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Seriously, Yahoo's new film is fantastic.
By ADRIAN MARTIN
FILM REVIEW
The Age
Thursday 14 September 2000
Mr. Accident (PG)
General release
Lest I be suspected of irony or perversity in what
follows, I hereby declare that every opinion in this review is sincerely
and strongly held. Director-writer-star Yahoo Serious' latest, Mr.
Accident, is by far the best, most admirable and enjoyable Australian
film I have seen so far this year. No one could be more surprised by this
reaction than me: Serious' earlier efforts, Young Einstein (1988)
and Reckless Kelly (1993), left me bemused rather than amused.
Mr. Accident, however, is a tremendous breakthrough.
One would not glean this from most of the commentaries upon it that have
already appeared. All I heard about this movie prior to seeing it was
that it wallowed in slapstick, peddled some simplistic message about national
identity (as did Reckless Kelly), and confusingly alternated childlike
humor with mildly risque bits. Detractors portrayed it as an ersatz, superficial
and opportunistic confection - unreal and (what's worse) unfunny.
Some of these remarks are partly true - but every
one of them is, ultimately, beside the point. What kind of strange and
wondrous film is Mr. Accident? A synopsis is not the best way into
a proper appreciation of its unique qualities. Roger Crumpton (Serious)
is an accident-prone guy who, despite this seeming curse, is endlessly
fascinated with the world of objects. His love interest, Sunday Valentine
(Helen Dallimore), wishes to make contact, one day, with aliens. Meanwhile,
the beastly Duxton Chevalier (David Field) takes over an egg company and
re-orients its manufacturing processes in mysterious, suspicious directions.
So much for plot. It is more the sensibility or
style of the piece that has really rankled with some people. Serious has
been taken to task for making a film in which every detail (from props
to facial expressions) is exaggerated for effect - the ultimate in Australian
"quirkiness". The best screen comedies (so this argument goes) depend
on situating their gags within a realistic, plausible, coherent world.
This is a spurious and reductive way of approaching
Mr. Accident - and, indeed, many great screen comedies. Serious
clearly has a better understanding of the context in which he works than
his critics do. This is a "cartoonish" movie in the tradition of last
year's overlooked Inspector Gadget, or the more extreme exercises
by the Coen brothers (such as The Hudsucker Proxy, 1994).
In its conception and execution, Mr. Accident
is superbly accomplished. It took him three films to figure it out - a
decent learning curve - but Serious has at last realised that all the
elements of a movie must be stylised in concert. At every point of Mr.
Accident, the broad, physical gags are matched by a similar intensity
of design, color, camera angle and a particularly delightful and intricate
soundtrack.
Few Australian movies orchestrate this many aspects
of cinematic language into such a pleasing whole. More plainly, where
many local films are literally depressing to look at - shot with ugly
filter-washes or dull, television-style, "naturalistic" lighting - Mr.
Accident is a gorgeous feast for the eye. And the actors, well cast
in every case, respond with ingenuity to the special demands of this bracing
stylisation. Serious has boldly adopted a disarmingly novel approach to
narrative structure with results that are more innovative than anything
in Time Code. The plot switches off its "motor" and delays, for a long
time, even the central conflict between Crumpton and Chevalier. Instead,
the film is like a level playing field on which diverse running gags constantly
collide and then separate.
Mr. Accident is woven from a repertoire
of obsessive motifs - some whose narrative function becomes clear only
in the final minutes, and even then in a "shaggy dog" fashion. Fridges,
pets, plunging stairs, the possibility of life on other planets, an imperishable
hubcap, food, clothes, cigarettes: the film is a merry, surrealistic list
of attractions great and small, suggesting some hitherto unimagined genre,
like a sci-fi musical. The closest comparison in world cinema would be
the wonderfully off-centre films of another do-everything maestro, Maurizio
Nichetti (The Icicle Thief, 1989).
Further heartening comparions suggest themselves.
The comic art of Jerry Lewis (far more than Jim Carrey) hovers over the
elaborate gag sequences, particularly those involving an escalating destruction
of interiors. Serious' set-pieces never quite reach the catastrophic heights
of Jerry's singing lesson in The Patsy (1964), but they come close.
Most central to Mr. Accident, however, is the spirit of Lewis'
mentor, the writer-director Frank Tashlin.
As in Tashlin's Artists and Models (1955),
two sets of same-sex friends inhabit the same building. Dallimore plays
Sunday as an ultra-feminine sterotype (squeaky voice, fairy gear) with
the same vigor and panache that Shirley MacLaine brought to her role in
that film. Serious borrows Tashlin's love of magically animated objects,
such as the garbage bags that build into a mass as they tumble down stairs.
Most fundamentally - and poetically - Serious invents
a quintessentially modern and supremely Tashlinesque mode of life for
his hero. Although Crumpton has a nostalgic, fetishistic fixation on the
consumer goods of the 1950s, he has been drilled, since childhood, to
take every man-made object apart. It is his genius but also his pathos,
since he neglects to put anything back together again.
Like Tony Randall in Will Success Spoil Rock
Hunter? (1957), who dreamed of making a new species of rose, Crumpton
must learn to combine his technophilia with good, old-fashioned imagination.
And Serious' own film is an invention of the same order: craftily assembled
with loving know-how, but alchemically transformed by inspired touches
of whimsy and delirium. This is why it pitches itself, so unselfconsciously,
to child and adult viewers alike - it is a proudly mutant object for the
polymorphous alien in us all.
article
availalbe from www.theage.com.au
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