According to Jean-Luc Godard, “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl”, a mantra that well served the cinematic output which gave rise to psychoanalytic spectatorship theory in the 1960s and 1970s. But in 1997 it seems anomalous coming from Bill Bennett’s ‘couple on the run’ feature, Kiss or Kill. An affectionate expression of personal nostalgia in the first instance, though heavily laden with melancholy within its contextual cinematic climate, Kiss or Kill is a bittersweet coup de grace to the once esteemed auteur theory championed by the Cahiers du Cinema. As such, it is largely unapologetic and disarming in its sort of self-reflexive, sometimes knowing throwback to a more naturalistic, less complex, cinematic paradigm.

The film opens with Dylan Thomas’ words “We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill / Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie” - a self-conscious acknowledgement that the girl and the gun are cinematic constructs, shadows dancing across the celluloid, their presentation of love: artifice, cinematic lie. This loaded intro is Bennett’s appeal to the audience not to engage in the usual act of total disavowal but to keep their wits about them because what follows is more than just the story of a couple on the run.

Al (Matt Day) and Nikki (Frances O’Connor) are lovers and small time scamsters whose commit petty crimes are motivated by both their socio-economic circumstances but also the thrill that comes from life on the run. In terms of narrative, Nikki is the real driving force, something of a femme fatale and, even though this film is not strictly noir, her voiceover statement which segues into back story definitely gives her an authorial standpoint from the outset. The set-up for the plot begins with a flashback sequence to a young Nikki, perhaps five or six years old, as she witnesses a knock at the door: her father; he immediately douses her mother in gasoline and sets her alight. Nikki watches her mother burn alive and this single event establishes early on both her hatred for men and her personal insecurities which later manifest into a delightfully Freudian “return of the repressed”.

Cutting back to present day we see Nikki wearing a sexy red dress, picking up a rich married businessman at the bar. Having successfully flirted her way into his hotel room she drugs him and, together with Al, rips him off before getting the hell out of there. Though it is clear this is a well rehearsed scam for the duo it appears to be the first time that such a poor, unsuspecting (albeit immoral) lump of a man has ended up dead. What’s worse, the prize stash they’ve scored isn’t money or jewels but instead a paedophilic sex tape incriminating one incredibly popular and well known footballer, Zipper Doyle (Barry Langrishe). Upon finding themselves in something of a tight spot, the couple decide to flee Adelaide and embark upon a literally and figuratively implacable, barren journey across the Nullarbor. Along the way tensions heighten and wherever they seem to stop over, bodies turn cold.

Between the mounting dead bodies, being tailed by the police and hunted by an irate football paedophile, the two leads slowly begin to unravel, suspecting one another as the killer. With Nikki’s increasingly strange sleep walking habits and Al’s subsequent recoil, their once certain love is brought into question along with their individual senses of self. In a particularly striking sequence of tightly shot reversals, the two have at each other whilst hurtling towards an infinite nowhere across the callous Nullarbor. The atmosphere is highly claustrophobic which is perfectly and ironically juxtaposed against the endless desert landscape. Considered against earlier jump cuts which were used to provide a clear sense of fragmentation and fractiousness, this carefully shot sequence reveals another level of their individual subjectivities and shows Bennett’s flair for intimate filmmaking.

Largely improvised to great effect, Kiss or Kill is a film that adheres to a classical narrative paradigm complete with plot causality whilst offering another level of reflection thereupon for a clued-in cine-literate audience. With clear reference to genre classics such as Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) - complete with character commentaries on David Lynch’s Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune from Wild at Heart (1990) and Oliver Stone’s Mickey and Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers (1994) - and with an added appetite for hard-boiled fodder, Kiss or Kill is an altogether curious little art house film that seems to want to be simpler than it actually is. The parting shot is a perfect example of Bennett’s inability to leave well alone, extracting any seriousness from its final sting by offering up anecdotal ambiguity. Entertaining and intriguing in equal measure, it certainly leaves an atypical aftertaste.

Director: Bill Bennett
Screenwriter: Bill Bennett
Cast: Frances O’Connor, Matt Day, Barry Langrishe, Chris Haywood, Andrew S. Gilbert, Max Cullen, Barry Otto, Michael Hill