Despite a relatively ubiquitous career over several years, mostly comprised of bit parts, Sampson still has the aura of a fresh-faced future gun biding his time before a lucky break sends his stock up from a likeable industry figure to Rolodex A-grader.

He “broke in” by joking about Maggi noodles on the teev with the jive of an intellectually disabled MSG addict and starred in 2005?s klutzy ‘strayian comedy You and Your Stupid Mate. That’s a movie generally spoken about — by the small number of people who saw it — with either Voldermortian hushed tones or boisterous bursts of condescension, though it’s fair to say few if any of its sins stuck to its stars. Interesting to note how they decided to market it on DVD, with a beach-set Australiana cover featuring an image Sampson’s head significantly smaller than the size of Rachel Hunter’s right breast.

Finally Sampson gets a chance to put that galaxy-wide glare to decent use as a serial killer with a twist in 100 Bloody Acres, an ambitiously quirky black comedy about two brothers who run an fertiliser business and use human bodies as their equivalent of the Colonel’s secret herbs and spices. The film is the feature debut of writer/director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes. It’s an admirably spirited shot that lacks oomph.

Sampson plays Lindsay Morgan, domineering older brother of imbecile Reg (Damon Herriman) who, shortly after the movie begins, stuffs a human body into the back of his truck. Like a move from Dude, Where’s My Car? he then picks up three hitchhikers on their way to a music festival and…things don’t go so well for them. Two ride in the back near the body, which is badly stuffed among other bags, and the other, Sophie (Anna McGahan), sits shotgun. Naturally the only sensible option is for Reg to go back to home base and ‘fertilise’ the three of them, who are now caught in a Wolf Creek-esque stroke of bad luck.

Making this kind of jet-black blood-n-bodies comedy work requires menace. With barely a whiff of it in 100 Bloody Acres, the potty puns and grim gags flip-flop. 100 Acres plays for laughs over scares, not by any stretch of a Sampson smile a bad idea, but underestimates — or for one reason or another wasn’t able to realise — the importance of the latter.

An uneven tempo gives the movie long slabs of punctuation and rapid shifts in tone, as if the Cairnes boys realised they were onto something good but couldn’t decide exactly what. On occasions the story takes desperate lurches into quickly abandoned new directions, often punctuated with comedic extremities not without their benefits.

There’s a great gag involving a stray knife, a good Rebecca Gibney pun (niche genre) and a hoot to be had in a you-crazy-mutha sex scene sure to provide Sampson comedic mileage for years, even if it boils down to him yakin’ shtick in a comedy room or after a few beers at the pub. We’d be right to hope that shit-eating smile will keep coming back, larger and snappier, with productions that stretch it into more interesting places.

Review by Luke Buckmaster

Though the execution lacks polish and a sense of creating a daringly original perspective, the central themes of director Belinda Chayko’s Lou resolutely come to the fore. This is the story of an 11 year old entangled in trying domestic circumstances in rural New South Wales. Lou (Lily Bell-Tindley), stuck with two younger siblings and a troubled young mother, Rhia (Emily Barclay), who is struggling to make ends meet, seems to be drifting through life, the departure of her father creating a troubling and hurtful absence that remains a bone of contention between the two.

Life is not easy for Rhia; there are wolves on her doorstep in the form of creditors looking to recoup a series of debts. To allow them entry would be the first stage of a more meaningful dissemination – one that strips them of material possessions and becomes, in turn, a painful admission of utter helplessness. Such an outcome is unthinkable to Rhia, whose current boyfriend seems another misguided diversion sought only to distract her from inner demons, including the parental responsibility she clearly struggles with.

The father of Rhia’s ex-partner, Doyle (John Hurt), an aged and infirm old navy man, enters their lives, requiring temporary care before a more permanent home can be found. Doyle, suffering from Alzheimer’s, proves to be a handful; prone to incoherence and fiery outbursts, he requires far more specialised care than the struggling family can provide. The unenviable responsibility of keeping track of him is handed to Lou who Doyle soon mistakes for his long dead wife. The nostalgia of dissolving memories means little to an 11 year old, but she soon begins to understand the significance of humouring his failing mind.

Occasionally Lou falls into cliché, especially when overreaching to strike the most obvious expressive notes. The friction between Lou and Rhia culminates in Lou declaring “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” Feeling lifted from any number of films in which teenage conflict and the meaning of parental sacrifice are central to the drama, this moment rings falsely even as it hones the conflict to a sharpened emotional edge. Barclay, so stunning in Suburban Mayhem (2006), feels like a weak link; her portrayal of Rhia’s emotional turmoil is generally less than convincing.

There’s not a great deal for the usually wonderful Hurt to work with here, though he and his director deserve credit for providing Doyle with a hardened edge. He could so easily have been a pathetic, forlorn figure whose every utterance becomes a manipulative device to obtain an expected response. The crotchety Doyle does struggle to win our sympathy but this is more due to lack of a back story of any real depth to help signpost the few experiences his failing memory clings to. Visually, Chayko uses the burning of nearby sugar cane fields as an effective metaphor for the slowly unspooling mind of Doyle who is often seem gazing on in silent consternation. The mild tenderness that develops between Lou and her frail grandfather is welcome but feels mildly contrived; subservient more to the narrative than to any naturalistic necessity.
Lou (2010) – only Chayko’s second feature and first in a decade - is the type of modest, small-scale film destined to be humbled with faint praise. There’s an impression of incompleteness somehow, of sketchy characterisation that would have benefitted greatly from fleshing out these roles. Despite the lack of poignant insights or a cathartic climax this is nevertheless a very decent second effort from Chayko who’s coaxed a fine performance out of Bell-Tindley especially.

Review by David O’Connell

My broad reading of Burning Man is that you’ve taken the genre of sad personal dramas involving family sickness and death and offset the morbidity of them by pumping the film full of risqué elements. Was that a deliberate move?

It probably is, but I’d interpret it differently in the sense that the film comes from an autobiographical start. My partner passed away ten years ago. Years went by and I really wanted to respond to the experience in a creative way. So I started thinking about this movie. What I experienced, what I have learnt talking to other people and researching, is that after such an event happens to you there is often a year of magical thinking, or whatever you want to call it, that follows. It’s almost as if you wander around with a get out of jail free card in your back pocket. That no rules apply to you, and once you get past the tradgedy and sadness of it it’s actually quite exhilarating to be set free from your normal domestic life.

Is that how you felt after the death of your partner, that you were set free? What sort of emotional hurdles did you encounter?

Life is turned upside down. You do and say and behave in ways — well, it’s like you’re a 20-year-old but you have the life experience of a 40-year-old. It’s quite a freeing and exhilarating place to be, but it’s deluded as well. After a period of time that slowly dilutes and real life intervenes. You have to reclaim responsibility for all sorts of things. I was really fascinated about the character and what it was like for him to wander around in that headspace. The film’s nonlinear structure came from that, because I wanted a structure that reflected his emotional and psychological state. I also wanted to explore what can be crudely termed his bad behaviour as a response to living through something like that, where he is trying to fill the holes left behind by that kind of loss. I wasn’t really trying to load up a story about loss with a whole lot of exhilarating things, it was more about drawing out of this character the things he uses to take the pain away.

For at least the first half hour Tom is depicted as a thoroughly unlikable person. Then you slow the film’s tempo down and humanise him. Did you ever worry that the protagonist might remain too much of an unlikeable person? That the transition wouldn’t be complete?

Yes and no is the answer to that. I knew we had to be bold about it. We couldn’t pull back and get too bogged down about the need to make him nicer and more sympathetic and stuff like that. Audiences will crucify you if you do that because they know straight away that you’re treating them with contempt and patronising them. I didn’t want to make a sentimental film that patronises the audience. That was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I wanted the audience to judge him, and judge him harshly at the beginning. But I also wanted a big enough reveal so that as the audience understand what he’s gone through and the loss he’s suffered, he would transcend the behaviour they judged him on and they would perhaps change their judgement.

Different people will have different readings of the film but for me the way you’ve represented items of food as metaphors for memories was striking. Some food is to remember and cherish, others to throw away and forget. You’ve got a great scene when the protagonist is literally confronted with the idea of slicing open his own memories. Where did this idea to represent food in such a way come from and was it all intentional?

There was a huge amount of intention behind that. I wanted the film to be a juxtaposition of images and scenes and I wanted to fill it with images of life, because of the subject matter. Sex, food, fire, water, amongst others. Food was a really important part of that. The fact that Tom was a chef allowed me to use food in that way. He knows how to handle it and it means something more to him. If you speak to most chefs they have a lot of respect for the ingredients they work with. When we created the car crash scene at the start of the film, I wanted all the ingredients of his life swirling around him because that’s the world he exists in.

There’s even a food, or cooking, reference in the film’s title.

Exactly. Ultimately fire is about rebirth, not about destruction. For Tom it’s an everyday part of his life and the fact that things burst into flames was really important because it articulated his emotionally incendiary behaviour and his state of mind.

This is your third feature film in 11 years. I know you’ve done some TV work on top of this, but how do you make a living out of being a director? Do you have another job? A money laundering scheme? A wealthy sugar mumma?

If only! I’ve done commercials, but what I’ve found as you do more films is that the two aren’t particually mutually compatibable. I haven’t done commercials now for a couple of years so it’s been a lot harder financially, but, you know, you scrape a living together. You do a film like this and you get paid a decent fee but it’s not just for the time you’re doing the film, it’s to cover your life. I started writing this film four years ago so it’s a four year journey in terms of that. It’s tough, but it beats doing a proper job.

Given the profession is that tough, and it takes so much time and effort to make a feature film, how do respond when you read a bad review?

As you get older you have to accept the fact that when you make a film like this it’s going to generate different opinions. I can see that for whatever reasons – the boldness of it, the sex in it, the swearing, all that – there are all sorts of reasons why Burning Man could turn people off. You accept the fact that not everybody is going to love you, so a bad review is just part of what you have to brace yourself for. Hopefully you make a good enough film that is embraced by enough people to give it the life it deserves.

On an atmospheric level the film is often stunning. You play with spatial properties, flip images, toy with reflections of mirrors and water and so on. It looks so good that there are moments when I suspect viewers become partly taken away from the immersive elements of the film. Was that a concern? That you might temporarily remove people from the experience?

I was very conscious that when you tell a story like this it’s quite full on for most people, it’s confronting. To give at different points at every level a little bit of a break for the audience – like a shot that’s just nice to look at it, it gives them a breather for a couple of seconds, ready to move on and plunge into the next scene. That was really conscious. Obviously you don’t want it to stand out like dog’s balls; it needs to be within the context of the film.  

People still talk about David Wenham’s performance in Gettin’ Square. He was an absolute scene stealer, and of course was in Better Than Sex as well. This is your first feature without Wenham in it. Did you offer him a role?

The trouble was there wasn’t really a role to offer him. Apart from Tom (the protagonist) there are not many male roles in the film, other than a smaller part played by Tony Hayes.

You didn’t think Wenham would have made a good choice for the main role?

I thought David would have done an amazing job in the main role (but) we decided to go a little bit younger. Also, one of the things I experienced and a lot of people said to me is that when they go through that sense of losing someone they feel a real sense of isolation. I didn’t want to articulate that; I didn’t want him to say “oh I feel so cut off from everybody” and all that sort of stuff. I liked the idea of Tom being an outsider. So having an English guy there, who’s a little not of this culture, brings that idea out of being slightly more isolated than he otherwise would have been.

What David did in Gettin’ Square, well, there’s hardly a day goes by when people don’t ask me about that. In many ways not enough people saw that film at the cinema. It was pretty successful but I really had high hopes for it being a lot more successful. A lot of people have discovered it on DVD. What David did with that character – that’s an actor at the top of their game. It was a brilliant, brilliant performance. I learnt a great deal about directing and the process of acting by watching David.

With Burning Man you’ve added another string to your bow by producing the film as well, meaning you’ve performed the triple: writing, directing and producing. Did you feel like you had a great deal more control than you did previously or did you feel hampered by the burden of responsibility?

A bit of both. The way I look at it, the most important thing about directing is you’re taking on the responsibility of the film. That’s what you do, so why not be a producer as well? The system that operates now is very conducive to being a producer and it’s also because this was a personal vision — I wanted a lot of control in everything that happened.

Were you healed by the film? Was it cathartic?

I don’t know, is the answer to that. I would say it was an important thing to do. It was really important for me to respond to what happened to me  creatively. I think there was an element of it being cathartic but I also think enough time had passed that I could connect with this story as a movie rather than as my life experience. I think that’s really important. I think it would’ve been a mistake to make a film like this if you’re trying to only recreate what happened to you.

Life in Movement, directed by debut documentarians Sophie Hyde and Bryan Mason (who were close friends of Liedtke) captures efforts from colleagues and close ones 18 months later to expose the world to her revered work via an international tour of her productions.

The wounds were obviously still open when filming. Interviewees accidentally alternate between past and present tenses when describing Liedtke and the late artist herself appears regularly in footage captured not long before she died, which adds a ghostly veneer to the film.

Making a celebratory documentary about an artist close to the hearts of the filmmakers and interviewees – especially so recently after the subject’s death – runs the risk of spilling into over-egged sentiment likely to disengage those who are unfamiliar with the object of their adoration.

Life in Movement dances on the right side of the line, not objective or critical by any stretch but not overtly emotional either. It isn’t the insightful and judiciously edited interview segments that make the film, but it’s integration of production and behind the scenes footage.

It’s a tough sell for viewers uninterested in dance and choreography, but those who are ought to peg this one down as a must-see. Mao’s Last Dancer it ain’t.

Review by Luke Buckmaster

The film, though its edge has been dulled by time, is notable for the strength of its cast. Graham Kennedy is excellent as Harry, the grizzled veteran, quick to proffer a sobering observation or two on the harsh realities of the group’s 12 month stint in ‘Specialist Services’. Offering able support is a trio of recognisable larrikins: the ever dependable John Hargreaves as Bung, Graeme Blundell as Dawson and Bryan Brown as Rogers. Then there’s a very young John Jarratt as Bill, whose going away party opens the film and around whose experiences the film is shaped.

Each actor is able exploit the screenplay’s shortcomings, for although it’s devoid of detailed characterisation, important personal moments bleed through to give the narrative some much needed depth: there’s Harry’s dissolving marriage which became the motivation for his decision to first join the military; the tragic death of Bung’s wife and daughter back home in a car wreck, and the abandonment of Bill by his girlfriend who had proclaimed undying loyalty to him before he left home.

Though far from unwatchable The Odd Angry Shot lacks a gripping sense of realism. A handful of combat scenes offer mild tension but a dearth of opponents and unnaturally flung bodies take an edge off the otherwise sobering portrayal of confrontation and the danger posed by well-concealed enemies. When the paths of the men cross those of a group of American soldiers, the accents sound like deliberately staged exaggerations too.

A broader political or social slant on proceedings is mostly sidestepped, though Harry fields a query about the real reason for their presence, proclaiming it’s “because you’re a soldier” and “there’s no one else”. He also laments the lack of diversity in terms of social class amongst the make-up of the group, noting that it’s the economically depressed who sign up for national service like sheep.

The grind of daily survival and infliction of battle scars aside, ultimately the film is best recognised as a testament to the camaraderie of soldiers and a celebration of the Australian spirit in times of duress. Going the extra yard for a mate, leavening the tension with a raucous joke or practical joke: these are the hallmarks of our national identity that receive poignant exploration.

Review by David O’Connell

Craig’s screenplay so closely follows the template of Death of a Funeral that it appears to be moving forward on rails, offering very minor variations on a theme as it does so. Director Stephan Elliot, no stranger to divisive and extravagant comedies, even imports Kris Marshall from the earlier film. He’s Tom, one of the moronic best men of David (Aussie Xavier Samuel, sporting a fine English accent) whose whirlwind holiday romance with Australian girl Mia (Laura Brent) sees him heading for the altar in double quick time in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. Simultaneously he must work hard to impress his forbidding future father-in-law, Jim Ramme (Jonathan Biggins), a wealthy politician very closely linked to a sheep in his campaigning. 

The performances are perfunctory, yet bordering at times on embarrassing as they strain to invent genuine comedic moments from the paltry inspiration behind Craig’s lazy screenplay. Rounding out David’s trio of best men are Tim Draxl’s Luke as a forlorn recently-dumped lover and Kevin Bishop’s whiny Graham. Both are walking clichés; the latter’s inferiority complex taints every word that escapes his mouth, though his crude best man’s speech does provide possibly the only laugh-out-loud moment of the film.

Faring worst of all amongst the cast is Olivia Newton-John whose performance as the Mia’s mother can best be described as forced. You can almost see her eyes bulging with desire to make her character’s every moment a memorable one. But it’s all to no avail; words can hardly express the pain of enduring a once iconic, if never great, actress imploring an audience to laugh along with the raucous misadventures of idiots.

A Few Best Men sincerely believes itself to be a clever, zany, romantic comedy in which the sight of Sandy Olsen sniffing cocaine with the foreigners is deemed the height of comedic subversion. I was neither convinced nor moved to mirth. Visually too the film flounders; it’s unaccountably, distractingly drab, with the appearance of a midday telemovie. The box office might respectfully disagree but this is one thoroughly unimaginative film, all creaky clichés and outlandish, juvenile pleadings for droplets of hard-earned laughter.

Review by David O’Connell

In 2009, despite serious misgivings, filmmaker Tony Krawitz decided to venture onto Palm Island, off the Queensland coast, with a mission – to reverse a coin of common perception; to tell the lesser known side of a tragic story that began on November 19, 2004. On an ordinary day, a drunken Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, was arrested for a minor infraction by towering white police officer Christopher Hurley, referred to by the locals as “the tall man”. Some 45 minutes later Doomadgee was dead in the local police station. 

A subsequent post mortem report made reference to a slew of internal injuries – including an almost split liver - that are usually equated with those suffered by car-crash victims. In the ensuing weeks these startling medical facts reached the wider community. The reaction from the locals produced a predictably primal encore. Both Hurley’s house and the police station were effectively reduced to cinders as seething resentment took shape in the form of destructive retribution. 

The Tall Man is compiled of interwoven, affecting interviews with family, friends and other figures pertaining to the court cases that contorted the Queensland courts over a number of years. A sobering context, which details the blighted history of Palm Island itself, is also provided as a necessary counterpoint to its ailing current condition. The director, using Chloe Hooper‘s book of the same name as the basis for his investigation, may be seen as blatant proselytising in orchestrating a campaign that refutes the innocence of Hurley. But by broadening the coverage of this tragedy he confronts the many ambiguities, allowing room for conclusions that any average person would naturally arrive at. Till now, it’s been the simplified newsworthy outcomes that form the basis of public knowledge - a flawed, semi-blind perception reducing nuance to footnotes that require concerted digging to make sense of them and their ramifications. 

The murky morality surrounding the guilt or innocence of this officer is complicated by dubious testimony from a drunken local, Hurley’s own untainted past record working in Aboriginal communities and the high probability of conspiratorial manipulation by the Palm Island officers and their superiors – the kind of behaviour that magnetically draws suspicion when brought to light. All of these elements are organically integrated into the narrative by Krawitz in a compelling manner.

The Tall Man (2011) is a first-rate documentary, offering an impassioned, humane perspective of Doomadgee’s tragic story whilst keeping away from the emotional fuse that, once lit, might unnaturally skewer audience reaction. The failings of the legal system are rightfully put under the microscope: who does it really serve and why? Krawitz has constructed a compelling real life tale that, reduced to its basic components, whether factual or inferential, underlines most emphatically a sense of its pervasive sadness. 

Review by David O’Connell

It’s obvious from the opening scenes of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead that wet around the ears documentarian Joe Cross never went to film school, never debated the merits of gonzo, expository or observational approaches to documentary. Cross is the antithesis of a filmmaking expert, an inexperience he spins into a virtue as the audience watch him, a true blue Aussie bloke, drive across America, juice ever in hand, not to make great art per se but to better his health and inspire the people he meets to do the same.

The film details Cross’ physical and geographic journey as he slims down from 140 kilos using a juice only fasting diet that lasts for 60 days. It’s sprinkled with short animated clips extolling the importance of good diet and exercise. The official homepage is sponsored by Breville, and after a few screenings scattered across the country the film will be distributed by — of all companies — Woolworths, which, in addition to the its rosy marketing materials (“3000 miles….60 days of juice…countless lives changed”) suggests something of a protracted infomercial, a whopping big ad for the supermarket food and veg aisles. Audiences are skeptical these days, and when they see a website like this they think “product.”

And so the heart warming clarion call for self-improvement that forms the core of Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead — which turns out to be one of the most inspiring documentaries about healthy living ever made — comes as something of a surprise.

When the doco begins Joe Cross walks around with a gut that looks like he “swallowed a sheep.” He also has a rare autoimmune disease, controlled by a plethora of daily pills. He explains that, as a finance whiz, he spent his life chasing wealth and forgot about health, and it’s now high time to tilt the scales in the right direction.

Cross wisely chose America as the playground for his life-changing exercise because A) the film subsequently has obvious exportability and B) he visits places full of greasy, fatty food (perfect for temptation) and big-gut clientele (perfect for case studies). “I used to eat two of these,” he says, addressing the camera in a pizza takeout joint. “Not two slices. Too whole pizzas.”

The days pass, his stomach shrinks and his juice intake increases. The film bounces along with vox pop bits and bobs thrown into the mixer. “I don’t fast. I eat fast but I don’t fast,” says one street dweller. “If you don’t want to be constipated eat the right foods,” says another. And one more, delivered totally deadpan: “I feel fine. I’ve had heart surgery.”

But the film’s dynamic changes after Cross meets obese truck driver Phil Staples, who suffers from the same rare condition as him. Staples glumly shares that his own family enquire about his death, ask him about coffin sizes and cremation. The only exercise he has takes place between truck and truck stop and it depresses him when people call him “big guy.” Staples is a pathetic, remorseful figure; so fat, so unhealthy, he’s viewed upon as the walking dead — a hot dog or two away from a heart attack. “He was on the border of suicide. He was trying to kill himself with food,” says one relative. In current affairs parlance, Staples is what you call “good talent.”

So, juxtaposed alongside Cross’s physical challenge, comes another, more important quest — to save a stranger from death by a thousand burgers. Cross isn’t a Morgan Spurlock, no snake oil merchant flogging a cheap stunt. He clearly wants to make a good film with good talent, which requires mild show boating and controlled didacticism, though his enthusiasm is unquestionably genuine. Cross builds empathy with the audience, warms us into his core message about controlling hedonism and embracing self-discipline. As a film the sum of its parts is a shade disconnected, with bits and bobs sprouting here and there, separated from the masthead, but the human connections forged carry Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead across the line with flying colours.

This is what reality TV should be: real lives depicted with tenderness and truth, rolled into a package that advocates change or sends a message. Though pointed firmly in a specific direction, with a specific solution in mind, Cross presents multiple points of view and reaches out to — rather than insults — the viewer. Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead will do infinitely more to inspire audiences than something smugger and sharper, like Super Size Me.

Cross delved into the documentary medium partly for self-improvement and partly magnanimously and has juiced together something special: a real life Pay it Forward, where one person’s inspiration inspires another, and the chain continues right down to the bottom of the line, to where even seen-it-all-before critics will be shocked to find themselves warmed and inspired. Not many documentaries can genuinely claim to provide a life-changing experience for many of its viewers. This is one of them.

Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead DVD will be available nationally at Woolworths from December 7 or online at www.jointhereboot.com.  

Writer/director Jonathan Teplitzky (Gettin’ Square, Better Than Sex) offsets the grimness of making a film about overcoming grief by modelling what could have been a morbidly despairing downer into a pot of revved-up and risqué drama with a soulful core simmering beneath the bombast.

Sex, swearing, car crashes, flames and fast-paced kitchen scenes that make episodes of Master Chef feel like gruelling single shot Russian realism flow thick and fast in the first act of Burning Man, a ballsy must-see Australian drama centred around an emotionally haunted English chef living in Bondi Beach. The heart of the film arrives later.

Burning Man kicks off as a disorientating portrait of the whirlwind life of Tom (Matthew Goode), a hedonistic anger-prone pratt who swears, drinks, abuses strangers and picks up pissed floozies and prostitutes. Then, in the second act, Teplitzky plays his emotional hand, beginning the task of humanizing and endearing us to Tom and forging an understanding between the audience and his wild and wicked ways.

Tom is psychologically stained by memories of a cancer battle fought by the love of his life, Sarah (Bojana Novakovic). Summoning a change of tone, the unfolding dramas between them — pitched at just the right emotional weight, bereft of overt sentimentality — slows the pace and tempo of Martin Connor’s top-shelf editing.

Told with a swirly nonlinear structure, the story jumps woozily backwards and forwards and around and around in chronological circles, like a Merry-Go-Round from the Twilight Zone that eventually dumps the viewer somewhere comprehensible. Pieces of the puzzle are picked up, thrown about, tossed and scrambled in a wok of fractured vignettes. Connor’s visual momentum has a dreamy, sometimes nightmarish fluidity.

Aesthetically Burning Man is a shining example of a great looking Australian film. Creative use of reflections and spatial manipulations by cinematographer Gary Phillips (who also shot Candy and Gettin’ Square) create consistently interesting compositions. If his compositions tinker on the precipice of looking a little too good, reaching that point at which images are so nicely arranged they temporarily remove the viewer from the world of the film, it’s worth it. Given the subject matter, they are also effective as momentary reprieve.

The intimate nature of Teplitzky’s direction — intimate in both an aesthetic and dramatic sense — may have benefited from stronger supporting characters, with Anthony Hayes and Rachel Griffiths under-used in bit parts. However it’s difficult to gauge how that dynamic might have affected the sweaty closeness the audience feel with Tom’s character, which is crucial to the experience.

In the pivotal role Matthew Goode throws everything he has into the pan and pulls the job off admirably well, albeit with a slight whiff — when things get particularly heavy and the emotional decibels rise — of an actor looking for the bridge to take them from a good performance to a great one.

But the strikingly brilliant aspect of Burning Man, and the thing that separates it from any other film you’ll see this year, is Teplitzky’s use of items of food as metaphors for memory — some to devour and savour, others to throw away and forget.

In a well-staged car crash presented at the beginning of the film, the camera rests on a close-up as we watch Tom and the inside of his vehicle roll over and over while ingredients he recently bought — vegetables and meat — rain down on him. We later understand, through a series of powerful but subtle images, that these are the unavoidable bits and pieces of his life falling back down on him, the blotched stains on his psyche he spends the film attempting to wipe clean. Burning Man is a compassionate drama told with verve, innovation and fearlessness.

It’s no coincidence that Tom is a chef. Observe the way he interacts with fire and the vegetable patch in his garden. Note the striking manner with which smoke is presented in one crucial scene (you’ll know it when you see it). Watch his interaction with a lobster, a visual motif used to evoke images of happier times. And note how — in one perfectly judged scene — the protagonist is confronted with the cruelly compelling situation of literally slicing into his own memories.

Burning Man’s Australian theatrical release date: November 17, 2011.

Director Ivan Sen’s follow-up to the head-scratching, frustratingly abstract Dreamland (2009) sees him back on home soil to tell a personal tale of how the endemic indifference of our country has created a void into which countless lives empty out like broken vessels. In the Aboriginal township of Toomelah, a dusty outpost and former mission straddling the New South Wales-Queensland border, a fearless young 10 year old, Daniel (Daniel Connors), is getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. Given the flick from school because of his threatening behaviour towards another boy, he hangs around local drug-dealer Linden (Christopher Edwards) hoping to be taken seriously as a future member of a roughly assembled gang of wannabes.

Daniel’s parents are not exactly role models; his mother, like most members of the community, sits around doing little between scoring drugs, whilst his father is an inveterate drunk whose only inclination is to sit on a gutter feeling sorry for himself. Trouble arises when a man just released from jail, Bruce (Dean Daley-Jones), muscles in on Linden’s turf, placing Daniel in the middle of a potentially volatile situation. Even though the conflict is treated as another lazy distraction for these people by Sen, a sense of genuine tension is created as the two men are seemingly set along a path towards an eventual confrontation.

Idleness breeds contempt in this remote place in which people are helpless to assist their own cause; educationally and financially constrained, they sink deeper into apathy. Toomelah makes for uncomfortable viewing, but the underlying humanism of Sen’s vision offers a much needed counterpoint to the despair that grips like a vice. The ghostly remnants of the town’s past life as a mission strike a poignant note too in stirring painful recollections of the older members of the community, their identities equally confused or misplaced by discriminating government policies.  

Using his own sparse compositions to create a sombre undercurrent of musical support, Sen has fashioned a film that cuts close to the bone in its examination of this profoundly sad and troubled place. The mostly non-actors occasionally do the film a disservice but their verbal interactions – spiced with plenty of profanity from the mouths of the very young - are mostly believable. Daley-Jones, an impressive lead in Brendan Fletcher’s Mad Bastards (2010), imposes his striking physical presence once again. Young Connors is undoubtedly the film’s centrepiece however; the way he holds his nerve in certain scenes, conveying the ambivalence and confusion of youth is actually quite remarkable.

Though a languid portrait of idleness that takes pains to illuminate the stasis in which this tenuous community exists, Toomelah is still strangely compelling viewing. The constantly moving camera - and fleeting out-of-focus shots that you become so used to you cease noticing them – reflects a place in which repetition is its own defence against the struggle of everyday living. Toomelah will not be to everyone’s tastes but despite glaring flaws, it’s a brave and important film in the same vein as Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009). This too is a grimly persuasive social document that will provoke and sadden in equal measure. The balance of perspectives it offers ultimately is a perfect compromise: it’s inflexible, in never allowing its naturalism to be polluted by commercial considerations, and yet offers a tantalising hope for something better – the hope of re-embracing a rich and varied culture - in its final moments.

Review by David O’Connell.