Passion

It's great to have supportive parents, the more so when you are a creative artist of fragile ego. But a relationship with a parent can be a crippling thing, even when the parent is aware of the danger of smothering a child with affection and preventing him from forming adult relationships. So it was for the Australian musician and composer Percy Grainger. In this film, covering a year in his life (the fatal year of 1914) and taken from a stage play, the multi-talented Percy's relationship with his mother Rose is explored. She is his devoted fan, manager and confidant. She encourages Percy, in his early thirties, to fall in love with a beautiful young talented pupil, Karin. Rose knows that the wellsprings of Percy's creativity are less than sparkling clear. Percy uses flagellation to clear his head for work, a practice Rose naturally deplores. Percy recruits his pupil to flagellation, and Rose finds out.

This film reminded me somewhat of the play and film "Amadeus" (loved by God) which showed Mozart (whose music Grainger hated to play) as a dirty-minded child whose musical genius seemed to just flow out of him without apparent effort on his part. "Amadeus" suggested that his rival Salieri was so consumed with jealousy that he brought about Mozart's death, "killing" God in the process. Grainger hears music everywhere - it just flows into him from sounds all around, and he captures and processes it. He hears a folk song being sung in a pub, or a barrow boy's call in the street and gets them down on paper. As Grainger himself says in the film, it's the folk material adaptions he will probably be best remembered for.

Like Mozart, Grainger has a supportive parent who recognises this extraordinary talent and moulds his career as a performer. Such creativity comes at a price, in Percy's case emotional over-dependence on his mother and the lash. Percy's is a pretty fragile psyche despite his cheerful manner and artistic confidence. He is a blond, athletic babe-magnet - perhaps women spot the mother's boy and go for him - but for Percy adoring fans are put there for his convenience.

Richard Roxburgh does a great job as Percy, full of nervy vitality. Barbara Hershey as Rose looks too young at first but as events take their toll she ages fast and the two of them are very convincing together. Emily Wolf plays Karin with Germanic seriousness. Towards the end the pace slows down to a crawl. It's as if the director didn't know how to finish. However "Passion" is handsomely filmed and easy to watch and listen to, with many of Percy's pieces on the soundtrack.

Melbourne born Percy Grainger (1882-1961) was a supremely talented and pretty weird musician and composer remembered musically for (English) Country Gardens, a folk song he collected, rearranged and popularised.

He was a piano virtuoso who was famous in London in the early 1900's for his rendition of Grieg's piano concerto, not to mention his alluring manner. I would imagine that there were a lot of young women at his concerts.

Passion outlines some aspects of his early life in London, concentrating mainly on Grainger's strange relationship with his mother, not to mention his rather peculiar behaviour with other women in his life. It's set in 1914 when Grainger's mother was ill.

There was a good deal of gossip about his apparently near incestuous relationship with his mother. This fellow was a piece of work.

Thankfully there's also a good deal of stirring, moving music included in this film about a musician. You certainly can't count on that happening. Hilary and Jackie about the cellist Jacqueline Du Pre and Shine which was concerned with pianist David Hefgott were both music biopics with strong Australian connections and they both failed to feature the music!

But anyway sex sells in film, much more easily than classical music, and not surprisingly Grainger's sexual strangeness is emphasised in Passion.

It seems that Percy was a great believer in the whip when it comes to sex. In fact if you should go to Melbourne it's well worth visiting the Grainger museum on Royal Parade in the Melbourne University grounds.

There you can view a selection of his whips along with a diary note documenting how he considered that flagellation is far superior to football with regards to relieving stress in the community. This boy was a forward thinker!

As well, there's a display of Grainger's music machines (hardly mentioned in the film) which are large contraptions designed to produce music automatically. There's also some of Percy's famous self made towelling clothing which is displayed with great elan in the movie as Percy jaunts along the local promenades. You'd have needed to have been very talented to get away with such behaviour in 1914 London and still prosper.

But what of the film. Richard Roxburgh as Percy Grainger gives a virtuoso performance as does Emily Woof who plays Grainger's girlfriend Karen. Roxburgh teamed previously with Passion's director Australian Peter Duncan in the interesting Children Of The Revolution.

Roxburg again in Passion exhibits unusual sensitivity and energy, although I suspect that we'd often be surprised by the abilities of many apparently staid actors if they chose to stretch themselves in so called art films.

Emily Woof along with Barbara Hershey as Percy's Mum are strong, although I didn't feel that we really got successfully inside Granger's syphillitic Mum. But then I suppose that might not have been all that attractive anyway. Australia's Claudia Karvan is interesting as the wife of Grainger's best friend, adding interest in what is a bit of a piece meal film.

Biopics are always beset by the same problem. Should the film limit itself to a cursory but expansive tale about the life of the subject, which is perhaps more the realm of the documentary, or should it concentrate on a small segment or aspect of the person's story.

It was disappointing to learn nothing about Grainger's later career or to find out more about his prodigious collections of English and Danish folk music but still Passion is above all passionate and very nicely filmed. Classical music lovers would do well to attend. Leave home the whips though, where they belong.

Percy Grainger was an American composer born in Australia, July 8 1882.

He was educated in Melbourne until he was 10 years of age. He was then whisked off to Frankfurt, to attend the conservatory in that wonderful city, and later wooed the audiences in England and America with his flamboyant showmanship, reviving and rearranging traditional old songs such as Danny Boy, but contrasting this side by dabbling in jazz and synthetiser music. Australia did not see much of him.

Peter Duncan the Director, has given us Grainger (Roxburgh) as an energetic, health fanatic doing his exercises in a terry-towelling outfit he made himself. He has also given us the other sides of Grainger, the kinkier side of Percy, sado- masochistic, his sessions of flagellation in his bedroom overheard by his Mother (Hershey), and his strong unusual affection and bond (as rumoured by others) to his Mother. Rosie as he called her; but Percy insisted it was a normal Mother and Son relationship (he treated her like his sister).

Richard Roxburgh (Percy Grainger), Claudia Karvan (Alfhild), Barbara Hershey (Rose Grainger), Simon Burke (Sandby), and Emily Wolf (Karen Holten), and others, all put in good performances of their characters.

Roxburgh is a true sturdy-looking resemblance to his real life counterpart, Grainger.

Roxburgh turns in a good performance as the eccentric, and sometimes a given impression of the immaturity of the genius of Percy Grainger in this new Australian drama, Passion.

But the energy emulated by Roxburgh is not enough to save a film, which despite the reasons for making this movie about perversity, pain and rumoured incest is shallow of it's plot.

The plot, or lack of it, seldom shows, no meat on the bone, in fact the movie is devoid of any purpose other than personifying a very small part of Grainger's life, not a lot happens at some or most of the time. Scenes go on and on like a soap opera and pop up with a lack of continuity and connection to the previous scene, and is more a talk type movie than action.

The scene of Grainger and Holten whipping one another is neither graphic nor detailed. The actors are like symbolic statues of supposingly gratification of mutual flagellation, but hardly move other than to show us their whip marks. They are posing. Grainger and Wolf, in their research, visited a salon at Coogee NSW, to learn the finer detail of bondage, whippings, masochism. The camera shoots, editing and all the other necessaries to make a film, didn't help them disclose on film, the information they gathered at the salon.

Then along comes the scene where the two embrace in an ultimate intimate sexual intercourse, the result of their whippings to each other. Mmm oh yeah!, what could have been done with those scenes to fit into the censorship, and make the film for what it was intended. This could be construed as artily directed, probably a cause of the censorship giving it an R rating, and is problematic of interpretation of Australian censorship rules, which Duncan appealed against. This scene falls well below a standard of some of the more dreadful of the B type movies. The R rating does seem to characterise the movie as being more explicit than it really is.

Any plot that can be uncovered, are scenes of Graingers' dalliances of encounters like the one with his best friend's Herman Sandby (Simon Burke) fiancé Alfhid ((Claudia Karvan). Alfhid could not be converted to Percy's lifestyle, and could see through him for what he was.

According to Barbara Hershey, she took the role because she had never seen this type of relationship on film before, a relationship between a man and a woman who happened to be Mother and Son, and it was a challenge to her.

One of the concerns of Barbara Hershey was age, how a 51- year-old actress could be seen as a mother to 37-year-old actor. It didn't come off, even though Rosie looked young for her age, as they said in Percy's biography. They looked like brother and elder sister in many of the scenes, lacking on screen chemistry between the two characters, except when the camera wasn't kind to Barbara. Her portrayal of a Mother extremely ill with a philandering husbands' syphilis was very moving, where she was able to give the scenes character, of being distraught for being unable to touch her son from his birth in case she infected him. Hershey's climatic scene in her distress is heart warming and sincere, and well done, in fact a small cutaneous lesion ( a symptom of this disease) can be seen on her right bottom lip. Purposely done, I wonder?.

Barbara for her career should have kept the name of Seagull, it might have proved helpful for her.

Roxburgh's golden, woolly, Aryan, Anglo- Saxon hairstyle didn't do much to improve the difference in age scenario as he would be 32 years in 1914, and crows feet near the eyes are hard to cover with make-up. Hershey's 51 years young just couldn't be compromised to fit the character of Rosie.

The sound track and music was absolutely beautiful and wonderfully relaxing.

I will give the movie a score of 7/10. A big 3 for having a go and really trying to show us, as an audience, the real Percy Grainger and his eccentricity, 2 for the cast and crew who did their best with what they had. And 2 for the South Australian Film Commission for supporting the people who made this film and continue to assist the Independent Film makers.

The movie will never knock "Shine" of its perch.

The world knows Percy Grainger mostly for his folksong settings: of which the one about the English country garden is probably the most popular. Some know one or two of his more individual compositions, but (I suspect) relatively few know of his early explorations of electronic music and musical ideas that place his name with the pioneers of the avant garde of twentieth century classical music.

Percy's eccentricity was matched with a tortured(sic)sexuality that embraced a close relationship with his mother and a penchant for flagellation. The brief display of the latter is( I suppose) the reason for the "R" rating.

Richard Roxburgh's performance as Percy is excellent, and (apparently) very close to the real thing. Barbara Hershey is less convincing as Rose.

In my opinion, don't be put off by the "R" rating for this film.

I am sure many of those who stumble on this release will want to find out more about Percy Grainger and what made him and his music tick.

Not a great film, but a very entertaining one. It is very much more intelligently made than some more sanitised or fictionalised attempts to depict the nature of those who brighten our lives with their creativity.

If in Melbourne : do not miss the Percy Grainger Museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne. It has lots of Grainger "artifacts" that document how close this film -flawed as it is - manages to recreate the setting, the times and the relationship with his mother.

It takes a phenomenal actor to pull off such a believable performance of a complex character, that being Percy Granger, worlds away from the life of the messed up David Helffgot. The photography of the period is piece perfect, but it is Roxborough's performance that will blow you away ( like he did as that corrupt detective, Roger Rogerson in Blue Murder, years prior) as the eccentric pianist who hid a dark secret, hence the reason for the R rating this film unjustly got. Grainger shared a sadomachistic relationship with his Mother, (Barbara Hershey, in a impeccable performance) that involved heavy whipping, that is passed onto his new wife, who's forced to accept the never changing Grainger for who he is. Burke and Karvan, especially, (more impressive by the minute) lend fine support, as Percy's friends. The film does end suddenly, it becomes such an engrossing view, as we really delve in and become fascinated by this famous pianist, who's name I can heavily recall, being mentioned as a kid. After all, he was of the great and most gifted pianists of them all, who always left an impression on his audience, just like Roxborough will leave an impression, with his performance of this great. Look at the world through Percy's eyes, in another landmark Aussie film.