Homesdale

A quasi-amateur film in appearance, in black and white, less than an hour long, shot over 5 days with a few thousand dollars... But a lot of talent is brought together there. Peter Weir demonstrates a real sense of mise-en-scene and of cutting, multiplying quality cuts and researched framing. The faces are scrutinized, and the actors are surprisingly excellent. The music score is also of good quality, oscillating between the disturbing and the amusing, in accordance with the general tone of the film which will be taken up a few years later in the excellent 'The Cars That Ate Paris'. We also find here a main character who is also naive. The plot recreates basically the process of making a film, which is to bring people together in a place, ask them to do things and see what happens... Very interesting.

This is one of those very early works of a promising young artist who has decided to make his first shot about, well, everything. There's ambition and some talent, but ultimately it is too rough on pretty much every level to rise above a curiosity for Peter Weir completists. I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad, it's too interesting in its individual moments to be dismissed like that, but it's not exactly something I would recommend.

A group of people come to the island hunting resort of Homesdale. Most prominent of these guests is the only one who hasn't been before, Mr. Malfry (Geoff Malone), a young, inexperienced man who is obviously out of place amidst people like Mr. Kevin (Grahame Bond), a part-time butcher and part-time rock star, Miss Greenoak (Kate Fitzpatrick), and Mr. Vaughn (Barry Donnelly), along with a few others. They are greeted by the manager (James Dellit) who meets everything with a toothy grin.

The actual point of this getaway is masked by the film's pretentious symbolism and metaphor that it's unclear what it's supposed to be on a literal sense. It doesn't seem relaxing, like when the oldest member of the bunch, Mr. Levy (James Lear), accidentally shoots and kills one of the staff only for another member of the staff to essentially laugh it off as nothing but a dirty little secret between them. There's a treasure hunt that seems designed to humiliate them, like when Miss Greenoak happens across a disfigured man in the forest whom she ends up snogging for...reasons, or when Mr. Malfry follows instructions on a rock and ends up hanging upside down from a rope in a tree.

There's also some kind of talent show late in the film where each guest is supposed to present themselves somehow. Mr. Kevin plays his music. Miss Greenoak makes fun of the war-scarred German woman Mrs. Sharpe (Doreen Warburton) before singing. In the middle of all of this is Mr. Malfry, berated more than once by the manager for not being into it enough, for not fitting in or being popular.

The film ends curiously with Miss Greenoak finally giving into Mr. Kevin's advances, sleeping with him, and then sneaking out to bring in the entire staff to...make fun of him? I guess? It's unclear because no one is clear about their actions or motives anyway in the film, and, in addition, it all gets cut short because Mr. Malfry ends up revealing himself to be deranged in a way that cuts the fun short.

Why does this place of Homesdale exist? It seems to me like it's a way for the staff to make fun of its clientele with too much money and then recruit for their own ranks from their guests, finding the most homicidal to join them. It's a problem with storytelling that takes metaphor and symbolism above actual storytelling. The surface ends up making so little sense that it's hard to actually engage with it because there's so much time wondering how these pieces fit together.

That being said, there are pretty consistently amusing little pieces. Weir, who co-wrote the film with Piers Davies, seems to have had a very black and dry sense of humor as a young man, and there are visual gags throughout that produce small guffaws. The playing of the humor is deadpan flat, more than once reminding me of Monty Python from the other side of the globe a few years earlier.

So, the symbolism, which feels really political on some level that I can't grasp because I don't live in Australia during the early 70s, and it seems like the political points are all designed to appeal to those living in Australia in the early 70s. I just don't know the paradigm outside of the moment Mr. Vaughn blindfolds both Mr. Malfry and Mr. Kevin, labeling one as the Communist and the other as the Australian, and then having them play a game where they try to light small sticks of explosives strapped to the bottom of toy fighter jets. It's obviously supposed to say something about manipulating people using political labels, but that's just the most generic of the examples. Is there something about Mr. Kevin's dual life as a butcher and rock star? Maybe. I dunno. It does provide some brief moments of humor, though.

If I were a film producer and a young filmmaker showed this to me, I wouldn't kick him out of my office. I also wouldn't give him a job. I'd probably invite him to a short conversation about what he wanted to do with the film and what he failed to do with it, hoping to give him some direction he could use on his next project. I wouldn't want to stop him from working, but I wouldn't be ready to work with him yet. There's promise, but he's got a long way to go before he realizes it.

Guests arrive at an expensive private guest house on a remote island near Sydney. The guest house and weird activities, like theatre sports and orienteering, are run by a leery eccentric.

As far as peter Weir goes, he is something of an Australian hero. Some call him an auteur, but let us just say hero. Few have done as much as him to bring attention to the Australian film industry (well, maybe Mel Gibson). Although he really broke out with "Picnic at Hanging Rock", this earlier attempt is much more fun and reminds the viewer of experimental, independent film not unlike that of other greats before their breakthroughs (Cronenberg, Cassavetes, etc.) Weir scholars have suggested this film also develops a theme that Weir would return to in the future: the institution and its push for conformity. Whether this was ever Weir's intention or not is unknown, but that is definitely an underlying message that could be gleaned...

This creepy black and white short is one of Weir's earliest films. It's much scarier than Picnic or Last Wave and convinced me that if Weir had continued along this line he'd have given Greenaway , Lynch and von Trier a run for their money. Thankfully he seems to have had a better sense of spiritual self-preservation.

The style and incidental touches are very much Weir. Some shots of the bushland surrounds of the sinister guesthouse look forward to the landscapes of Picnic. Watch out, too, for the use of the hymn "O God our help in ages past" which is like, and yet very unlike, the use of hymns in Picnic and Mosquito Coast.

So far as I understand the plot, which is allusive and ambiguous, a motley bunch of guests turn up at "Homesdale Hunting Lodge", seemingly for a rest cure of some kind. At first we wonder whether the place isn't a psych. hospital. The manager and his assistants (one of whom was played by Weir himself) encourage - or compel? - the guests to play some increasingly dangerous games. There are darkly comic allusions to things such as the Psycho shower scene. We soon realize that each guest has a Past - some are downright traumatised - and that what happens to them at Homesdale is no help. Rather the opposite. Indeed the Manager is an early version of a figure who recurs in Weir films - the would-be Puppetmaster (think Billy Kwan, Allie Fox, Christof in the Truman Show).

The conclusion is truly shocking. In fact one is left wondering whether the events have taken place on this earth at all; we feel like we have been looking through a window into Hell.

Clever and frightening but I will not watch it again.