Wri./Dir. David Swann
St. Warren Mitchell, Peter Rowsthorn, Susan Lyons, Daniel Kellie
Screening at: Hoyts, Greater Union cinemas
Crackers is a cleverly-made Australian genre film. A spruced-up family comedy replete with sight-gags, cartoon pacing and running jokes it won the Car D'Or award for low budget films at Cannes, and is for the most part, cute and amusing. Like previous Australian films such as the Castle, and the Boys, it deals with a dysfunctional working class family exorcising their suburban woes with plenty of scuffles and swearing. Four generations of eccentric extended family get together for a Christmas barbeque, enact petty jealousies and practical jokes, share a few beers, laughs and tears, and after 90 minutes come out on top. Sound familiar? It is. The quirky quotient is made up with fart jokes, exaggerated accents, farm animals, clumsy sex, a self-burial, a hash cookie, a shotgun and a roasted cattle-dog. Crackers is a popular formula reworked with healthy doses of that famed Australian cynicism.
Shot mostly Melbourne's East Brighton, the floating camerawork is exemplary, the story held together by an extraordinary series of pained facial expressions and unspoken affection. My only criticism is that in a country with so many important stories to tell, this is the one we keep telling. It toys with old stereotypes that limit 'the Australian' to either flannel-shirted Anglo-Saxon battlers, sincere rural folk or disposessed Aborigines and the mythical 'Outback'. We need more films to challenge this mould, films that acknowledge Australia as one of the most multi-cultural urbanised middle-class nations. We have our Crackers, and they are good, but we need more sophisticated works like Floating World, Head On and Last Days of Chez Nous. Crackers is a safe bet for film financiers, but is it worth making? In a country with less and less Government funding to the Arts, one must ask, what are we giving up to make these films?
eugs
comments? email the authorBelow: Four generations of misfits.
