on James Vaughan’s FRIENDS AND STRANGERS
Did you sing through the battle call?
Did you ring like silver in the wasted light?
DMA’s, “Silver”
Eight years after his outstanding debut short You Like It, I Love It, Australian writer-director-editor James Vaughan makes a blazing return with his similarly outstanding debut feature Friends and Strangers. A stealthily superb comedy of social unease about a sadsack twentysomething Sydneysider, it premiered to largely ecstatic reactions in the main competition at Rotterdam, yielding comparisons with Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo’s intricate miniatures. Those illustrious predecessors are famed for prolific workrates which the 31-year-old Vaughan shows few signs of emulating; the clue lies may lie in You Like It, I Love It‘s key line: “never compromise!”
A student film that competed at both Clermont-Ferrand and the Berlinale, You Like It, I Love It mined comedy gold from Australian life’s quotidian mundanities before executing a breathtakingly audacious leftfield formal swerve. Largely self-funded by Vaughan (including via stints as a medical experimentee) and his family, Friends and Strangers is less conceptually adventurous but sharpens his observational focus despite operating on a much larger canvas. Festivals will flock, and the director may find himself besieged by small-screen commissioners perpetually on the qui vive for the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge or Michaela Coel.
Friends and Strangers‘ four sections begin with long-time friends Ray (Fergus Wilson) and Alice (Emma Diaz) wandering Brisbane as they prepare to embark on the lengthy drive back home to Sydney. They overnight at a camp-site along the way, where their platonic camaraderie yields to a more romantic form of intimacy — with embarrassing, abortive consequences. The final two sections are more Ray-focused and unfold in Sydney, culminating in a long set-piece at a rich family’s waterside home, where Ray and his schlubby pal Miles (David Gannon) arrive to discuss their upcoming job filming a wedding-video.
This doesn’t sound much on paper, and the bland title (no connection with American novelist J. Courtney Sullivan’s 2020 book) isn’t exactly a draw. But even from the stylish opening credits — illustrated with 1780s landscape watercolours — it’s obvious that Friends and Strangers is the work of a smart mind and a strong aesthetic sense, attuned to Australia’s complex and controversial history. Vaughan takes sitcom-like material about the mishaps of young middle-class urbanites — by now a woefully familiar sub-genre — and reinvigorates it with his hilariously offbeat comic sensibility and quietly impressive cinematic flair.
This is, among many other things, a terrific film of and about Sydney, capturing both the astonishing beauty of the beach-fringed, sun-blessed metropolis and its distinctive atmosphere whereby laid-back surfaces conceal angsty social frictions. The relatively brief running-time is punctuated with seemingly non-sequitur interludes in which the city’s landscape or some specific detail therein is observed, akin to the “pillow shots” for which Japan’s Yasujirō Ozu was famed. These fragments are judiciously interpolated by Vaughan’s editing — he also cut Ted Wilson’ thematically similar 2018 Under the Cover of Cloud — to give a palpable sense of a world beyond the solipsistic self-absorption of the characters. The picture is also a great showcase for Dmitri Zaunders’ crisply limpid, unfussy camerawork; Friends and Strangers is also, remarkably, his first feature-film credit.
The most experienced hand involved here is sound-designer Liam Egan. In lieu of a score, Vaughan deploys diegetic music from an exotic variety of sources — including a tune composed to accompany Josef von Sternberg’s 1928 silent Docks of New York. Increasingly loud strings in the final section — leaking in from the pad of a former rock star living next door — greatly embellish the off-kilter ambience. Egan’s credits stretch back to 1986 and include Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah, a debut feature which presaged a directorial career of international eminence. The odds look good that lightning is about to strike twice.
Neil Young
8th February 2021
FRIENDS AND STRANGERS (Australia 2021, 84m) [8/10]
contact: Leitourgia Films, Sydney
