Praise

Praise is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Andrew McGahan, who also wrote the script for John Curran's screen adaptation. The book was critically well-received and perhaps the script read well on paper but as so often with this type of material, the question never seems to have been asked: who will want to be a fly on these squalid walls?

Gordon (Peter Fenton), is a shiftless twenty-something with asthma living in a doss-house in Brisbane. Cynthia (Sacha Horler) is a sex-mad, belligerent and eczma-ridden frump. They shack-up, hump each other e'xtensively, drink, take drugs and go nowhere in what is apparently intended to be a Death In Brunswick for the 90s.

John Curran, an American-born director working in Australia, helms all this with a laconic ribaldry and the film, photographed by Dion Beebe looks very good. Yet whilst it garnered a number of prizes including an AFI for McGahan, screened at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals and was widely praised by the critics, it is in its self-conscious grungy pointlessness downright boring and its (no doubt budgetarily-determined) hermeticism tiresomely dated.

Horler, who won the Best Actress AFI for her willingness to get into the role of her unprepossessing character is good in the part as is Peter Fenton as the chronically apathetic Gordon. This does not mean that they are particularly engaging on screen, nor with their kit off, rutting away, in any way appealing. One pretty good indicator of a tragic attempt to be hip is the presence of rock stars in movies. Here Gregory (aka "Tex") Perkins obliges as Gordon’s flea-pit neighbour.

 

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