MOUTH TO MOUTH
Carrie (Kim Krejus) and Tim (Ian (iilmour) in the abandoned power station (hey make their home. Mouth to Mouth.
Jcannie (Sonia Peat) and Carrie (Kim Krejus) rush down an alley titter stealing food from a supermarket. Mouth to Mouth.
MOUTH TO MOUTH Jack Clancy “ You
s a y y o u ’ve s e e n it in th e m o v ie s ; T h is m o v i e ’s j u s t b e g u n . ”
The lyrics that accompany the ending of John Duigan’s new film are true enough, in one sense; we have seen stories of “ young love ’ 1 before. But in another very important sense, we have not seen anything like this in Australian films.
356 — Cinema Papers, April/June
Before Mouth to Mouth one had to search very hard to find an Australian film with this combination of compassionate observation, social concern and behavioral truth. One thinks immediately of Pure Shit, then perhaps 27A, Office Picnic and touches of The Removalists or Don’s Party. But it is impossible to find an Australian film which so boldly tackles a subject of urgent social concern, and so triumphantly brings it off. The subject is the young unemployed and, more especially, those who get into trouble with “ authority” .
Carrie (Kim Krejus) and Jeannie (Sonia Peat) escape from a girl’s reformatory and meet Serge (Sergio Frazzetto) and Tim (Ian Gilmour), two young country boys down in the city to find work. The four are carefully delineated — Carrie tougher and more aggressive than Jeannie; Tim with a kind of cow-chucks country boy’s self consciousness, as against Serge’s knowing openness. And their mating rituals are painfully, comically and truthfully caught as they agree, warily, to set up a kind of domesticity together in what looks like an abandoned power station. At first the bonds are closer between the two girls — and the two boys — than between boy and girl. The initiatives lie always (in a way that recalls Duigan’s earlier The Trespassers) with the worldly wise and temporarily employed girls, and their mixture of defiant bravado and giggling intimacy is too much for Tim, at least, to handle. Gradually, Jeannie and Serge’s relationship grows, while Tim and Carrie’s remains problematic, with Carrie still harking back to a previous lover. The differences are underlined, perhaps to o h e a v i l y , by D u ig a n a n d his cinematographer Tom Cowan, in purely spatial terms. In fact, one of the more impressive things about this film (and here The Trespassers forms a contrasting reference point) is the way the script is spare and functional, while the burden of the narrative and the shifting emotional patterns is carried visually. This is not, it should be emphasized, a merely technical or aesthetic point: it has to do with the way the film communicates a sense of its characters’ lives; forces us to
see them, and understand, before we condemn or sympathize. O b v io u sly th e p erform ances, particularly of the four principals, are directly relevant here, and in his four youngsters Duigan has discovered, and m a d e use of, what are potentially considerable talents. The performances seemed to me, not surprisingly I suppose, to achieve degrees of excellence in proportion to the demands the roles made on them. Kim Krejus as Carrie is extraordinarily good, with Sonia Peat, Sergio Frazzeto and Ian Gilmour almost equally so — as are the others in the cast, particularly Michael Carman as Tony, the former boyfriend, and Walter Pym as Fred, the old “ derro” who shares the place with them. Having established the four teenagers in this precarious, vulnerable dom estic arrangement, the film moves forward with a sense, if not of d o om , then of inevitability. The girl’s temporary jobs finish and the boys are still unable to get work; the girls steal food and clothes from stores, the boys copy them; the girls, again with attitudes of bravado, begin doing escort work; the boys resent it but cannot stop it. Jeannie can’t bring herself to continue, Carrie does so, defiantly. With the old m an’s death, and the arrival of the credibly unsympathetic police, the delicate structure of mutual survival (this, as well as the sexual overtones, is suggested in the f l m ’s title) is broken apart. One can foresee possible objections to this film. The frmly realist mode can seem too like a television style; yet the reply is surely that we could do with more television, or flm , drama with the feeling and acute observation to be found here. The film is bound to encounter charges th a t it e n c o u r a g e s to o g r e a t an identification with its characters; the son of criticism made of Pure Shit, and an equally misconceived one. There will probably be an opposite claim that the film is not sympathetic enough — another charge emerging from a failure to perceive the delicate balance of detachment and sympathy. One’s hope is that middle-Australia, with its dole-bludger mentality, at least gets a chance to make up its mind on this question. There are minor criticisms to be made of aspects of Duigan’s treatment of his script. Besides the heavily pointed spatial arrangements of particular scenes, the sequence on the beach evokes one of the heaviest of romantic and anti-romantic cliches. And I wasn’t too happy with the end-title song; its reiterated “ the more you love, the harder you fall” seems intended ironically, but its foregrounding takes it well beyond the level of the transistor “ju n k ” that has been recurring throughout as an index of the characters’ view of reality. Honesty and concern are not guarantees of a film, though they are necessary prerequisites. When combined as they are h e re with p e rc e p tiv e n e s s, satisfying dramatic structure, and a visual quality that would be admirable in a film with four times this one’s extraordinarily modest budget, they are a cause for rejoicing. MOUTH TO MOUTH: Directed by John Duigan. Producers John Duigan, Jon Sainken. S c r e e n p la y Jo h n D u ig a n . D i r e c t o r of Photogra phy Tom Cowan. Editor Tony Paterson. Art Director Tracy Watt. Sound Recordist Lloyd Carrick. Cast: Kim Krejus, Sonia Peat, lan Gilmour, Sergio Frazzetto, Walter Pym, Michael Carman, Janis Hayes. Production Company Vega Prods. Distributor Roadshow. 35 mm (blown up from 16 mm). 90 min. Australia. 1978.