Rikky and Pete

Hollywood has never known what to do with Asian actresses. It took an Australian woman director to bring out the full potential of the lovely Tetchie Agbayani as Pete's girlfriend in this gentle Aussie comedy. The scene where she is negotiating to get a rise out of her boss (double entendre intended) shows her to be a highly talented comic actress.

I actually saw the film because of Tetchie's participation in it, and was pleasantly surprised by the movie as a whole. It delivers quiet chuckles rather than belly laughs, but leaves you feeling good. It deserves to be more widely appreciated.

Nothing much happens in Rikki and Pete, but this is not really a criticism. It's a character comedy and the time spent with the titular oddball brother and sister pair is not time wasted. Rikki is a bored researcher who wants to be a country music star and tries a few wacky stunts to get her second career going. Pete is a rather anti-social, housebound type with a real genius for creating fascinatingly useless, Rube Goldberg style devices. Watching these weird toys work is one of the genuine pleasures of this little movie. The style is intimate, with a lot of close shots of one of both of the sibs, and the setting is effectively littered and cluttered, as any world would be that had a mad little builder like Pete in it. There are few bright colors and no big message here as their odd little story lines play out, just a quite appealing portrait of a functional sibling relationship in a somewhat dysfunctional and frustrating life situation. Worth a look.

"Rikky and Pete" are thirtyish Aussie sibs who leave Melbourne to escape a dictatorial patriarch and Pete's problems with a local copper and to seek their fortune in the outback where they take up with silver mining and a bunch of quirky characters. "R&P" is a fun little Aussie comedy romp which wanders without clear purpose through it's marginal plot conjuring up moments droll, offbeat, and awkward humor and little else. Worth a look for those into Aussie flix.

I have especially enjoyed Rikki and Pete for reasons difficult to analyze. Just as a skilled writer can engross and hold an audience with what may appear to be simple prose, this film, too, with its simple and wacky story line maintains an artful and absorbing balance in its dramatic elements: a panoply of "unique", interesting characters, a comical clash of modern suburbia with desert mining town ethos, the clash of inventive slacker minds in the face of both, and a lively rhythm accented by Rikki's C&W barroom singing. What serious social messages it may contain - if any - are handled lightly. After all, nothing's new under the sun - certainly not male chauvinism or sexual abuse in the workplace or generational gaps. This film concentrates on its wacky characters and mining town setting, not on such hackneyed subjects.

A masterpiece it isn't, and I won't deny it succumbs to excess toward the end, but compared to the usual empty-headed commercial stuff hyped in papers and video rental box-backs by critics of dubious loyalty (certainly none to the purchaser or to intellectual integrity) I find it nonetheless a superior piece of entertainment - deserving perhaps a 7 out of 10. Back in the 1980s when I first saw it, I would possibly have rated it higher. Despite the years, I still carry with me visions of the dart-throwing Swede, the mining boss bargaining for "lays" he'll never get, and the wild contraption R & P construct with the help of their friends to automate the mining of their own semi-fraudulent gold claim.

Two wealthy Australian siblings — one an attractive geologist, artist, and country-western songwriter, and the other an unmotivated mechanical whiz kid in trouble with the law — borrow their crippled mother's Bentley and leave their uptown Melbourne mansion to 'go outback', enjoying several adventures along the way, none of which amounts to much. The same writer/director team tries to repeat the luck they had with their 1986 feature 'Malcolm', but the results this time around are too relaxed and unfocused, to say the least. The travelers stop to perform some music (with support from ex-members of the Down Under pop group Split Enz), try their luck at gold mining, and build several clever mechanical toys, but like the outback itself the script ranges all over the map without arriving anywhere. The film isn't exactly pointless, but it's not exactly brimming with purpose either. There's a token crisis involving a vengeful backwoods sheriff, but with no real conflict there's no need for resolution, and the film disappears from memory almost as soon as the end credits finish rolling.