The Best And Worst Of The 2016 Sydney Film Festival, Reviewed

The Film We’ll Be Talking About For The Next Few Months

Down Under dir. Abe Forsythe

Starring: Lincoln Younes, Rahel Romahn, Michael Denkha

Reviewed by: Tom Clift (this is a shortened version of the full review which you can read here)

On premise alone, Down Under seems like a terrible idea. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe (who’s previously appeared in Always Greener, Laid), it’s a big screen black comedy set in the immediate aftermath of the Cronulla riots, and follows meatheads on both sides of the ethnic divide as they drive around the Sydney suburbs on the hunt for a little bloody retribution. Sounds hilarious, right?

Here’s the good news: I can confirm that Forsythe’s film (his second feature to date) is a hell of a lot more intelligent than you might expect. As a matter of fact, I’d wager it’s one of the savviest Australian comedies in years. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t also incredibly stupid, because it most definitely is. And that’s the entire point.

I’m not going to try and break down what sparked the riots back in 2005, but hopefully we can all agree that, in addition to being embarrassing and horrifying, they were also really fucking stupid. Bigotry is born of ignorance, and Forsythe and his team know it. That’s where the comedy comes from in this film. Whether it’s an Arab kid forced to wear Aussie flag board shorts after losing his pants (don’t ask), or a white guy spouting off about his all-Australian hero Ned Kelly only to be casually informed that the famous bushranger was an immigrant from Ireland, the characters in this film are consistently shown to be idiots, and the jokes come almost exclusively at their expense.

Forsythe also relishes the chance to draw parallels between the two groups, driving home the point that, for all the hatred that divides them, they’re really not all that different. We see it in the way they act (a recurring visual motif involves the characters doing doughnuts in extreme slow motion), and hear it in the way they talk (there are points in this film where it feels like every second line of dialogue is ‘cunt’, delivered in that colloquial Aussie way).

One big downside of Forsythe’s focused approach, however, is that he fails to really acknowledge the other factors that led to the riots. For example, although snippets of media coverage are heard in the background throughout the film, the director avoids making direct references to certain radio personalities who played a part in stoking the flames of racial disunity. Anyone hoping for an Alan Jones cameo will be sorely disappointed — and by not acknowledging the role of shock jocks and conservative pollies in what happened, Forsythe has let them off the hook.

There’s also an argument to be made that by dismissing these bigoted characters as idiots, the film fails to interrogate why this sort of thing could happen in modern day Australia at all. I suppose it’s a trade-off. The more you dig into that, the harder it is to make audiences laugh — at the end of the day, the film is still meant to be a comedy.

Actually, what I should say is that it’s meant to be a comedy… until suddenly it isn’t. One thing that you cannot deny is that Forsythe doesn’t shy away from the brutality of racist violence. Without getting into specific spoilers, there is a point late in this movie where it’s as if someone has swapped over a reel without warning and you’re watching a totally different film. The violence in the dying moment of Down Under is extraordinarily hard to watch. It’s nasty, jarring and not funny in the slightest. As a result, viewers are forced to reflect on all the moments throughout the film when these characters made them laugh. It’s uncomfortable, and it should be.

For fans of: political comedy, STRAYA, feeling very uncomfortable (in a good way).

Opening in Australia: July 11

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