prod. martha coleman of emcee films
dop. dion beebe
st. peter fenton, sacha horler, marta dusseldorp
Australia, 1998, 98 mins, 35mm, colour
Budget, budget, budget! These three words sum up everything that prevented the film adaptation of Andrew McGahan's 1991 Vogel/Australian prize winning novel, Praise from being a cinematic experience equivalent to the brilliance of that novel. As it is, the film directed by John Curran is a superficial and Sydney-centric retelling of the relationship fought out during a Brisbane summer between Gordon Buchanan and Cynthia Lamonde. Curran's Praise manages to suck out much of the substance from the complex themes explored throughout the book, and fails to offer its' audience any recompense that might have been offered by way of the cinematic medium.There are of course, difficulties inherent in comparing books with their film adaptations that must be acknowledged. The two media involve different production processes, one collaborative, the other an intensely solitary experience. Each medium possesses different qualities, and thus differing capacities and weaknesses for story-telling. Added to this is the different ways people read books and films: you can re-read passages in a book, whereas until Praise comes out on video you'll just have to keep going back to the cinema to be impressed by the significance of some scenes. In spite of these differences, the principal betrayal the cinematic version of Praise commits is that it unnecessarily relinquishes any imperative to stay true to the spirit of the novel, such that it wouldn't matter how many tickets you bought, you'd still think Praise was no more than an out-of-the-ordinary love story.
On the process of adapting his novel to a screenplay, McGahan has said,"I felt a bit powerless and at the mercy of the team. We talked about ideas and development but it was being at their mercy, really. In the end, it's the director's creation and you have to abide by that. You can influence the director but only to a certain extent, otherwise the film becomes a mishmash of visions, which will make a very bad film"(Queensland Writers' Centre News April 1999, p 23). He also notes, "I had to justify every line. I had to let go of scenes I really liked, mainly for financial reasons, rather than creative ones"(QWC news p22). Clearly the first scenes to be discarded were those that didn't involve any reference to Gordon and Cynthia's relationship. Aspects of the novel that considered the social, political, cultural and economic milieu in which characters such as Gordon and Cynthia come to exist remain undeveloped by the film-makers. The inattention to the importance of context in the film is most apparent in the producer's (Martha Coleman) decision not to film in Brisbane. Aside from budget constraints, this decision is inexplicable, and not one that is alleviated by the sounds of heavy summer rain against the window, nor the odd shot of rainforest greenery. The belief that Praise could be filmed mostly indoors to avoid the glaring absence of Brisbane scenery in the film surely misses the point that in Queensland even the most sun-avoiding goth spends a significant portion of life outside. Similarly, the attempt to pass the stone and wrought-iron balcony terrace houses of New South Wales as old housing in Brisbane, neglects the structure of feeling imparted by raised wooden houses with wide verandahs which are architecturally specific to Queensland.
The film-makers attempts to evoke Brisbane are fraught with Sydney-based conceptions of Brisbane and Queensland as backward and 'other'. What precisely is the point of the anachronistic voice-overs broadcast from Gordon's television throughout the film? Why was there an evocation of the 'exotic other', residing south, or in this case north, of the border through the music by The Dirty Three? These choices by the film-makers are dubious because they allow the audience to distance themselves from the 'everydayness' of the events in McGahan's novel. The film perpetuates the crime committed by many critics of 'grunge' when it emerged as a literary genre in 1995: there is a failure to acknowledge the immediacy of the experience of youth unemployment and the inanity of unskilled labour. In the film of Praise those 'problems' become situated comfortably elsewhere.
The film's failure to engage with the social issues raised in the book has consequences for the re-telling of the central relationship of Praise. Although the casting of Peter Fenton as Gordon and Sacha Horler as Cynthia were inspired choices, that the entire nature of their relationship is so grieviously altered by the omission of several scenes from the film's conclusion was, for this reviewer, the most disappointing aspect of the adaptation. It is no coincidence that Cynthia's surname is Lamonde, a feminised version of 'le monde', the french word for 'world'. Gordon's awareness of inhabiting a feminised world to which he has been introduced by Cynthia, infuses their relationship with a sense of joy that never quite makes it to the screen. Gordon, through his relationship with Cynthia is enabled to embrace a life outside socio-culturally imposed norms of masculinity which would have him gainfully employed in a soul destroying job. Cynthia actively encourages him to go on the dole and inhabit the gaps which exist within the survey of the social security system and family planning doctors. To this end the completeness of the severing of the relationship in the film does not acknowledge the significance of the ensuing communication between Gordon and Cynthia in the novel, after she boards the plane for Darwin. While Praise is a story about a particular relationship, it is also a story about an individual's relationship with the world. That Gordon maintains constant phone communication with Cynthia throughout the novel's conclusion is indicative of his continued relationship with the social world, which in this era of high unemployment, and disturbing rates of male youth suicide, is not irrelevant. The omission of these scenes mutates the story of Praise from one of philosophically attained survival in an era of limited material prospects, to one all too readily interpreted as an expression of superficial and youthful bourgeois angst.
Kirsty Leishman
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