#70 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Directed by Paul Ireland from a script by Damian Hill who also stars. Astronomy Class provided the opening track (Four Barang In A Tuk-Tuk) but lead John Brumpton (Romper Stomper (1992)) prefers talkback radio on his commute to his pawnshop in Footscray.
This is a series of vignettes about some people centred on that shop. The suburb felt tiny, that everyone knows everyone, but without a justification like the house sharing of John Birmingham's He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001) or a life event as in Erskineville Kings (1999). (The bookshop here is a clanger, a built-yesterday outpost of inner-city clean living whereas Gould's there was a decades-long grimy landmark.) Or the hermetic asociality of boarding-house Brisbane and Sacha Horler in Praise (1998). The vibe is 1990s, a time when you could idle on the street all day, live on the kindness of rollies begged from strangers, bet on the dogs at all hours. The audience were all young smokers then and probably noticed the absence of pubs in this scenario.
The script is generally weak. I did not enjoy the time spent with the two blokes evoking Jay and Silent Bob; Malcolm Kennard aims for Spiteri but he's no David Wenham while Mark Coles Smith is saddled with a numpty of a character that prevents him using the skills he showed in Last Cab to Darwin (2015). Ngoc Phan, essentialised, WTF. Naomi Rukavina, WTF. The dialogue is often cringe worthy and I could often predict it, especially as the romance between pawnshop-employee Hill and bookshop-employee Maeve Dermody warmed up with seconds to go. (She seemed a bit lost so far from Mosman.) Many of the storylines dangled — Kerry Armstrong beamed in from another movie for a bit, one closer to Lantana (2001) — while suicide and sundry heaviness descended without much thought or motivation. (I read Hill committed suicide in 2018; he radiates unhappiness throughout. See Wikipedia for a link to The Rooster (2023).) It doesn't even function as a time capsule of the place or era.
Heavily pumped by Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz at the time. Luke Buckmaster: two stars. Russell Marks at brutal and tenderising length. Mike Leigh-adjacent, poorly executed. (I'm not sure I agree but this is obviously not The Pawnbroker (1964).) Marketed multiculturalism, nostalgia for the mythic monoculture. Ruther Scouller also got the Bryan Brown vibes from Brumpton. Rod Quinn: "I never thought that hanging out in a pawnshop all day would be all that interesting, and I think that this film proves that."
