By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Bruce Beresford’s era-defining 1976 Aussie classic Don’s Party, starring Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves, Ray Barrett, Candy Raymond, Jeanie Drynan and Graeme Blundell.
Champagne socialists. Australia is full of them, but in the theatre and film industries, they’re absolutely everywhere. You know the type of people that I’m talking about here. They live in Sydney suburbs like Balmain, Hunter’s Hill and Elizabeth Bay, where the real estate is ridiculously expensive, but the feeling of moneyed-up extravagance isn’t as blindingly obvious as it is in Point Piper or Vaucluse.
They only listen to the ABC, they hate commercial television, and when it comes to movies, they exclusively head to arthouse flicks and foreign films. They talk a lot about politics, and if they have kids, they give them overly literate, designed-to-impress names like Holden, Atticus or Hunter, and encourage them to be decent, upstanding little tykes while ignoring their kids’ unfortunate habit of bullying other tackers in the playground, usually because they’re too busy drinking coffee or checking their mobile phones.
They vocally support “indigenous issues”, and think that Cate Blanchett is the single greatest woman that Australia has ever produced. “She’s just so real, yet so regal,” they coo, while adjusting their scarves, and wishing that Sydney was more like Paris.
Champagne socialists, however, are nothing new. In the seventies, acclaimed Australian playwright David Williamson practically set the blueprint for this most annoying of local sub-species. His plays are all forced in their wittiness, and his social stance has always been that of the wealthy, demonstrably “concerned” champagne socialist. You know, not horribly offensive, but a bit self-involved.
Director Bruce Beresford’s long, tedious, stagey 1976 film adaptation of Williams’ “masterpiece”, Don’s Party, is constantly raved about as an essential work of The Australian Renaissance, a political milestone blah, blah, blah. Set at a party on the night of The Federal Election in 1969 (whoa, how political!), the film basically documents a bunch of blathering Aussie tools on the piss, gabbing about shagging sheilas and how great they are. In one scene, they strip a young woman naked and toss her in the swimming pool. Charming! It’s the kind of “realistic” picture of Australia that only a champagne socialist would paint. Thanks, Dave!
