Head On

I've just come back from the cinema, and having read the book ('Loaded' by Christos Tsiolkas) and being British/Greek and gay I thought it was excellent. It is a rarity for a start: a very good adaptation of a book, with amazing performances from an all-Greek Australian cast, including the gorgeous Alex Dimitriades himself who, incidentally is straight. I was particularly impressed about the cinematography (I looked it up later - by Jaems Grant and no, it's not a spelling mistake), all moody and dark like the plot.

The whole point about the film is encapsulated in the scene where Ari is having oral sex with Sean. He was selfishly roughing up and gagging Sean who had just said that he loved him. It was the ultimate brutalisation of sex by a brutalised closeted youngster in a hopeless, brutalising society. At that moment we wince, as Ari consciously rejects love for the anonymity of the street corner suck-off, but we *do* understand why he is unable to form a relationship: in his own way, he acts according to type, obeying his family's and society's homophobic and racist insults and conventions. Symbolically he looks up from his knees in the end, just as his TV friend Toula pushed him a few scenes before dismissively. The moral of the film as she says is that if you don't stand up for yourself you spend your life on your knees.

That moral may perhaps be irrelevant or far gone for gays who have come out and have asserted themselves in society by rejecting the hypocrisy of a double life full of compromises, but it is nevertheless still relevant for a large number of people in many different cultures.

Head On is almost certainly the best film I'll see in 1998. I saw The Travelling Sydney Film Festival on the same weekend. So Head On is in exalted company indeed. And Head On is an Australian Film! Our strongest artistic expressions are cross cultural; those mergers and clashes that result from our second and third generation migrants growing up in Australia. Until the last few years we Aussies have tried to kid ourselves that we are exclusively Anglo Saxon people on the big screen, conveniently forgetting Eastern European and Asian migration, not to mention our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. So we've tended to wallow in vague Dad And Dave rural soapies, Horse Operas of the Phar Lap type or nostalgic, ANZAC and Breaker Morant homages to the mother country, ignoring the fact that we are one of the most urbanised countries on the planet, and that most of us have parents who weren't from within five hundred ks of London. Head On is about Ari (Alex Dimitriades), a 19 year old homosexual Greek Australian living in St Kilda Melbourne. He's a lost soul, enveloped in a broiling sea of parental conflict, drugs and sex. He's "not proud to be Greek. He just is." A myriad of urban dilemmas are raised in Head On, nearly all of which are profoundly realised, but only through the briefly attentive eyes of a spaced out malcontent like Ari. I was reminded of that masterful scene in that early Scorcese film called Mean Streets; a scene which has never been bettered at showing what it is like to be drunk. But Ari isn't only drunk, he's on a cocktail of speed, cocaine and God knows what else and he's full of resentment. There's a scene in Head On where he and another unhappy soul, his cousin Betty (Elena Mandalis), slump in a toilet together, sharing their unhappiness, in a brief interlude before the madness resumes. It's a poignant, sad scene, where we realise just how desperate and empty lust and drugs alone can be. But when Ari is offered love he rejects it, violently. And that's a pattern repeated in Head On. People lurch in and out of Head On who have yet to, or one suspects may never, achieve a viable feeling of self worth. They strike out against commitment and self worth, indulging in hedonism because they can. Their parents have made the sacrifices. That looks boring to the children. Materialism is as easy as the next drug deal. Love is as easy as the next screw. Head On (the alternative title Hard On is a particularly apt Freudian slip, one that I've been guilty of) is about the alienation of youth, particularly homosexual youth. It's also about the generation gap, magnified by Ari's Greek migrant parents. And Head On is about a dozen other, contemporary urban issues. Racism is addressed with some feeling, in the film's weakest segment, but Ari's not too concerned really. He's reasonably happy just if he gets stoned and laid; sad but true of so many. Writer/director Ana Kokkinos has masterfully introduced us to the Ari's turbulent St Kilda world. Her film is fascinating and world class. Alex Dimitriades (Heartbreak High) is fantastic. Head On is spot on.

The kettle is on the boil and 19 year old Ari is about to burst with a combination of his culture, sexuality and drug intake, colliding to create a mixed up youth with a cause. His parents migrated to Melbourne, Australia, from Greece and with them they brought their strong culture that they hang onto while back in Greece the culture changes with the times. This we don't see but it is the fact of life for every second generation immigrant who has to fight the ignorance and hypocrisy of their parents and social surroundings. This creates a monster Ari carries on his back, a destructive energy within him that is wasted in back street alleys, public toilets and where ever he can get it. And when people don't come to his side of life, he manipulates them with sexual advances, testing their moral grounds. Through his love of Greek dancing, Ari yearns to keep part of his ancestral culture intact for identity purposes, but with his own freedom of passion. Can the two mix? That's what he's journey is. A journey for self expression without any rules of repression. This is Alex Dimitriades' cake as he eats Ari up and plays the character with conviction. Director Ana gets right into the heart and soul of Ari, via the camera with a confronting script dealing with issues aimed at any migrating culture.

Culture clash in modern-day Australia, as a 19-year-old Greek named Ari, handsome but feckless--and prone to snorting and shooting drugs--rebels against his hot-tempered papa, a man of values and culture but perhaps stuck in the past. Ari's inner-anger is all-encompassing; he lashes out at his family, at his diverse neighborhood (which appears to be an otherwise peaceful agglomeration of working-class Asians and middle easterners) and at girls who find him attractive. Ari's father is shown as disappointed with his wife and children, but even in the flashbacks there aren't any clues as to what would've made this man happy (he and his wife protested for Greek rights, but does he want his son to continue this fight--and what would the fight be about, the same issues the father fought for?). As Ari, Alex Dimitriades struts and preens like the next John Travolta (in fact, some of the home front squabbles, particularly one around the table, seem lifted from "Saturday Night Fever"). It's a risky role for the actor, who must keep up a perpetually ill-mannered demeanor, complete with lusty, angry homosexual activities which Ari keeps secret (his father hates 'poofters'); yet, Dimitriades, self-enamored and intense, makes the part work for himself and the audience. He's helped a great deal by director Ana Kokkinos, who also co-adapted the screenplay from Christos Tsiolkas's novel "Loaded" with Andrew Bovell and Mira Robertson. Kokkinos keeps the camera busy and free-flowing, although she stumbles when attempting artiness, which in this case is akin to dreariness. Some marvelous moments emerge in what could have been just another coming-of-age melodrama. **1/2 from ****

Head On is an amazing film. Its beauty and treasures lie in not judging the journey taken in the film but opening up to the experiences of a young man lost and hidden. Its not a bright, gay film but rather a fiery drama which doesn't offer answers but depicts a painful truth which many would prefer to disregard. This is a film about the loss of hope in the jaded nineties.

It is very much a local film (shot in Melbourne) and an Australian film, but I think it offers up wider and more general issues.

Few films capture the mood of the 1990s quite like Head On. It is a film embedded with characterisitics which intuitively identify the strangely blank decade that edged up to the 21st century. If the eighties was - though simplistically - regarded as the decade of high paced materialism. The 90s can be seen as a time of conservatism and cautiousness - again too simplistically - which could be regarded as the tired decade. A time imbued with a feeling that everything had already been done. Grunge embodied this, as did the increasing popularity of pastiche and remakes such as the way television shows were more and more the source for films. It was a time where even moreso than in previous decades - the answers and ideas were sort in ready-made forms. Reused, resurrected and exploited. Sarcasm and cynicism became law. Pettiness became more and more common. Many of us were just tired out.

Ari, the central character in Head On played with brilliant vibrant vividness by Alex Dimitriades, is the embodiment of this tired feeling. He reacts to the world by going to extremes in an attempt to register some feeling, a momentary intensity. Since there is nothing new to be found, he embraces fleeting bursts of passion and uses anything that helps him escape the exhausted sensation whether through drugs or sex, people or music. Anything that he can do to keep himself isolated and inside his own individual mind, he races toward. Head On. He's gay but not proud. He's Greek-Australian but not interested. He's young but may as well be old. History is an excuse to crap on and foster negativity. Ari can't contemplate love because he's lost between the cracks of a society he doesn't care for and doesn't want to contribute to maintaining. He doesn't trust but he yearns, somewhere deeply, for some sense of security or truth. The film follows his search for reason in the chaos of his life in a world of silences and charades. But for Ari, there can be no reason. He feels doomed. Sensation is his only food, the only way to quench an indiscriminate, blind thirst.

Dimitriades puts his body and soul into the role of Ari. Its the performance of commitment and intense passion for the role. He doesn't flinch at the frontal nudity or gay sex scenes as other actors might have and hence brings to the role an authenticity which is the spine of the film. But the supporting cast are equally well cast and powerful. Paul Capsis radiates every scene as Toula/Johnny, Ari's gender-bending cousin. Julian Garner is perfectly contrast as the one person who loves Ari enough to try and show him hope rather than dismissal. In fact, the script ensures even the smallest roles are provided with weight through the powerful and serious screenplay. The book from which this film was born - Loaded by Christos Tsiolka- is an excellent expansion of the films vision.

The soundtrack is split between roaring alt-rock and techno-pop with some interesting surprises. The whole film comes together with a precision and ease which never feels unnatural or artificial. This is a raw but tight film. It deals with issues intelligently and strongly without judgement or fear. The loss of hope shown here is left to be dealt with in our own lives, and with the people we meet. I think the film provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on the destructiveness of notions like identity and truth in a world which increasingly blurs examples that aren't suitable or fashionable.