for this week’s ‘Tribune’: SNOWTOWN [6/10]; LOUYRE – THIS OUR STILL LIFE [3/10]

Published on: November 17th, 2011

Snowtown
Director: Justin Kurzel

Louyre – This Our Still Life
Director: Andrew Kötting

Current release Wuthering Heights might have Downton Abbey devotees spluttering into their Earl Grey, but it’s fairly genteel stuff alongside Justin Kurzel’s nightmarish Snowtown - an Australian drama chronicling the nation’s most prolific serial-killer. Based on non-fiction books on the ‘Snowtown Murders’ (Snowtown was only where the killer kept his victims’ bodies – the slayings took place in an Adelaide outskirt nearly 100 miles away) this is, only months after David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, another tale of a a fatherless, blank-faced Oz teen led astray by a charismatic dad-surrogate.

But while both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw, Snowtown is a much more scuzzily abrasive affair, the criminality depicted motivated by psychopathic malignancy rather than profit-motive (though the real-life case involved considerable elements of social-security fraud). As persuasively played by twinkly-eyed Daniel Henshall, the sole ‘proper’ actor among (variably talented) non-professionals, John Bunting is a Machiavellian opportunist, taking advantage of – and indeed encouraging – anti-paedophile hysteria in an impoverished, isolated mid-90s underclass suburban community.

Among those falling under this deceptively genial ocker’s spell is 16-year-old Jamie (Lucas Pittaway), whose severely dysfunctional family-life has left him vulnerably damaged. Snowtown is at its strongest during the atmospheric early/middle sections as director Kurzel and scriptwriter Shaun Grant sketch in Jamie’s dire environment, quietly introducing Bunting as a charismatic, insinuatingly manipulative presence.

But as Bunting’s evil nature becomes apparent, the film shifts from obliquely penetrating social critique to more conventional, less interesting evocations of gruelling unpleasantness (with enough “strong sadistic violence” to land an increasingly-rare 18 rating from the BBFC). Numerous holes of motivation and plausibility start to impede Grant’s elliptical screenplay, right up to a naggingly unsatisfactory, drawn-out and overwrought finale in which Jamie’s complicity is drastically cemented.

So while there’s much to appreciate here (first-timer Kurzel’s confidently controlled direction is boosted by an unsettlingly ominous score by brother Jed) in the end Snowtown falls some way short of both Animal Kingdom and Rowan Woods’ genuinely chillling excursion into similar terrain, The Boys (1998) - not least because it’s just a little too enamoured with its unflinching depictions of unalloyed nastiness.

IF the BBFC probably had little choice than to slap an ’18′ onto Snowtown, there was surely little debate about granting Andrew Kötting’s Louyre – This Our Still Life a ‘Universal’ certificate, denoting work containing “no material likely to offend or harm.” According to the organisation’s website, “the BBFC has placed this work in the ART HOUSE genre,” and indeed Kötting’s 59-minute essay-film is oriented firmly towards out more adventurous independent cinemas – or galleries and installation spaces.

An energetic sight-and-sound collage, it celebrates the passing of the seasons as seen around Kötting’s raffishly bohemian family-home in Louyre, a beautifully corner of the Pyrenees (the “extremity of solitariness”). The main emphasis is on Kötting himself – a beefy, fiftyish, Slade-schooled multi-disciplinary artist, and 23-year-old daughter Eden.

What results is an ambitiously discursive, tangent-mining blend of domestic travelogue and home-movie footage that combines 8mm/16mm celluloid with the flatter tones of digital-video – displaying little real visual flair but maintaing a degree of fascination as an audio collage, studded with what sounds like extracts from bygone radio-broadcasts: poetic musings (“beware the soft mountainous surge of time”); high-faluting intellectual debates.

Only occasionally do image and sound elements productively intersect, and the cumulative effect is of a sorely overstretched short. Kötting can’t dispel a heavy, unappealing atmosphere of preciously twee self-indulgence (and even narcissism) which hovers over the project, as what’s fascinating and charming to the writer/director may not necessarily exert much appeal to the viewer.

The whimsical allure of Louyre isn’t helped by being weighed down by all manner of cod-philosophical musings (“religion so often disappoints its customer”), only very slightly leavened by a strain of self-mocking humour. On paper a potentially plausible heir to the likes of Jarman, Greenaway and Keiller – with one foot in Europe and an eye on currents in modern art – on this evidence Kötting’s talents unfortunately just aren’t very well-suited to big-screen expression, meaning that his work seems most unlikely to reach an audience beyond a self-selecting arthouse coterie.

Neil Young
8th November, 2011
written for Tribune magazine