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Wake In Fright (Film)

by Julian Shaw | June 30, 2009 10:05 | Edited July 01, 2009 10:30

Almost lost to the ravages of time, Wake In Fright is a seventies masterpiece, re-mastered for the big screen.

The best Australian film showing on silver screens this year won't be one that has been produced in the past twelve months. Instead, it will be this ball-tearing, long unseen masterpiece from 1971.

 

Joining the recent pantheon of foreigners who have exquisitely teased out the subterranean emotions and not-always-obvious pratfalls of foreign mores (American Robert Altman with Gosford Park; Brit Sam Mendes with his quad-tych of American pictures starting with American Beauty; Dane Lars von Trier with Dogville), the helmer behind this off-colour outback epic is Canadian Ted Kotcheff.

 

Far from embracing the loveable larrikin personas that have polluted our screens for decades, this woozy, nightmarish vision of our culture at its lowest ebb peels off devastating footnotes on the deeply hypocritical, leave-your-brain behind rite passages of Australian manhood.

 

Blissfully free of the jingoism and sentimentality that can undo even the most gifted filmmaker when they swing their telephoto lens at the homeland, Kotcheff has fashioned a probing, uncomfortably intense essay of Antipodean bad manners in the heightened tones of a Dadaist fever dream.

 

The humour is rich, and the laugh-out-loud moments trickle freely, but always in deeply thorned and trenchant ways.

 

What makes Wake In Fright work beautifully though, and halts any chance of the themes becoming one-dimensional, is that it doesn't merely demonise boorish Australianness, but also satirises the spiritual brittleness of a British gentleman who makes a doomed odyssey through the flies, litres of piss-warm beer, and blood tracks of the Aussie desert.

 

Indeed the first clue that the director might be a foreigner is that the protagonist - something of a proxy for the helmer, you can't help but feel - is a suave teacher abroad. John Grant (an immaculate Gary Bond, with a bleached coif, coolly calculating eyes and lilied English brogue) is a bonded school tutor who is marooned in The Yabba, a micro-community whose readily apparent limitations are perfectly encapsulated by the film's tagline: "Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There's nothing else out here..."

 

When we first see Grant, he is in a tense stare-down with a cast of kids dying to get out of their sweltering classroom and into the sunshine - little do we know at this point that Grant is perhaps more eager than them for the school year to wrap up.

 

After a mindless, booze-fuelled gambling spree (there are echoes of this sequence in Australian director Rowan Woods' current film Winged Creatures), Grant finds himself with a dollar to his name, indefinitely stranded in the desert, and with Sydney - let alone London - impossibly far away. The local community picks him up and dusts him off with the proverbial "she'll be right, mate" wink and nudge, but there is nothing but spiritual desolation on offer when Grant strikes up a temporary friendship with Doc Tydon (an unforgettable Donald Pleasance). Per his Christian name, Tydon is indeed a doctor who has forsaken his career for a rusted-over sand shack, so that he might booze himself at all hours of the day, answering to no-one.

 

With not a single card up his sleeve to play, Grant gets hauled into a world of beer sculling, hunting and bleary-eyed "mateship" led by the nihilistic Doc, that will ultimately tear his soul apart.

 

Though Wake In Fright stunned audiences when first released, what's exhilarating is that it still packs a mighty thump to the solar plexus almost forty years after being created. The nighttime kangaroo-hunting sequence will still leave jaws agape, not just because of its images of casual killing (attained during real kangaroo culling season), but because of the savagely syncopated editing and dizzying sonic flights. There are other subtler delights to be had for mature audiences, including the sight of local icon Jack Thompson, as outback wrangler Dick, in his first major film role.

 

Despite screening at The Cannes Film Festival on its initial release (and again this year in a retrospective sidebar), and gaining pupil-widening responses from foreign audiences under the title Outback, Wake In Fright just couldn't garner traction at home, seemingly averting eyes every step of the way.

 

Editor Anthony Buckley has led the charge to have this dusty, long-believed-lost masterwork reinvented for the big screen today, and his perseverance and self-belief is to be unreservedly commended. Lady luck has also played a big part, as the original film negative was slated for destruction in the North Eastern United States.

 

Restoring the picture digitally over the course of one year (the deeply deteriorated print meant that a photochemical fix-up would do little to reverse the impacts of father time), Atlab have done a marvelous job of preserving the surreally vivid imagery and sounds of Wake In Fright for future generations. This digital restitution is especially beautiful for the reason that it never tarnishes the film's original raw palette. It's evidently all "still there" - the saturated colour scheme, and the burnt-out and fly-flecked vistas, as well as a dense film grain that resembles the wide-open pores of an aged face.

 

If you're a fan of Australian cinema, or would even like to fancy yourself as one around the water cooler, then don't miss this one on the big screen. That would be close to criminal.