Friends and Strangers Review: A Wry Portrait of Contemporary Australian Malaise

In the film, Australia is a country of sleepwalkers drifting along in a placid dream, unable or unwilling to wake up and move forward.

Friends and Strangers
Photo: Grasshopper Film

James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers is unlikely to be greeted with the same fierce response as Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love upon its Cannes premiere, but the Australian filmmaker’s feature-length directorial debut is arguably, in its own wry way, just as fixated on asses. The first glimpse we get of a posterior occurs when Alice (Emma Diaz), camping in a national park outside Sydney, cracks the door of a public lavatory and gawks for an oddly prolonged moment at the rump of a tramp-stamped man toweling himself off. Later, Ray (Fergus Wilson), the film’s wayward millennial protagonist, will direct a similar deer-in-the-headlights gaze at a sculpture showing the torso of a body bent over, almost flaunting its crack in his general direction. Shortly thereafter, the woman of this brazenly decorated mansion (Amelia Conway) that contains the sculpture will complain of having poked her behind on a potted cactus before presenting her alleged wound to the camera.

None of these and other such moments are particularly erotic, and while it’s not out of the question that Vaughan has an affinity for derriéres, it’s more than obvious that the film has an abiding interest in turning things over and presenting their flip sides—and often excavates something deeper in the process. Friends and Strangers begins in romcom territory by way of mumblecore as it traces a hesitant encounter between Alice and Ray in Brisbane, though after their camping trip gone awry, the film abruptly pivots away from this romantic thread, then continues reorienting itself every few scenes, ultimately weaving a patchy quilt of quotidian happenstance, with the recurring thread being that nothing goes as planned for the characters. A funky comedy of manners emerges, but the breaking of decorum here does a bit more than just ruffle feathers, because gradually it appears to crack the face of reality itself.

The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—it shuttles through five different, tenuously linked set pieces rather than dozens—but Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency. A clue to his intentions comes during Alice and Ray’s camping trip, when a fellow traveler, Wes (Steve Maxwell, whose deadpan delivery wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Flight of the Conchords), suggests the two take a hike to see the “Aborigine doodles” up the hill, his flippant tone and crude phrasing betraying both ignorance of and indifference to the actual history he’s invoking. And just before the pair receive this tip, Ray tellingly reads aloud to Alice from a section of a book in which the author ponders what a man should return to the owner of the pound he stole and amassed a fortune from: the pound alone, the pound plus the compound interest from the time elapsed, or the entire fortune?

Advertisement

While it only momentarily captivates Ray—he ultimately brushes it off as being “a general question about justice or something”—this thought experiment reverberates across the film’s disparate episodes. Friends and Strangers offers up a portrait of well-heeled white Australians who have inherited the fruits of their country’s colonialist fortune but who nonchalantly dismiss, if not outright repress, the thought of where that fortune might have originated from. Later, a woman from a tour group surveying the Sydney coastline tosses off a question—“What about the Aborigines? Are they around here or what?”—that’s pointedly never answered because the tour guide (Eliza Oliver) gets distracted when she spots an acquaintance, and that’s the film in miniature: distraction as a storytelling form and as a way of life.

YouTube video

To Vaughan’s great credit, none of this chiding is presented in the austere manner of a stern moralist, but rather through the realm of dry, absurdist comedy. Wilson is an impeccable straight man, his boyish face and timid delivery naturally suited to Ray’s wallflower-like vulnerability in the face of more garrulous and confident personalities, and he’s complemented by a handful of brilliantly off-kilter performers. A scene of Ray getting upbraided by his mother (Jacki Rochester) after throwing a minor tantrum when his car breaks down—“Everyone’s here to help you and you’re carrying on like a pork chop,” she barks, with a hilarious emphasis on the word “chop”—sets the stage for an even more thorough emasculation in the third act, when Ray attends a meeting for an upcoming wedding videography gig. Here, in a seaside villa decorated with garish tributes to royalty, Ray is confronted with the face of real wealth and privilege: the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, beer-swilling, art-collecting David (Greg Zimbulis), whose every impulsive thought gets bluntly articulated, in turn dictating the zigzagging flow of the scene.

Spanning nearly 20 minutes, this narrative detour in a larger string of narrative detours grows increasingly trippy—and hilarious—with each passing minute: a dissonant, tension-building buzz of violins on the soundtrack is revealed to actually be coming from an eccentric neighbor’s sound system; a painting of Queen Elizabeth II appears to change color before Ray’s very eyes, perhaps a reference to the popular dress meme of 2015, a notable recent example of two different realities coexisting through a simple quirk of optics; and nearly every time Ray agrees with something his host has said, the thrust of the conversation is somehow turned against him. Is it true that, as David proposes, there’s “nothing hidden or dark or weird” about this afternoon meeting, that the disruptions and oddities are all in Ray’s head? Or is it that such ruptures in reality are endemic to a society predicated on a widely shared fiction? Either way, Vaughan has plenty of fun with the scenario, framing it all in obtuse camera angles that make clever use of the home’s superfluous décor and labyrinthine floor plan.

Advertisement

Ray and David’s conversation eventually moves to the basement, a repository of the latter’s eclectic art stash, where the two discuss, with an increasing degree of abstraction, the notion of value, of the thin line between beauty and trash—calling to mind a similar balancing act conjured by Vaughan’s filmmaking. Friends and Strangers is defined by picturesque, sun-soaked cinematography of Australia’s more pleasant metropolitan environs, even pausing periodically to meditate on its muscular monuments to its own colonial “triumphs,” and yet the film is also marked by periodic top-down shots of sewer grates, trash bags, and other junk—the stuff that exists beneath our feet, beneath our active awareness.

A precocious little girl, Lauren (Poppy Jones), who Alice meets at the campground early in the film argues that the whole length of Australia consists only of such detritus, though others—like the girl’s father (Ion Pearce), whose parents he claims were close with potter and figurative sculptor Guy Boyd and other midcentury artists—recall a not-so-distant past of great intellectual ferment. These twin poles of cynicism and wistful idealism, Vaughan suggests, are ultimately beside the point, because neither identify the root of the contemporary malaise that Friends and Strangers so slyly unearths. In his view, expressed in glancing blows and subterranean insinuations, Australia is a country of sleepwalkers drifting along in a placid dream, unable or unwilling to wake up and move forward.

Score: 
 Cast: Fergus Wilson, Emma Diaz, Greg Zimbulis, Dave Gannon, Jayden Muir, Victoria Maxwell, Poppy Jones, Steve Maxwell, Amelia Conway, Ion Pearce, Jacki Rochester, Mal Kennard, Eliza Oliver, Kat Try  Director: James Vaughan  Screenwriter: James Vaughan  Distributor: Grasshopper Films  Running Time: 82 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.