming year. At a press conference last week ahead of the AFI awards, Russell Crowe confirmed that he and Nicole Kidman have been cast in what is expected to be the next film project for director Baz Luhrmann.

Although Luhrmann has stopped short of confirming when the film might be made, he did say that he "would be delighted if Russell and Nicole were to be involved in the Australian epic", and he is hopeful that the right conditions will come together to allow production to begin early in the new year.

To be continued.

© News Limited 2005

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