frontrow@inpress.com.au than just a third part. I realised I had a huge amount of back story and we realised it would be simple to make the movie about that back story.” The resulting feature stars child actor Onni Tommila (Helander’s nephew) as little Pietari, a kid who still believes in Santa Claus – but is very, very afraid of him, and for good reason. He’s a rather more demonic creature than we’re used to. “It was always my intention to reveal the secret behind the myth about the original Santa Claus,” Helander says. “What the hell happened, and why we have a Santa Claus now that’s the opposite of the original one. There are lots of dark stories in Finnish folklore about Santa Claus and I wanted to remind people of that, that we don’t have to borrow from the Coca-Cola company. I tried to make a film about a kid who still believes in Santa Claus and he has to convince everyone, which is a hard job. I had a version of the script where the father is the main character but I realised it would be more emotional to focus on the little boy.”
JALMARI HELANDER
REALLY BAD SANTA
FINNISH DIRECTOR JALMARI HELANDER DOESN’T SUBSCRIBE TO THE IDEA OF SANTA CLAUS AS A JOLLY FAT MAN – HIS RARE EXPORTS EXPLORES A MORE SINISTER SIDE TO SAINT NICK, HE TELLS BAZ MCALISTER. About seven years ago, a short film hit the internet starring three reindeer hunters in the Korvatunturi mountains stalking a most elusive and dangerous prey – a fat, hairy, white-bearded nude man. When they finally tranquilise him they drag him
off to the showers, clean him up, and ship him off in a crate to department stores around the world. This is the rare export of Rare Exports – bona fide elves, delivered to your door, stand-ins for Santa, all dressed up in the red and white foisted on Santa
Claus by the Coca-Cola Company’s ad campaigns of the 1930s. The budget of the remarkable short film was a mere 3,000 euros and it was shot in a day and a half. A sequel followed two years later. Now, thankfully, Finnish writer-director
Jalmari Helander was given a good deal more to shoot the feature-length prequel, Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. “My original idea was to make a third short film,” says a sniffly Helander, “but people kept saying to me that maybe we should make a feature film about it because I have lots of ideas about this thing. I thought it was a bad idea to try to stretch the short film idea to a feature film but I thought it might work if I could make an idea that stands on its own, rather
THE TV SET (M*A*S*H, Scrubs, etc.). You get the feeling that Darabont wants to take the zombie formula beyond its in-built fanboi demographic and make it appeal to a broad audience, one already tricked into watching the unusual by Dan Draper and Walter White - if viewers can sympathise with a chain-smoking adulterer and unbalanced meth cook, surely they can connect with undead killers…
THE WALKING DEAD
So, Darabont is hammering home the messages most zombie film-makers prefer to leave as underlying themes for fans to take on board or ignore as they want. So far though, each episode has contained enough flesh-devouring, skull-crushing and scary thrills to keep The Walking Dead interesting. In fact, it’s sure to cause a nightmare or two over the coming weeks.
TWIN TOWERS WITH ANDREW MAST The show most-swapped around the coffee maker in Australian offices at the moment seems to be The Walking Dead (which The Age reported last week was close to being picked up for screening here on Fox 8). Despite the zombie thriller starring UK actor Andrew Lincoln, best known for comic dramas This Life and Teachers, it’s not going for laughs in the vein of recent Britzom Dead Set. Made for US cable network AMC, The Walking Dead wants to be a serious contender alongside stablemates Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Brought to our screens by Hollywood heavyweight Frank Darabont (he’s had Oscar nominations for his films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile), the writer/director/ producer thankfully has a past with B-grade horror to draw upon for this (he specialised in remakes and sequels like The Blob, The Fly ll, and the third Elm St film). The six-part series, based on an Image Comics’ black and white monthly, is set in Atlanta following a zombalypse that has left the States populated by shuffling dead types (‘walkers’) in need of live flesh to gorge on. The series follows Lincoln, as a sheriff
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with a small band of non-infected beings, in his struggle for day-to-day survival. This group of zombie-bait is, of course, a microcosm of pre-walker society and in the first few episodes there has been racial tension, domestic violence, and gender disparity - gay adoption, abortion, and zombie rights are surely just around the corner. Darabont has gathered together a smart, but odd, group of writers and directors - with past work on Treme, The Wire, Dexter, Sons Of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, and Angel between them - including Piranha ll: Flying Killers writer Charles H Eglee and former Swedish dance producer Stakka Bo (now Johan Renck). In the five episodes screened in the US so far, Darabont’s Oscar-attracting penchant for ‘meaningful moments in conversation’ shuffles in to devour the action at any given moment (“Guess the world has changed.” “NO. It’s the same as it ever was. The weak get taken.”). It’s a pity, and brings to mind that failed attempt at ‘a meaningful moment of pathos’ in the most recent season of Breaking Bad where a gimmicky two-hander episode, based around a fly being stuck in the lab, was mawkish in a way most US TV waits to indulge in once its been on air too long
And Helander found a truly remarkable elf in Estonian actor Peeter Jakobi. “The moment I saw him I was really happy,” Helander says. “This was just the kind of guy we needed to play a Santa in the film. He is a really skinny, really weird-looking guy. He has actually been in some kind of car accident and his bones look weird because of some kind of operation. All the other Santas were a Norwegian man’s choir – in fact there was a strange moment during the filming when we were shooting that scene where they were washing all the Santas in the shower room, and all the men’s choir guys just started singing Christmas carols... it was the weirdest moment in shooting.” It seems we can expect some very strange DVD deleted scenes from this shoot... WHAT: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale WHEN & WHERE: Screening in cinemas from 2 December
THEATRE REVIEW THE NIGHTWATCHMAN Theatre Works The set design for Daniel Keene’s The Nightwatchman is simple, three hanging panels of fabric collaged with peeling layers of old wall paper, metaphorically referring to layers of experience and the passing of time. Bill, splendidly played by Roger Oakley, son (Brad Williams) and daughter (Zoe Ellerton-Ashley), spend a last night together at their family home. Bill, about to retire to a nursing home, is accepting of the fact that his remaining years are few. He has already lost his sight and his wife and is now losing his memory. A diary kept by Bill’s dead wife, the mother of Helen and Michael, suggests that a secret may be revealed. There is a lot of reminiscing in the garden along with much thoughtful and nostalgic gazing out into the middle distance. Because Bill is a protagonist who doesn’t want anything, and the other two don’t know what they want, there is little real conflict or drama. The second half gets even more precious with a gently meandering melodic piano score, repeated references to Monet’s garden and even more poignant and meaningful observations about the changing of seasons, flowers and colours, and the fading of light (“we must never regret what might have been”), to the extent that this jaded reviewer started to feel a little ill. The language is exquisite but with Bill being so sorted and neither of the younger characters being idiosyncratic or interesting, I found I couldn’t care about them. Until 12 December
LIZA DEZFOULI
NOT ALL TWINS ARE PSYCHOPATHIC, DECLARES NICOLA GUNN, AS SHE STEERS PAUL RANSOM THROUGH THE STRANGE WORLD OF TWIN. Nicola Gunn sits across the table and ponders the work she is making with close friend and co-conspirator Olivia Bryant. “I’m still wondering what it’s about,” she quips playfully. “I could just say that the show is basically about nothing and it’s just gonna be a bit of fun.” It’s a disarmingly unfussed insight into the process of making theatre about a topic that most would consider deep, dark, and psychological. On paper at least, Gunn and Bryant’s Twin seems to offer up the prospect of something more than a bit of fun. Taking as its starting point the often bizarre and beguiling tale of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twins who shared a life of petty crime, transistor radios, and D.H. Lawrence, and who spent much of their adult lives incarcerated in a mental institution, Twin is principally a show about intertwined identities. “There are two narrative threads,” Gunn explains. “One is based around the story we read about the
Gibbons twins, these two girls who started behaving very awkwardly and asocially; and there was a lot of debate about whether it was on purpose or not… But as much as we were inspired by that we were also interested in exploring our own relationship; y’know Nicola and Olivia making a show together but without it being about making a show.” The self-referential strands of Twin are not intended to be post-Seinfeld kitsch but rather to underscore the show’s themes of individual and conjoined identity. “The Gibbons twins were so consumed by each other’s identity that they decided that one must die in order for the other one to live,” Gunn continues. “And one did die – quite suddenly.” For Nicola Gunn, who has made her name with solo work like the much lauded At The Sans Hotel; this is clearly an experiment in making work with someone else. “I think we have a very sisterly relationship,” she says of her friendship with Bryant, “in that we
hate each other and we love each other. But it’s like our friendship has been put on hold. We don’t see each other socially now, we just do Twin.” However, if things seem like they might be about to veer into solemnity, Gunn wheels out the grinning bluntness. “We’re not hoping to make some meaningful, profound piece of theatre here. We really are just making something interesting to watch. It will be funny and it will be dark. We just want to enjoy making the work. So I don’t think we want people to come away with any newfound respect for life or whatever.” Twin, it transpires, is much less a classically ‘written’ piece than a ‘made’ work; a show that has yet to settle into its final form. With its video
cut aways and moments of surreal silliness, it remains a somewhat organic beast. “I’m sure that the work will evolve over the season and I’m quite happy with that,” Gunn declares. “We really won’t know what it is until we do it; and I think that more work from Australia should be permitted to do that.” And here, just when we think that we’re in for an evening of contemporary absurdist difficulty, Nicola Gunn can’t help but conclude, “Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything. You won’t be challenged. You’ll just be distracted for an hour.” WHAT: Twin WHERE & WHEN: La Mama Theatre Wednesday 1 to Sunday 12 December