The Big Noise

Synopsis :Morris Falzon works with his father, George, in a crummy legal practice in Sydney’s inner West. With his personal life a mess and the business falling apart, Morris is thrown a lifeline when a dying client leaves him a sizeable legacy in his will. However when his client miraculously recovers, George comes up with a plan that could land them both in a lot of trouble.

There are some first-time film-makers who for one reason or another manage to negotiate the funding maze and there are those who can't or won’t but just go ahead and make their film. The former have a budget to work with but they also have to answer to their investors. The latter at least can do what the heck they like with what little they’ve got. Needless to say Dominic Pelosi’s film belongs in the latter category and whilst it undeniably suffers from its budgetary constraints it’s also refreshingly hand-hewn.

The foundation of any good film is a good script and that doesn’t actually cost anything. Particularly not when the scriptwriter is, as is the case here, your brother.  Andrew Pelosi has delivered an original, blackly comedic script which feels as if it owes much to his own experience. One of the charms of the film is the way that it captures the atmosphere of old school Italo-Australian culture, one which both looks inwards to the ways of the home country and outwards to the mores of the adopted land.  It’s unusual to have a couple of old geezers as your principals but Morris and George represent wonderfully the generation of migrant Italians who came to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, with the younger Morris sliding Janus-like between the two.

The Big Noise is not a big film and director-cinematographer-editor and producer Dominic Pelosi is evidently influenced by the intimate scale of Nouvelle Vague films, especially those of Truffaut and Godard (the director also cites the influence of Italian Neo-Realism but there is none of the sentimentality of that tradition here). There’s the black and white photography, of course, but there’s also the elliptical approach to story-telling, the bold use of music to direct the mood, the way in which voice-overs (sometimes in subtitled Italian) are used to present characters’ points of view and the overall sense of lively irreverence.

There are aspects which require forbearance. The sound is, at times, iffy, and the effectiveness of the non-professional cast is variable, resulting in a shaky dramatic tonality in places. Sometimes it’s simply unclear what is the intended tone of a scene.  The good news is that Maurice Marshan as Morris is a hoot and the double act with Mario Marchioni as George in the latter stages of the film are wryly amusing.

Would Pelosi’s film have been better with an industrial-sized budget? Well there would have been paid actors and rehearsals and retakes and dubs and re-dubs and so on, but it is precisely its makeshift guerilla aesthetic that gives the film much of its charm. If homogeneity is not your thing then The Big Noise is worth checking out.

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