The Five Weirdest Forgotten Classics Of Australian Cinema
When we do weird, we do pretty bloody weird.
Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff (1971)
A teacher working in a hellish, nowhere town in a remote community has his shit together: he’s educated, well-spoken and professional. Only when he stops overnight at an outback pub called the Yabba and befriends the locals does his life spin out of control. A careless game of two-up casts him into a gambling black hole, he loses his last few bucks and his mind, becoming stranded in the town and at the mercy of its matey inhabitants. The real Australia breaks him; the outback spirals him out of control. He’s in a waking nightmare.
It took a foreigner to make one of the most wryly-observed films in and about Australia. Who else could make sense of the chronic alcoholism, the wild mateship, the hardcore heterosexuality, the gambling, the blokiness, the repressed fear, the implicit top-qual misogyny, and the intense seediness? Who else could understand that the most socially unacceptable thing you can do in Australia, as a man, is not drink booze? Who else could understand that the only worst thing you can do in Australia, as a man, is to realise you’ve had sex with another man?
Women only appear a couple of times throughout the film, and always with a sense of weird, threatening sexuality. Meanwhile the most evil, messed-up men are the most hospitable: they’d help you change your tyre, shout you a beer, only to take you to rock bottom, into the most violent corners of the most remote places of the most hostile country. There’s nothing really comforting or heartening about this film at all, except the comfort of recognition of all the things you feared about this weird-arse country but could never articulate. Also, old mate Martin Scorcese is fan.
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