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Australia 2006
Directed by
Alkinos Tsilimidos
86 minutes
Rated R

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Em4Jay

Synopsis: Emma and Jay (Laura Gordon and Nick Barkla) are two heroin users who start holding up all night stores. They know that they’re spiralling out of control but like their addiction they are unable to stop it.

Showing the lives of drug addicts without cinematic gloss is a commendable project but the problem with such films is that the makers need to find some way of presenting their story that dramatizes the situation without romanticizing or sensationalizing it. Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) did this to great effect as did Neil Armfield with Candy (2005) but director Tsilimidos, whilst unquestionably showing the horrors of heroin addiction, has not managed, as those films did, to do more than depict the inevitable decline of his subjects and this makes for rather predictable, and even worse, monotonously bleak viewing.

Tsilimidos has a fascination with and empathy for the underdog, displayed in his previous films Tom White (2004) and his unfairly neglected Silent Partner (2001), both written by Daniel Keene with whom the director wrote this film. Em4Jay is related to both films in this respect but lacks their dramatic texture and wit respectively. The fundamental problem is that there really are no characters other than Em and Jay and they are not only so immersed in their inward-looking dependencies on heroin and each other but are also ineluctably crude, self-interested, self-deluded, self-destructive and, human tragedy aside, thoroughly unlikeable people. So all that we as an audience are witness to is the ritual of their tawdry, drug-addled existence, a repetitious and pointless cycle of highs and lows. If this can be accepted on the grounds of verisimilitude and both Laura Gordon and Nick Barkla are very convincing as drug addicts, Tsilimidos’s idea of leavening his thin material with furious shagging, pig masks and a grungy white boy blues soundtrack by American band The Black Keys is far from inspired and even veers, albeit unintentionally, into the exploitative.

As is so often the case with Australian films, even ones which are well made, as this is, no one ever seems to have bothered to ask the fundamental question “who will want to see this”? That is the essential problem with Em4Jay. OK. It’s real, but that alone is not enough.

 

 

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