Our summerlong exploration of one of Australia’s finest begins with a gritty little short film about fear, class, and distraction.
Over on Letterboxd, I have a running list that outlines my favorite film that came out every year since I was born. It is an eclectic list to be sure, but one that I think serves as an overall view into my tastes as a film critic. From an auteurist perspective, it is an interesting data point that one three directors show up on the list more than once: Carl Reiner, Spike Lee, and Peter Weir.
Namely, Weir’s films Witness (1985) and Truman Show (1998) are the ones that top out their respective years. When considering these two films, they reflect a few things about Weir’s filmography. They are distinctly different films, but they reflect one of Weir’s great strengths, which is to find central performances that elevate high concepts premises into high-gloss crowd pleasures. They also are both beautiful films, both aesthetically and regarding their deeply empathetic perspective. But they never delve into the sentimental, providing deeply felt observations on human experiences. They are honest, but lovely, films that reflect Weir’s humanistic perspective as a storyteller.
But despite these two and Dead Poets Society, Weir’s filmography was a giant blindspot for me. I couldn’t quite quantify why however; I simply had never sought it out, despite having heard high praise for a large portion of his work.
So this summer I am going to fix that. Starting this week, I am going to be watching in chronological order the full Weir filmography, week by week. My hope is to discover a deeper understanding of Weir as a filmmaker, and perhaps find some new favorites along the way.
This project is split into two distinct parts: Weir Australian New Wave period, and his American films. Fascinatingly, the two acts are almost equal in length: Weir made seven films in Australia, with his last, A Year of Living Dangerously (1982) being considered a paramount classic of the Australian New Wave movement, and then eight films in America, concluding with 2010’s The Way Back. Weir has announced he considers himself retired, meaning that while he is still alive, unless he changes his mind this is an effectively complete filmography.
This split does feel noteworthy not just because of the working conditions and budgets he was working in, but also because Weir’s earlier Australian work feels like a world apart from his later output. His Australian New Waves work, for most of the run, feels esoteric by comparison, playing more with genre as a means of expression. He mainly made horror and thriller films, movies with a sense of impending dread, before closing out this period with two historical epics starring Mel Gibson (Gallopoli and Living Dangerously.)
By comparison, looking at Weir’s American output, they are much more populist. While Witness might have the DNA of a genre filmmaker in its bones, it’s still extraordinarily approachable, a crowd pleaser that taps into the visual language of neo-noir but delivers a kinetic movie star performance from Harrison Ford, earning his lone Oscar nomination. Weir also bounces between genres, making melodrama, comedy and historical epics all with the same relish and attention to making fine crafted populist cinema. While his final film The Way Down received warm but not rave praise from critics and less attention commercially, the whole scope of his career is littered with the sort of serious, grown ups-oriented cinema we are increasingly lacking
But before we get to the end of the line, let’s look at the beginning. Like most up-and-coming directors, Weir cut his teeth on several short films, mostly funded by the Australian Experimental Film and Television Fund. While we won’t be covering all of his short films, we are going to examine probably the most significant: Homesdale.
This was the last and by far the longest of Weir’s short films. Similar to his others, it was shot in black and white on 16mm film that was later converted to 35mm for display. This gives the film a slightly distorted, disorienting quality, especially in digital conversion. But rather than working against this distortion, Weir uses it to the full effect as a special effect in Homesdale, offering a scratched out window into a strange alternate Australia.
The titular Homedale in the film is a hunting lodge, where we see several guests visiting, several returning guests, seeking some form of escape. But once there, the staff at Homesdale stretches the attendees past their breaking point. Through a series of disturbing conversations, it becomes clear that the purpose of the hunting lodge is less to experience the outdoors, and more to push the limits of guests’ comfort.
Homesdale is in many ways a difficult film to write about. It is deliberately opaque with its themes and storytelling, a film about people being forced to confront that which makes them most afraid that never quite spells out what exactly is going on. But it is also silly, a comedicaly large exploration of issues surrounding death and aging. While there are aspects of the short film that are unnerving, the overall effect of it is a farce, a broad comedic take on Australian elites, and how they busy themselves to avoid their actual fears of aging and death.
A lot of the themes of Homesdale will pop up in later Weir works; in many ways The Cars That Ate Paris feels like a logical extension of Homesdale’s world view. Those later takes are more thematically nuanced and certainly more aesthetically confident. But there are a lot of the things that will form Weir into the director he is bound to become. The movie’s dialogue, from a script co-written of Weir’s early collaborator Piers Davies, is sharp, but it is the way that the performances from the film’s ensemble cast that give this largely unlikable crew some veritas and empathy.
Like most of Weir’s early short films, Homesdale is a bit difficult to track down. I only found it as a special feature on Picnic at Hanging Rock. And ultimately while it is an interesting entryway into Australia-era Weir, I don’t find it especially crucial. It is more a fascinating glimpse into Weir’s identity as a darkly funny filmmaker, a trait that will become more subtle in his later work, but always lies under the surface.
Next Week: We visit another strange locale as we explore the seething politics of small town life in The Cars That Ate Paris.
