Contemporary Australia: Women

51 Gillian Armstrong Australia b.1950 The Last Days of Chez Nous (production still) 1992 35mm, colour, Dolby, 93 minutes It is in the films by women that the complexities of parent–child relationships are more compassionately explored. In Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate 2009, we feel the irascible, dying father, played with great subtlety by Bryan Brown, has unwittingly contributed to the dysfunction at the heart of his family. There is a prickly relationship with the prodigal son (Ben Mendelsohn), who returns to the remote property to see his father for the final time. So much is revealed in the moving scene in which the son washes the father’s body after death. The connection — the love — is there, it is just not expressed. Instead, the two are like sparring partners, jabbing one another to cause little hurts. Although this story was adapted from an American novel, this male behaviour strikes me as very Australian in its nature. Compassion for both mother and child dominates Gillian Armstrong’s High Tide 1987, where the long‑absent mother wants to resist any connection with her daughter. The daughter, on the other hand, is yearning for the mother. At the very end, one breathes a sigh of relief when the mother does not, in fact, shy away from a commitment, although there is a moment when you worry that she might. Armstrong is served well here by her three leading actors, Judy Davis, Jan Adele and an impressive young Claudia Karvan. The role of parenting is at the fore in Ana Kokkinos’s Blessed . All the children suffer from some form of neglect or carelessness, not necessarily for selfish reasons. The character played searingly by Frances O’Connor is in some ways very similar to the title character of Glenda Hambly’s Fran . Both mothers are out for a good time, much to the detriment of their offspring, and leading to tragic results. A smothering of care, a lack of trust, and a denial of a truth also mark the mothers’ actions in Blessed . In Rachel Perkins’s Radiance 1998, the maternal presence hovers over a far north Queensland house where three sisters gather for their mother’s funeral. The children of three different fathers, they all have issues with the past and with each other. Yet, this ultimately plays out as an affirmation of family, as secrets are revealed and wounds healed. The parent thing It is a relationship that begins at birth and never leaves us. It is fundamental in forming our relationships with the outside world — and it can so easily go wrong. Parental relationships feature strongly in many films, Tony Ayres’s bittersweet memories of his mother, played wonderfully by Joan Chen, in The Home Song Stories 2007, recall the powerlessness of a young boy to resist the impulsive and destructive behavior of a woman struggling to survive in a new country, far from her glamorous, but dependent, life as a Hong Kong nightclub singer. There is anger and frustration in this story, but also love. The monster mother of David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom 2010 gave Jacki Weaver the chance to sink her teeth into the role of a woman who is sweetness and light on the outside, but a tiger within. The role of the mother in criminal gangs is an interesting one, as we’ve often witnessed in the media. In contrast, in Rowan Woods’s The Boys 1998, Lynette Curran’s mother character is powerless in the face of her eldest son, an astonishingly sinister performance by David Wenham. Everyone is afraid of Brett Sprague, even his younger siblings, and for good reason. The absence of fathers is notable, although you suspect that, in the case of Animal Kingdom , the mother is merely carrying on a family tradition. With The Boys , one senses that a chaotic family life has possibly been created by the mother, whom we assume has had multiple partners and has struggled to survive in a working-class world. Only in Spider and Rose 1994 is a sort of parental relationship seen in an optimistic glow. The road trip taken by the ambulance driver and his feisty passenger allows mutual respect, even affection, to develop — a respect Rose (Ruth Cracknell) is not afforded by her son. Notable in Wasted on the Young is the complete absence of parents. These high school students exist in a world of their own. We are given an insight when Zac explains his mother’s absence; she was spending all his father’s money, so the father got rid of her — ‘It’s better this way,’ remarks Zac. Maybe if Mum had been around, Zac would not have felt he could get away with viciously abusing women. Women in contemporary Australian cinema