by Jenny Valentish
A crowded student house party, Carlton, mid-’90s.
Film student Alice is recording her peers on a multi-turreted Super-8 camera, weaving through the crowd but particularly zooming in on Ari, a classics student she finds attractive. The protagonist, Mia, is arguing the limitations of monogamy with a friend, but that’s just a front. In reality, she’s moping over her ex, Danni, who’s having a fabulous time in the next room, which is crammed with people dancing to a rave remix of ‘Recognise’ by the Underground Lovers. Lovelorn medical student Mike looks alienated as he perches on a sofa next to four girls – each dressed in black, with dark eyeliner and red lipstick – who have huddled together in order to deconstruct the faculty staff.
‘Wasn’t he the lecturer who was a cross-dresser?’ asks one girl.
‘Nah, you’re thinking of Mr Jones from the literature department, who has an alter ego called Maria,’ says another, who has two long strands of hair hanging down from her centre part.
‘Did you guys hear he’s going out with one of his students?’
‘Yeah, I know her – Julie’s her name. She’s really nice, she’s in my class.’
‘So does that mean Julie’s going out with Jones or Maria?’
‘She goes out with Maria,’ chimes in another girl, who has a nose ring and miniature bunches perched atop her head. ‘Jones is asexual, but Maria’s a full-on lesbian.’
So begins the final act of 1996’s Love and Other Catastrophes, shot at the very sandstone university it portrays, the University of Melbourne. Its 23-year-old director and co-writer, Emma-Kate Croghan, was a recent graduate of the VCA’s School of Film and Television, then found herself on the dole. She’d made some shorts that were well received at film festivals – Sexy Girls, Sexy Appliances and Desire – as well as a music video for INXS’s ‘I’m Only Looking’, before basing her first feature at the campus where many of her friends studied, due north of the VCA and across the river, in Parkville.
In part, Love and Other Catastrophes is a love letter to Melbourne, or at least to a clique of suburbs: Carlton, Fitzroy and – at a push – Brunswick, where the bulk of the university’s students lived. Just as young, arty residents of, say, St Kilda and Richmond often stayed faithful to local crowds and haunts, there was a territorial pride in those living in Carlton, which had a rich history of subversive culture in the forms of La Mama Theatre and the Pram Factory theatre collective.
The film has also become an ethnographic snapshot of a culturally fertile period of DIY fashion, music and movies – the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the ’70s – and a surge of academic interest in feminism, identity politics and queer culture.
The action is shot over one day and revolves around the calamities of film student Mia (Frances O’Connor, who’d previously had roles in Blue Heelers and The Man from Snowy River). First, there’s the romance troubles – she’s a commitment-phobe who’s kind-of, sort-of broken up with her girlfriend Danni (Radha Mitchell), who may-or-may-not have moved on to haughty beret-wearing Savita (Suzi Dougherty). Then there’s the accommodation: Mia is living in a warehouse with her friend Alice (Alice Garner, who won the Film Critics Circle of Australia award for Best Supporting Actress), but they need a third housemate, stat. Shy medical student Mike (Matt Day) hopes to fill those shoes, partly because he’s alarmed by the antics of his current cone-punching roomies and partly because of his crush on Alice.
Most urgently, Mia wants to swap courses to cultural studies, but her current professor (Kym Gyngell) is affronted by this and, as a result, obstructive. In order to qualify, she also needs to pay off an astronomical library fine – for which, awkwardly, she needs the financial assistance of wealthy Danni. Mia has till the end of the day to race around campus securing the right permissions and bumping up against bureaucracy, in an escalating farce that sucks in her friends and involves a major death-by-doughnut setback.
Love and Other Catastrophes was shot on an indie budget, initially of $40,000, which grew to around $500,000 courtesy of post-production funding from the Australian Film Commission. While it undeniably has retro appeal, it did well at the box office, grossing $1,687,929 in Australia, and enjoying some international acclaim, with Croghan joking that she had to explain to her dole officer why she was going to Cannes. The film also screened at Sundance, Toronto and Venice, and was nominated for five AFIs.
On The Movie Show on SBS in 1996, David Stratton enthused that he had enjoyed it enormously and ‘it made me want to be a student again’, while Margaret Pomeranz called it a ‘classic romantic comedy’. Writing in the UK’s Independent, Ryan Gilbey observed: ‘Emma-Kate Croghan looks more like the lead singer in an indie band than a film director. But then her first feature, an effervescent comedy entitled Love and Other Catastrophes, often feels more like a pop album than a movie. It is bright and breezy and rough around the edges; it seems to have been made by a bunch of your mates one Sunday afternoon after a mammoth drinking session.’
Famed US film critic Roger Ebert wasn’t as keen, giving it two out of five and complaining that Croghan was ‘so distracted by stylistic quirks that the characters are forever being upstaged by the shots they’re in . . . Movies like this are intensely interesting to the people in them, just as people like this are intensely interesting to one another.’
Either way, this was an era in which indie films could actually prove financially viable, which sat uncomfortably with the ’90s ethos of not selling out (another ’70s throwback). Reality Bites, for instance, released in 1994, grossed $33.4 million worldwide, but was written by a 20-year-old about her life post-graduation. Helen Childress got meta when creating Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder), a recent college graduate making a documentary about her disaffected friends (Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofalo, Steve Zahn), and nailed the day’s sentiment about not working for The Man. ‘I’m not going to work at the Gap, for Chrissake!’ Lelaina exclaims about the generic retailer, the implication being that she’d rather be an impoverished artist than a corporate whore.
The gen-X legacy has become lost in the culture battles between Millennials, Boomers and Zoomers, but perhaps it only has its studied apathy to blame. This was a generation characterised by slackers, stoners, latchkey kids (divorce rates were high, and mothers were entering the workforce in larger numbers) and Prozac. Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture covered most bases, following three twenty-somethings (‘brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the ’80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan’) who would rather work in dead-end ‘McJobs’ than be capitalist careerists.
The book curated terms that became synonymous with gen X (which covers those born between 1965 and 1980): the Mid-Twenties Breakdown; Now Denial (‘To tell oneself that the only time worth living in is the past and that the only time that may ever be interesting again is the future’) and its close relative Historical Underdosing (meaning the ’90s was a period of time considered to be dull); Option Paralysis (‘The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none’) and Terminal Wanderlust, which was a condition attributed to those constantly trying to find an idealised sense of community.
It was Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) that set the tone for the gen-X film genre. Slacker follows socially marginalised, unemployed moochers in Austin, Texas, with the focus passed like a baton from one character to another. Like Love and Other Catastrophes, the action takes place over a single day. Shot on 16 mm film when Linklater was twenty-nine, it was made for just US$23,000 but grossed more than a million at the box office. Its lack of structure and emphasis on naturalistic dialogue was considered so influential on a next generation of filmmakers, that in 2012 the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’.
Yet the gen-X genre is as blink-and-you’ll-miss-it as the generation itself. You can add Singles (1992), which revolves around twenty-somethings living in a Seattle apartment building, including a cafe waitress played by Bridget Fonda, who is intrigued by grunge rocker Matt Dillon (his fictional band features real-life members of Pearl Jam). One might wonder, was the equally brooding Matt Dyktynski (Ari in Love and Other Catastrophes) being positioned as Australia’s answer to America’s gen-X poster boy Matt Dillon?
Then there’s Empire Records (1995), which starred Liv Tyler, Renée Zellweger and Anthony LaPaglia. It may have opened to the undeniably cool tones of The Cruel Sea’s ‘The Honeymoon Is Over’, but it also wanted to cash in on ‘the coolest generation’, as gen X has been dubbed. It failed by having a distinct plot, but tried to score credibility points by pitting the staff of an indie record store against a corporate giant (to whom they would absolutely not sell out). The irony was the film was made for a budget of US$10 million and grossed only $303,841 at the box office, despite there being plenty of salacious shots of Tyler’s midriff (dressed, as she was, in ’90s uniform of short kilt and crop top).
The UK was experiencing peak lad culture in the ’90s – with Britpop, the rise of novelist Irvine Welsh and the success of Trainspotting, and a resurgence of interest in mod fashion – but Love and Other Catastrophes clearly takes influence from the United States, right down to the grungy soundtrack. Most pertinent on the film front was Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), about neighbouring convenience-store and video-store workers who slack off to play hockey on the roof and nerd out over movies, and of which Emma-Kate Croghan told a magazine, ‘Clerks had just come out in Australia, and we just thought, if they can do it, so can we.’
In fact, Love and Other Catastrophes ticks all the boxes of a classic American gen-X film, which should include dialogue that is naturalistic to the point of being banal, a lack of direction on the career front, and romance typified by non-committal couplings within friendship groups (the term ‘friends with benefits’ probably made its cultural debut in Alanis Morissette’s 1995 track ‘Head Over Feet’, and the sentiment was equally seen on TV, via Friends and Seinfeld).
The main point of difference between Love and Other Catastrophes and the wider cultural trends of the ’90s is its charm. From the splicing-in of cutesy hand-shot footage, to the often deliberately contrived dialogue, it’s a world apart from the decade’s fascination with the underbelly of serious drug use. Tarantino, Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis were all preoccupied with the topic, and Melbourne itself had a ‘healthy’ heroin scene, but Love and Other Catastrophes is distinctly wholesome.
Dr Greg Dolgopolov, who teaches and researches at the University of New South Wales in video production, film festivals and film theory and literacy, remembers Love and Other Catastrophes being filmed on campus at the University of Melbourne when he was doing his PhD there.
‘The great thing about Love and Other Catastrophes was it’s quite a hopeful, positive film, and we were seeing a lot of dark and gothic,’ he says. ‘It came out around the time Jane Campion’s Sweetie came out. They made a good combination of new independent female voices that were speaking to their audience and their audience was not unlike that. They’re kind of neo-gothic, dirty and grungy, and hopeful.’
The students would never have taken the route to the Arts faculty they did in the film, Dolgopolov notes, but other than that, campus life was faithfully portrayed. ‘The police were not allowed on campus and there was a general atmosphere that you really could do anything you liked,’ he says. ‘If you were told off it would probably be a maintenance worker rather than anyone in any position of authority.’
In fact, he says, the University of Melbourne was second only to La Trobe in permissiveness: ‘La Trobe probably had the most ratbag proto-fascist left-wingers and hardcore anarchists,’ he says. ‘If you weren’t with them you were against them.’
Elly Varrenti was a classmate of Dolgopolov’s who now teaches part-time at the university as well as being a writer, broadcaster and actor. ‘I remember when I was complaining about some overdue essay or other and a friend of mine said, “Oh come on El, you can get a degree from Melbourne University just by reading a paperback in [local cafe] Johnny’s Green Room,”’ she says of the institution’s laid-back reputation.
Varrenti remembers the enrolment process involved running manically back and forth all over campus the way Mia does in the film, with bureaucracy actually having a face – such as that of the gatekeeper of a department – rather than taking the form of an online portal as it does today. Similarly, the campus was a social locus, whereas contemporary students tend to come in for lectures and then leave.
‘There was a lot of theatre stuff happening on campus back then and plenty of people from those days including Greg and me were also doing stuff outside the uni environment,’ Varrenti says. ‘Greg actually got a small, but to us a mind-blowing amount of money via a government grant to start our own theatre company. Those were the days when arts funding bodies didn’t require you have a Masters in form filling and box ticking but when a great idea and plenty of energy was enough. We had the kind of chaotic creative confidence I’ve come to associate with making art in the ’90s.’
Offsite, Varrenti spent quality time in the Italian cafes on Lygon Street, such as Tiamo and Brunetti’s, or in the foyer of the Carlton Cinema on Faraday Street. Readings was good – then more of a record shop than a bookstore – and of course there was La Mama. Students drank at The Clyde and caught up for coffee at Rumbarella’s, the latter making a cameo in the film. Sometimes they’d stray further to Fitzroy’s Night Cat or Black Cat Cafe. Many girls took waitressing jobs at Genevieve’s or Paradiso.
Glenn D’Cruz has now retired from academia – he was most recently Associate Professor of Art and Performance at Deakin University – but he taught Varrenti and Dolgopolov in the ’90s, having been hired at the tender age of twenty-five.
He often mingled with students – which wouldn’t happen now, as he notes – and remembers parties that would amass up to 500 people in large Fitzroy houses. ‘Staff and students would mix socially and I made a lot of friends amongst the students I taught,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I’d be off my face at the Punter’s Club and students would come up to me. I’d think, can I access my lecturer persona? Absolutely not!’
Being Anglo-Indian and from East London, D’Cruz’s first thought upon arriving at the University of Melbourne was how white and privileged the students were, something he thinks is reflected in Love and Other Catastrophes, deliberately or not. ‘Even the title; I thought, give me a break. Catastrophes like dealing with a university’s bureaucracy?’ he says.
Take the scene in which Alice joins Ari, who she has a crush on, for coffee and tells him about her long overdue thesis, Doris Day: Feminist Warrior.
‘You’re into popular culture and all that,’ Ari nods.
‘I bet you’re really brainy and deep and read Socrates when you’re relaxing,’ Alice gushes in response. ‘I suppose your parents are in publishing or academia and you all speak Ancient Greek around the table.’
The character of Ari reminds Varrenti of French New Wave cinema with a punky twist. ‘He self-identifies as an intellectual, philosophical one of the group, and it reminded me of Godard stuff,’ she says. ‘There’s always one of those characters.’
D’Cruz thinks Love and Other Catastrophes is more a homage to screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, hence the references to Doris Day, and Croghan herself told Cinema Papers in 1996 about her love of romantic comedies from that era, such as The Shop Around The Corner, Holiday and The Awful Truth.
‘There are a few jump cuts at the start, but it’s a very conventional narrative,’ D’Cruz says. ‘There are also the remnants of post-punk culture; the idea that anyone can play and anyone can participate.’
In 1997, US film critic Ruthe Stein reported on a ‘new wave’ of Australian cinema – including Shine, Hotel de Love, Angel Baby, Cosi, Children of the Revolution, Love Serenade and Love and Other Catastrophes – and Croghan told Stein, ‘My generation was the first to be brought up on video, so we had access to all the American films. We could watch horror films – anything we could get our hands on. That will mark the difference between my generation and filmmakers like Peter Weir, who were more influenced by art house repertory.’
Certainly, Love and Other Catastrophes wears its deep love of film on its sleeve. It was shot on Super 16 mm, blown up to 35 mm for theatrical release; real-life film critics Adrian Martin and Paul Harris make fleeting appearances; and an interview with Croghan in the UK’s Independent newspaper ran with the headline: ‘Food I Could Live Without. But Film . . . Never’. In one scene, Gyngell’s character, Professor Leach, wants his class to study Hitchcock, which is met with groans. He suddenly sees the students separated into tribes: the Quentin Tarantino tribe, the Woody Allen tribe, the Spike Lee tribe – and dressed accordingly.
‘In Melbourne in the ’90s there was a real buzz around film culture,’ says D’Cruz. ‘With my course I made sure they were aware of Paul Harris on RRR and Cinémathèque at RMIT. What dominated film theory was this idea that experimental film could have some kind of political impact on culture. It was a revolutionary act in itself.’
D’Cruz references Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ in terms of prejudices of patriarchy being encoded into film. ‘In the ’90s there was a more critical approach to that,’ he says. ‘People started to question the theorists of the ’70s, but nevertheless there was still this idea that film was critical. Attention was starting to be paid to working-class culture and non-white culture.’
In Love and Other Catastrophes, Mia is desperate to switch from film to cultural studies, which was a relatively new concept in Australian universities – and actually, the University of Melbourne was particularly late to the party, according to D’Cruz.
‘There was a strong sense of activism from students – protests on campus, marches – and cultural studies was cool and hip because it directly engaged with politics,’ he says. ‘A lot of middle-class kids got seduced by the idea of applying semiotics to subcultures and to music culture, and excited by the idea that consumption could be a political act. Not only that, but it explicitly gave you a political costume. You could engage in a bit of political cosplay and rebel against Mummy and Daddy a bit.’
There’s one scene where a female student has cornered Mike and is pontificating on Milan Kundera’s take on Parmenides’ perception that the world is divided into pairs of opposites. It is, of course, deliberately pretentious dialogue, but Varrenti insists, ‘We did talk like that!’
D’Cruz agrees. ‘Although maybe it was just the parties I went to. It was trying on identities in the same way that in the film [Mia and Alice] try on different outfits. There’s one scene where the uncool lecturer, played by Kym Gyngell, starts using unintelligible psychoanalytic jargon, and people did have those conversations.’
Varrenti says that in 1996, post-structuralist theory would have been colonising every social science and humanities subject – and there was a hunger for it. ‘I remember the word “phallocentric” being a revelation for me and suddenly looking at the world through a phallocentric lens,’ she says. And then there was David Bennett’s course, Art, Pornography, Blasphemy and Propaganda, which every student wanted to take.
‘A lot of us did that subject and were horrified at how hard and incomprehensible it was, and how little we got to read about fucking,’ Varrenti says. ‘It was actually one of the toughest subjects you could do, and David was intellectually rigorous, running a very serious cultural subject. I can’t imagine a subject like that would even get through the front door now because there is so much censoriousness in the university system; there’d be so many trigger warnings.’
In Chuck Klosterman’s book The Nineties, published in 2022, the essayist writes, ‘Many of the polarising issues that dominate contemporary discourse were already in play, but ensconced as thought experiments in academic circles. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive.’ The discourse brewing on campuses, though, was about to surge beyond the sandstone surrounds. As Croghan herself put it, in an interview with Senses of Cinema in 2018: ‘there was stuff in the air about universities and students, strangely enough because of scandals that had happened at Melbourne Uni . . . Helen Garner had released the book The First Stone, which is completely unrelated [to Love and Other Catastrophes] but there was just stuff in the air about university life, and being a recent graduate it was in the air for me.’
She’s referring to the incident that Garner (whose daughter Alice plays Alice in the film) turned her focus to, in which two University of Melbourne students accused the master of Ormond College of groping them. Alan Gregory was found guilty at the Melbourne Magistrates Court and subsequently resigned. D’Cruz thinks the controversy generated by the book had a huge impact on campus culture and the way students spoke about gender. Alice Garner was in her third year at the university at the time, but had hardly been aware of the furore until her mother wrote about it. As she told The Sydney Morning Herald in an article titled ‘The Good Daughter’, the colleges were a separate world. Varrenti describes there being an ‘apartheid’ between campus life and college life, the latter of which attracted ‘monied or country kids, and on both counts, daggy’.
Dolgopolov agrees with that. ‘Some of my friends had spent a year in college and run screaming because they’d been sexually harassed or had experienced things they never wanted to experience again,’ he says. ‘Some colleges had religious affiliations; there was a women-only college; there was extra tutoring. It felt a bit like mollycoddling. Why would you send your kid to live in a college and not in a shared house?’
Having rewatched Love and Other Catastrophes, Varrenti has some grief for those long-gone days of self-expression and for the enjoyment of debate. ‘I felt sad, possibly nostalgic, for a life I took for granted,’ she says, ‘but mostly I felt sad for my nineteen-year-old son who is about to start an arts degree at Melbourne University, because campus life back then was just more creatively shambolic and intellectually loose. In a good way.’
As Croghan herself told Cinema Papers in 1996, ‘You go to this place to learn, but really it’s about getting the social thing happening, finding your place in the world.’
The ensuing change of culture feels so demoralising to D’Cruz that he decided to leave academia early; one reason being that university students must now partake in a compulsory unit ensuring they are work-ready. ‘You’re eighteen years old, and the first course you do is to sketch out a plan for your life,’ he says in disgust. ‘The humanities are especially for play; you don’t do a drama degree or film degree and then just waltz into a film position. So all the things I enjoyed about Love and Other Catastrophes are gone – the playfulness and experimentation.’
Even Douglas Coupland, who defined gen X to a large degree, thinks that individuality is moot in the current digital age. He wrote in The Guardian in 2021 that he cannot remember what his pre-internet brain felt like. ‘I find comfort in the fact that brains all over the planet have been rewired similarly to mine. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that our species has never been as neurally homogenised as it is now.’ In his new book, The Extreme Self, he defines ‘autophobia’ as ‘fear of individuality’, adding ‘it’s easier just to subcontract your identity to QAnon or Antifa’.
Emma-Kate Croghan, of course, could never have known that her film would become a time capsule for academia-as-rite-of-passage. She went on to make another feature, Strange Planet, starring Claudia Karvan and Naomi Watts, in 1999, and then moved to Los Angeles, then New York – where, as she says on her blog, ‘I became a better writer and collected some great development hell stories; I once had a development executive ask me to explain what “solipsistic” meant.’
It’s not what you’d call the most self-promoting bio, particularly for someone who moved to the United States to be in the heartland of filmmaking, but then the very generation she immortalised has all but faded into cultural obscurity.
As Klosterman put it in The Nineties, ‘it’s hard to exaggerate the pervasion of self-constructed, self-aware apathy that would come to delineate the caricature of a time period that already feels forgotten, mostly because those who embodied it would feel embarrassed to insist it was important.’
This is precisely what makes Love and Other Catastrophes all the more precious.
Melbourne on Film: Cinema That Defines Our City (RRP:$34.99) is published on 2 August by Melbourne International Film Festival and Black Inc.
Tickets to MIFF’s screening of Love and Other Catastrophes are available here. To explore the festival’s Melbourne on Film retrospective program, and the full 2022 MIFF line-up, visit miff.com.au
