Category: Anthology drama
Directed by: Kriv Stenders
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In my review for The Last Days Of Chez Nous, I bemoaned Australian cinema for either producing movies by wankers for wankers, or for making movies whose primary purpose is to castigate the audience for living in a country tainted by a past based on racism/sexism/colonialism/etc. And with this movie, I walked into it good and proper - castigation aplenty! However, criticism of Australian society is not without warrant as there are definitely horrible people around, and indigenous people have been at the rough end of the justice system.
However, what I've never understood is why anti-racism crusaders make anti-racism movies trying to guilt racist people for being racist - the people that need to be reminded to not be racist don't usually sit down to watch anti-racism crusade movies made by anti-racism crusaders.
Anyway, about the movie itself. Australia Day is an ensemble story - much like Dragged Across Concrete - in that it presents three different plots that connect in the end, so I'll sum it all up as best I can given that the story jumps back and forth.
The plot:
Terry Friedman (played by an aged, but definitely not diminished Bryan Brown) is driving down a Brisbane road on a stinking hot Australia Day when an Asian woman (Jenny Wu) running away from a warehouse flags him down. She then helps herself to the passenger seat and implores Terry to drive off as fast as possible while an Asian man (Zhou, played by Kee Chong) looks on in frustration and disbelief.
Just for some context, January 26th is Australia Day, a public holiday dedicated to celebrating the fact that Australia exists and that we all share this fucking great country. But because it is in January, smack-bang in the middle of summer, it can get quite hot and sticky -\ especially in the Sunshine State.
At the same time, Senior Constable Sonia Mackenzie (Shari Sebbens) is talking with her colleagues after being involved in a police pursuit of a stolen vehicle driven by two indigenous teenage girls. While Mackenzie did everything by the book, the stolen vehicle had crashed and one of the young girls has died which sets off protests and adverse media coverage about indigenous people being killed by the justice system. Complicating things is that Mackenzie herself is indigenous, and that the girl that survived - April Tucker (Miah Madden) - is known to Mackenzie and has gone missing. Just to complicate things even further is that April's father has been found dead as the result of blunt force trauma to the head.
The last story that is playing out is that of brothers Dean and Jason (Sam Keenan and Daniel Webber) who have Sami (Elias Anton) held hostage down in their garage after finding their sister Chloe (Isabelle Cornish) unconscious, overdosed and with signs of sexual activity having happened. There are definitely racial overtones as Dean and Jason are Caucasian Australian teen boys, whereas Sami is from an Iranian immigrant family where the father is absent due to working long hours to support the family and his brother Yaghoub is involved in drug-dealing. Jason and his friend want to extract revenge on Sami for supposedly raping and almost killing Chloe, though Dean has some misgivings about the situation.
Terry takes the woman back to his accomodation, tends to her wounds and then takes her to a police station where it turns out the woman's name is Lan Chang, and we know this because the police officer states that the woman's uncle has made a missing person's report. Terry then goes to the pub across the street from the police station and sees Lan being collected, but being physically manhandled by her "uncle" (David, played by Charles Wu) to the point he breaks one of her fingers. Springing in to action, Terry runs out and rescues Lan from the situation and takes her to a medical clinic where a doctor friend of his works. Terry and the doctor, who were both Vietnam veterans, commiserate the death of one of their friends who would actually be able to speak Chinese to be able to communicate with Lan. Terry and the doctor return to the treatment room, only to see Lan has absconded.
Sonia has been told by her superiors to sit out the rest of the day while the police handle the media heat, but weighing on her mind is that she knew April Tucker's dad was abusive and the only thing she did (and could) do was file reports. Weighing on Sonia's mind as well is the idea that once an indigenous youth enters the justice system, it's very hard for them to lead a normal life afterwards. She visits her dad (played by Ernie Dingo) and then April's grandmother who chastises Sonia for both being a police officer (because she's part of the system that targets indigenous people, you see) and for ONLY filing reports when she knew what was happening - all the while April is running through the streets to avoid police capture. We then see April is accosted on a street by four white Australian teenagers who make casually racist remarks on the topic, the only thing getting her out of the situation is a taxi driver who just happens to be passing by. The taxi picks April up and takes her to a drug and alcohol accomodation service where her mum used to stay. Stealing her mum's file, she finds the address her mum went to next - a sharehouse run by the very creepy Les (John Brumpton). Unfortunately, April gets locked in a room by Les who wants to take advantage of her, but she uses her smarts to find a way to break the bars off the windows right as Sonia enters the house looking for her. It turns out that April's mum was staying at the house until she fell deep in to drug addiction due to losing custody of her children.
Meanwhile, Dean helps Sami escape his kidnapping and assault, then goes through Chloe's phone and finds that Chloe and Sami were in a secret relationship, indicating she wasn't raped. Meanwhile, Sami has run back to his house where his mum and brother notice all the marks and bruising. The mum encourages Yaghoub to take care of things "like a man" in the absence of their father, to which end Yaghoub gets a group of his friends over to Dean and Jason's place to drag Jason and Chloe down to the garage and assault them like Sami was. Dean goes to Sami's house and sheepily asks Sami's mum if Sami is home, the mum lies and says he is not home (though Sami overhears the conversation and twigs that something is up).
Terry eventually finds Lan running along a road and takes her (somewhat forcibly) into his car. Lan then guides Terry to the warehouse she ran out of at the beginning of the film where Terry discovers that it is actually a brothel being run by people involved in Asian sex trafficking. Feeling guilty at the whole situation, Terry initially rejects the women on offer, but the madam takes this as Terry wanting something much more illicit so she takes him into another room where an underage girl is. Terry eventually returns and drives off back to his accomodation, but not before dropping Lan off on the side of the highway with some money while he says he has "something to take care of". His accomodation is a motel room that conveniently overlooks the headquarters of a beef exporter where the federal agriculture minister will be announcing a free-trade agreement between Australia and China. Grabbing his rifle, he seemingly plans to shoot any or all of the official delegation that he can see out of the window while they're making the announcement for the cameras.
The reason Terry wants to shoot people is because the bank foreclosed on his farm after years of drought drained his finances, and while the impending free-trade agreement was supposed to be the way back, the Chinese delegation that inspected his cattle decided to change their mind, leaving him with nothing after all the years of hard work and sacrifice. Right before he begins to shoot anyone, he writes a note which he puts in his jacket pocket, grabs his military medals and calls his son and tells him that he is in town because he no longer has a farm. During the terse phone call, Terry's son bemoans the fact that working the farm took Terry away from his family. And who is Terry's son? Homicide Detective Mitchell Collyer (Matthew Le Nevez) who is overseeing the investigation into the murder of April Tucker's father.
However, right before Terry can get shooting, he hears a loud banging at his door - it's Lan who has come yet again to Terry for help. Terry, incredibly frustrated, yells at Lan and goes off to clear his head - however when he returns, Lan is missing (again), but so is his rifle.
April goes through the hangouts of the city where people sleep rough and do drugs, asking anyone around if they have seen a woman that matches the photo April has in her pocket. April eventually finds her mother, but her mother is so strung out on drugs that it barely registers that her long-lost daughter is right infront of her. Feeling dejected and rejected, April walks away just in time to miss Sonia attending to Heather's overdose. Sonia then chases after April whose escape route is cut off by a couple of passing police officers, leading her to climb up on the rail of the bridge in order to throw herself into the water. Facing uniformed police on one side and Sonia out of uniform on the other, April reluctantly steps down and embraces Sonia.
Lan arrives at the brothel where she holds Zhou at gunpoint and tells the women there to escape. David sneaks up and grabs the rifle off of her, but then Terry suddenly shows up and holds Zhou at knifepoint, leading to a standoff. Terry tells David to put the rifle down and retrieve the passports of the working women, to which David responds "they are working off legitimate travel debts". Terry then picks up his rifle and as he turns a corner to look into a room, David shoots Terry with a pistol who in turn fires back reflexively. Lan comes back in and sees both Terry and David dead.
Realising that his brother has taken his mum's advice to not involve police and to take care of things like a man, Sami run's back to Dean and Jason's and implores his brother to stop the assault, stating that if either of Chloe or Jason are killed, the cycle of revenge will never stop.
While at the brothel attending to his father's murder, one of Mitch's superiors explains the suicide note Terry had in his pocket which ties in to the last voicemail from his dad where he apologises for not being there. This plays as we see Dean mop up the blood off the garage floor, Dean and Sami acknowledge each other at sports training, Lan attending an English language class, April, Heather, Sonia and the grandmother share a moment together and then the taxi that April jumped in to pulls into Sami's driveway where Sami's dad steps out and embraces his son.
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I actually thought this was a decent film. I was expecting it to be lousy given it's an Australian production that I don't even think had a theatrical run, but crikey, this grabbed and held my attention! Now, of course, taste is subjective and the IMDB-verse didn't view this film as favourably as I did, but me, I was hooked from the start. While this film doesn't quite go into R18+ levels of violence and adult themes, it also doesn't pull that many punches - people are racist, people do unethical things, people take the law into their own hands. In essence, we see the underbelly of Australian society that the jingoism and light-headed patriotism ignore.
And on that note, Stenders brilliantly juxtaposes that jingoism of our national day with the harsh reality that not everyone has it easy - for example, those who are forcibly sex trafficked and have no idea what's happening outside their four walls. One of the ways this is achieved is by playing TV clips in the background that show a confected sense of happiness, while people are mourning lost relatives or opportunities. On that note, I was surprised that all of the TV clips played are badged Sky News Australia, which is actually a legitimate TV station here in Australia, though not a free-to-air network. Usually in Australian movies/shows, they'll play clips from free-to-air TV networks, especially the ABC - but in this instance, they went with the paid option. Or maybe the paid option was the only station willing to have their name highlighted amongst all the misery.
I also like that (up to an extent) a lot of the characters act like real people. The only things I would call out is that Lan's character, when she's in the car with Terry, her constant flurry of words that is in no way registering with him. Like, bro, if the person you're with can't understand you, then you're just making noise. And also the Iranian mum switching between English and Farsi also felt a bit jarring. Though on the foreign language front, I definitely applaud the decision to not use subtitles when foreign languages are spoken - it gives us the impression we're observing, but not being guided through what's happening, as if we were there ourselves.
In terms of performances, everyone played their part really well. Bryan Brown always had it and still has. He's been a quintessential Australian icon since my childhood, and his convincing portrayal of someone dealing with his own heartache while going out of his way to help others with theirs was brilliant. Shari Sebbens as a police officer torn between two worlds was great as well. Miah Madden as the desperate April deserves commendation. But most of all, I have to tip my hat to John Brumpton - his portrayal of a sleazy sharehouse slum lord was creepy and unnverving!
I felt, though, that it was a TV movie. I can't really expand on what I mean by that, but yeah, it just had that classic "small-screen" feel.
But I definitely think this is well worth a watch, especially if you like your drama hard-hitting!
STAR RATING: 4.25/5
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