THE KING OF THE TWO DAY WONDER
THE JOURNALIST
Journalist hovers weakly between furtively admitting hypocrisy, and still begging for credulity. Similarly, Simon Morris is a kind of muted, middle-class Petersen only in terms of his supposed susceptibility. The Journalist and Petersen are also intensely misogynist in their portrayal of the female decor for male activity, but there is more emotional com plexity and credibility in 10 minutes of Petersen than in all the long duration of The Journalist — since Petersen’s perceptions are so aggressively asserted, and so generously privileged, that it becomes im possible to resist or to dismiss them. The Journalist does make some gestures towards socially placing the appalling cari catures it presents, but since the bits and pieces about journalism and business life mainly serve to hook episode to episode, gestures these remain. It also makes half-hearted motions towards being a film about fear of failure and ageing, but this remains a possibility lurking in the background. The two girls who pick up Simon to give him a ‘refresher course’, have the surreal quality of creatures of somebody’s fantasy; yet all that is finally made of this disturbing sequence is that Simon has only been overdoing it else where. The few good moments in the film are pale in themselves, but are thrown into relief by the surrounding blandness — for exam ple, Simon’s mistress (Elizabeth Alexander) upsetting a restaurant table to make her pregnancy announcement heard above the babble. Penne Hackforth-Jones as Gillie Griffith, however, lights up the screen whenever she appears, and she alone manages to carry off her dreadful dialogue with some life and humor. Elsewhere, a depressing dullness pre dominates; whoever described The Jour nalist as a “ cheeky comedy’” either had a cheek themselves or a tongue therein. The Journalist is thoroughly small-scale and limp, and everything in it leads to defla tion. Even the theme song, which is ex cellent, embarrasses through its inappropri ateness to the film’s paltry hero; and the.title
Walter Dobrowolski as the pulp writer, Robert Damian, in The King of the Two Day Wonder.
sequence, with its magnificent aerial photo graphy of Sydney, promises marvels which never materialize. In the recent moves towards capturing commercial success for Australian cinema, some films have appeared which anger many people — The Odd Angry Shot, for example, or even Dawn! But The Odd Angry Shot is
good entertainment, and Dawn! is a failure worth discussing. The Journalist is neither; and if it may well be part of the develop ment of a national cinema to acquire a stock of poor films, then it is also the case that the interest these can provoke rapidly becomes minimal. The Journalist: Directed by: Michael Thornhill. Producer: Pom Oliver. Screenplay: Michael Thornhill and Edna W ilson. Director of photography: Don M cAlpine. Editor: Tim Wellburn. Music: Wayne Kent-Healing. Art director: Jenny Green. Sound recordist: Tim Lloyd. Cast: Jack Thom pson, Elizabeth Alexander, Sam Neill, Penne Hackforth-Jones. Production company: Edgecliff Films. Distributor: Roadshow Distributors. 35mm. 90 min. Australia. 1979.
The K in g of the Tw o D ay W onder Jack Clancy
The Journalist. Liz disrupts dinner in a restaurant to announce that she is pregnant.
For young authors, an unpublished first novel is sometimes the necessary prelude to more assured and later publishable efforts. The first low-budget achievements of young filmmakers, however, do not win commer cial release, but they are at least shown and seen in informal non-commercial ways. These films are often more thematically and stylistically daring than later works which do achieve commercial recognition. It is, at least in part, on efforts like these and on the development of such talents, that a film industry is built and maintained. The King of the Two Day Wonder was written, directed, photographed, and co produced by Kevin Anderson, and its production — a more extreme case than usual of the difficulties of such semiprofessional first film — took four years, with interruptions and lengthy delays. It is an extremely ambitious film in con ceptual terms. It experiments with time and n arrativ e, and even with notions of character. It presents the kind of complex, even baffling, surface which makes one ap plaud its daring, while retaining the uneasy suspicion that not all of its apparent com
plexities are fully under directorial control, and that some of them may be the result of the long production period, or of postproduction exigencies. Two Day Wonder begins with the very nice idea of a writer, Robert Damian — played effectively, if a touch narcissistically, by co-producer Walter Dobrowolski — completing his latest pulp Fiction novel in volving a detective called Blake. Having met his two-day deadline, he delays submitting the manuscript to his publisher because he is not satisfied with the ending. Damian is not concerned so much with multiple possibilities of narrative as with the inter-relation between the narrative and his own life. In re-examining the novel, he becomes involved in a re-examination of his own life, to the point where the two become interchangeable. He sits at his typewriter smoking endless Gauloise cigarettes, while in intercut scenes we see aspects of his previous life, and the lives of the characters in the novel. The detective story provides opportunities enough for a filmmaker to parody, pay homage to, or simply make references to other films, and the number and breadth of these references in Two Day Wonder in dicates love of cinema which is so often a feature of young filmmakers’ work, and a self-indulgent eclecticism which so frequent ly flaws it. This eclecticism is equally evident in the cinematic style (or styles), and in the use of music. My reaction to Two Day Wonder, even after a second viewing, was almost uniform ly ambivalent; delight at seeing so much genuinely cinem atic inventiveness was cancelled by irritation at so many wilful ob scurities; and admiration for the sheer com petence and authority of particular se quences was dampened by recognition of what seemed stylistic self-indulgence. But a review of a film of this kind should, I believe, concentrate on particular achieve ments. The kind of thumbs-up or thumbsdown critical judgment appropriate to a more obviously commercial undertaking is out-of-place here. What is at issue is whether the creative development that is so impor tant is truly in evidence; and on that score there can be only one verdict. Anderson has
Cinema Papers, July-August — 465