Flathead review – a beautiful meditation on life in rural Queensland – The Guardian
Australian film-maker Jaydon Martin makes an excellent characteristic debut with this absorbing, transferring and visually lovely documentary – a form of guided reportage about two males’s lives within the distant, dusty city of Bundaberg in Queensland, the Australian Texas. It’s shot in a luminous monochrome, switching inscrutably to color sometimes for the digital moments of house video.
“Flathead” refers back to the fish utilized in fish and chip retailers within the locality. One such, the Busy Bee, is now being sorted, previous to sale to new patrons, by a younger man referred to as Andrew Wong, whose late father was a Chinese language immigrant who owned the store, constructed the enterprise by 50 years of toil and paid for the training of Andrew and his sisters. Andrew, nevertheless, appears dedicated solely to his exercise programme and bodybuilding targets.
Andrew’s mate Cass Cumerford is the movie’s unselfconscious star: a rangy, scrawny, liver-spotted outdated man whose scenes within the hospital MRI scanner trace at sickness and imminent dying. One grotesque shot of him throwing up into a rest room exhibits us a decrease set of false enamel on the toilet ground. And but he appears fairly powerful, with an unrepentant smoking behavior, a liking for getting drunk and a method of swinging his forearms when he walks that jogged my memory of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
Maybe looking for redemption, or salvation, or only a narrative form to his life at its finish, Cass is exploring non secular choices. He has evidently befriended a Christian fundamentalist preacher who tells him about how all sins – together with homicide, theft and youngster abuse – might be effaced by being born once more into the religion. He talks simply and good-naturedly about his adolescence concerned in medication, which he then (with some remorse) needed to depart behind when he turned a husband and father, after which discloses a non-public tragedy that places every part into perspective.
In the meantime, Andrew is brooding on Buddhist religion and what that means his hard-working father’s dying has for him.
And so Martin’s digicam ranges loosely across the panorama, usually in a automobile whose radio is tuned to the Christian station, typically within the firm of Cass and Andrew, typically with others, such because the itinerant labourers who’ve stored the area’s ailing agricultural financial system afloat or some good-old-boys who’re cheerfully loosing off shot weapons (“shotties”) and searching rifles.
Cass will get drunk with a number of individuals, together with a gnarled character whom he asks about his desires and is instructed: “I’m not into this dreaming caper, mate.” Cass himself sings a music of his personal composition, and sounds moderately like a younger Dylan.
The movie is devoted to the agricultural employees of Queensland and but a few of its poignancy and irony lies in the truth that its two key figures haven’t, in reality, obtained a lot or any work to do – though at one stage Cass helps a mate with some shovelling and muck-spreading. The movie’s poetry resides in its considerate inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.
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