From: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Subject: REVIEW: DEATH IN BRUNSWICK
Reply-To: frankm@microsoft.com (Frank R.A.J. Maloney)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 14:13:26 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.movies
Summary: r.a.m.r. #01598
Keywords: author=Maloney

			     DEATH IN BRUNSWICK
		       A film review by Frank Maloney
			Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney

     DEATH IN BRUNSWICK is an Australian film directed by John Ruane,
from a script by Ruane and Boyd Oxlade and adapted from a novel by
Oxlade.  It stars Sam Neill, Zoe Carides, Boric Brkic, John Clarke, and
Yvonne Lawley.  No rating, includes violence, nudity, graphic
grave-digging scene.

     DEATH IN BRUNSWICK is delightfully outrageous black comedy that was
big box-office success in Australia and was nominated for a 1991
Australian Film Award.  It played at the last Seattle International Film
Festival where the reception was positive enough to encourage the film's
North American distribution.  This is its U.S. premiere in Seattle at
the Metro Cinemas.

     Brunswick is an ethnically-mixed, low-income suburb of Melbourne.
It is the home to a middle-aged loser, Carl, whose has been
psychologically mauled by his mum, nice, old Mrs.  Fitzgerald, played
menacingly by Yvonne Lawley (AMONG THE CINDERS).  Carl is played by the
chameleonic Sam Neill, who has held his own against such major scene
stealers as Meryl Streep (CRY IN THE DARK) and Judy Davis (MY BRILLIANT
CAREER).  Neill is a master of timing and lifts the semiautobiographical
story from the distasteful to a level of offbeat energy that redeems and
illustrates its anarchic view of the world-as-loony-bin.  Carl gets a
job cooking at local dance club owned by a man who thinks his patrons
deserved maggoty meat and cockroach-infested greengroceries.  Carl
immediately falls in love with a young bartender ("We all thought you
were a pouf"), Sophie, played by Zoe Carides, and runs afoul of the
cretinous, bullying bouncer.  Carl's kitchen helper, Mustafa, played by
Nico Lathouris, is more interested in dealing drugs and fencing boom
boxes out the alley door than he is in scrubbing down the counters, but
otherwise he's a mousy family man whose fate is more than the product of
dumb luck than deserts.

     In between ghoulish moments, Carl's life is lifted and then
imperiled by his attraction to Sophie.  They have a funny movie date at
the Progress Cinema where the moppets around them are watching THE
MARSUPIALS: HOWLING III when they're not jeering Sophie and Carl trying
to make out.  On the other hand, Mum is picking at him ("I know you
think this is bohemian") mercilessly.  Carl's mate, a gravedigger
played by John Clarke, and Clarke have to deal with one of Carl's
problems, but the generally drift of Carl's life by now is becoming
rapidly more self-destructive than anyone else can stand.  The final
resolution of Carl's troubles to me means that he finally joined the
nutsiness around him, that he finally gave up his quiet, desperate
clinging to sanity and normality; in an insane world, only the sane are
crazy.

     This movie really tests the limits of good taste, but the
first-time director, John Ruane, is too talented to let his movie slide
over the edge.  Ellery Ryan's cinematography is gritty and apt; the
soundtrack sets an engaging mood from the beginning.  It hard to like
Carl, although he does redeem himself in a characteristically funky way.
And the film does have a tendency to become a procession of increasingly
outlandish incidents in the manner of AFTER HOURS and INTO THE NIGHT.
But Ruane's wry humor and Carl's desperate unquenchability pull the film
out of what could have been a tailspin.

     I recommend DEATH IN BRUNSWICK to you if you get a chance to see
it.  Try to hold out for matinee prices; this film is too far from the
mainstream to really justify mainstream prices.

-- 
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney

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