Lasseter's Bones

Lasseter's Bones premiered as part of the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival

Australian history has never seemed appealing to me – dirty, masculine, embarrassing in its barbarism to the Aboriginal people, and let’s face it, decidedly lacking in glamour. But the opening title of the documentary Lasseter’s Bones reminds us that a wit no less than Mark Twain found it fascinating: “Australian history [...] does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.” It’s a brilliant opener, pulling the viewer immediately into the extraordinary story of Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, a man who claimed to have sited a 7-mile gold reef in central Australia, and reportedly died in the desert in 1931 after one of several failed expeditions to try to find it again. Conflicting stories suggest Lasseter was a con-artist, an obsessed fool or a tragic genius.

Documentary filmmaker Luke Walker (Beyond Our Ken, 2007) spent three years sifting through the stories and the facts in an attempt to establish what really happened, and why the story of Lasseter has gripped the imaginations of so many. What he uncovers is gold indeed, though perhaps not the kind Lasseter craved. The real nugget is Lasseter’s 85-year-old son, the sprightly Bob Lasseter, a bearded and amiable Aussie eccentric who has spent 50 years trying to vindicate his father’s assertions and rescue the family name. He invites the filmmaker to accompany him on the latest expedition to try to locate the famed El Dorado of Australian gold mining (somewhere near the border of Western Australia and the Northern Territory).

This trip, undertaken with modern four-wheel-drives, aeroplanes and good camping equipment, is so harsh and difficult that it really hits home how convinced Lasseter must have been to do it in the 1930s . We see the immensity of the landscape, the cruelty of the salt-bush (heavy duty car tyres are ripped to shreds every few kilometres and repaired at night by campfire) and the indifferent landmarks that all start to look the same after a while, especially when you’re looking for a rocky outcrop that resembles “a lady wearing a bonnet”.

Walker, a British-born former actor and VCA graduate is a personable presence throughout the film. Fit, tanned and enthusiastic, he’s nonetheless cowed by the landscape. “I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed,” he tells Bob as they rest on a sandy mound after days of fruitless searching. “It is a bit immense,” admits Bob laconically, in a moment that sums up the entire project and his undaunted approach.

Lasseter’s Bones is a triumph of painstaking research, but it’s made to look easy. Interviews, maps, clippings and extensive detective work are utilised to make sense of the complex story. The Australian types and characters, most of them elderly now, are delightful as they reminisce. The long dead Lasseter lives on as a larger than life character, a Zelig or a Christ who is reportedly seen after his death on a boat to New York, and who claimed to have drawn the original design for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The real revelation, however is the nature of obsession – the way that an idea can take root in a person and begin to choke out all other relationships, all other loves, all sanity. Even the filmmaker starts to look like he’s in its thrall for a while, as he considers: “Just one last trip to the outback…”

[This piece was originally published as a Program Note for Lasseter's Bones as part of the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival]

Rochelle Siemienowicz

Top 10 - an eclectic selection from a not-so-frequent film reviewer

It's been another hectic year where duties at the Australian Film Institute have sucked up most of my time and required me to watch a LOT of Australian features, documentaries, shorts and television dramas. I'm not complaining. Love it! But it makes my top ten a little skewed. Nevertheless, I managed to catch some festivals, some screeners, and even the odd regular film screening (radical!). Here's what I selected for my yearly wrap-up of films for The Big Issue magazine (edn. 396). Apart from the standout, they're in no particular order. They were selected from films that were on general release in Australia during 2011.

Standout Film: Melancholia

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia may well be the most perfect film ever made about the end of the world. The extended opening sequence, a masterpiece in itself, places the solemn strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde alongside extreme slow motion images that are gravely beautiful and strange: a huge green golf course overlooking the ocean; a sad and beautiful bride, floating dreamlike in a pond; a black horse sinking into the earth; and two planets, seen from space, on a collision course for disaster.

In a change of tone, the film reverts to the realistic and blackly comedic tone we expect from von Trier, as the newly married bride (Kirsten Dunst) and groom (Alexander Skarsgaard) giggle and kiss in the back of a ridiculously long stretch limo, which the driver is failing to maneuver around a bend. The seemingly happy couple is destined for a hideous wedding reception – complete with obnoxious guests and squabbling relatives (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling play the bride’s monstrously bitter parents). But the main problem is the bride. She’s suffering from a malaise that makes the term ‘depression’ seem like a picnic. Meanwhile, the bride’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is worrying about the rogue planet that’s moving closer and closer to Earth.

A grand and exhilarating work, Melancholia never abandons the human elements. The closing scenes are bound to have you in tears, reaching for the hand of a loved one.

Brad Pitt is the enigmatic patriarch in Tree of Life.

Tree of Life

Another hugely ambitious film about the grand state of things (including more magnificent images from space), Terrence Malick’s masterpiece tackles life, the universe, faith, grace and innocence. Tree of Life frustrated those who need a straight, clear narrative thread, but for lovers of beauty and mystery, this was one of the year’s must-see films.

Red Dog

The Australian blockbuster of the year, Red Dog was a nostalgic but knowing tale of a dog that united a West Australian mining community in the 1970s. Funny, heartwarming and accessible for all ages, this was true family filmmaking. Let’s have more of it.

Mad Bastards

Another film set in spectacular north western Australia, Mad Bastards was an uplifting musical journey about an estranged father and son, with a catchy toe-tapping score from the Pigram Brothers. Set in the heart of a contemporary Indigenous community the film was hopeful without ever shying away from reality.

Bridesmaids

Hordes of laugh-hungry women warmed to this story of a single thirty-something chick struggling to cope with her best friend’s wedding plans. Like Sex and the City’s wrinkly but more likeable cousin, Bridesmaids had heart and soul – and some genuinely fat people in it.

Hanna

Part fairytale, part assassin thriller, Hanna was blood-pumpingly exciting chase tale. Saoirse Ronan shone as the flaxen-haired teen killer taught to survive by her father (Eric Bana), and hunted relentlessly by a red-haired Secret Service witch (Cate Blanchett). A jolly good action ride, all powered by a stunning Chemical Brothers soundtrack.

Saoirse Ronan in Hanna.

Bill Cunningham New York

An audience favourite around the world, this zesty documentary created an unlikely spiritual hero - the octogenarian bike-riding fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, whose passion and pursuit of beauty has an inspired and pure quality about it.

Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska was the perfect Jane Eyre in this adaptation of the beloved Bronte book. Serious and interestingly plain, her face lit up with genuine love and beauty when she encountered her glowering and mysterious Rochester (Michael Fassbender). This gets my vote for Best Sexual Chemistry on Screen this year. 

Passionate moments in Jane Eyre.

Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard

Certainly one of the year’s best music documentaries, this portrait of singer/songwriter Rowland S. Howard depicted not only a talented, self-aware and articulate individual, but a fascinating era in Melbourne’s early punk scene, with great interviews from the likes of Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Wim Wenders.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

An excellent adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestselling book, this film succeeded in conveying the puzzles and ambiguities at the heart of the novel: Are killers born or made? And what part does a mother have in making them so? A strange kind of maternal love story with Tilda Swinton as the mother of the ‘monster’.

So there they are. 

Below are some others not mentioned in the magazine wrap.

Honorable mentions to Source Code, Winter's Bone, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Blue Valentine, Julia Leigh's erotic fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, Ivan Sen's heartbreaking but humourous Indigenous tale, Toomelah, the very under-seen Australian thriller set at sea, Caught Inside; and The Trip with a memorable turn from Steve Coogan, but too many funny voices and impressions for my liking.

Highlights from festival films, one-off screenings and DVDs: Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats; Amiel Courtin-Wilson's extraordinary Hail; John Curran's much maligned Stone; the already awarded Irananian drama A Separation; the beautiful documentary about Sydney dancer Tanja Liedke, Life in Movement; and the surprising and frank French drama set in a police child protection unit, Polisse. I was thrilled too, to see on the big screen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast - though the final scenes made me giggle at the now-dated special effects and costumes.

Heartbeats - from the precociously talented and beautiful Xavier Dolan

Greatest disappointments and bores: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Wim Wenders Pina (I know, controversial!). Also, went to sleep in Kung Fu Panda 2, The Hunter (should I admit that? Might get me fired) and The Cup. 

Here's to another year of films. Happy New Year!  

Rochelle Siemienowicz

Love, Lust & Lies

In 1976 Gillian Armstrong was a fresh young filmmaker just out of school. Commissioned by the South Australian Film Corporation to make a documentary about what it’s like to be a 14-year-old girl, she made Smokes and Lollies, a portrait of three naughty working class girls. Kerry, Josie and Diana proved to be funny, honest and spirited, and so a series of films were made, following them at 18, 26 and 33. Now the girls are 47-year-old women, and in some cases, they’re grandmothers. It’s been 14 years since we last caught up with them, and this instalment proves to be highly entertaining and revealing – as the title suggests.

Comparisons are bound to be made with the British 7-Up series, and it’s true there are similiar voyeuristic pleasures in seeing lives fast-forwarded and rewound. But Armstrong is warm and generous, with a unique focus on love, sex and mothering. She’s never condescending, even as she charts lives that have been constrained by early parenthood and lack of education. The resulting film is a beautiful and inspiring tribute to family, and to the universal yearning to create a better life for one’s children.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review appeared in #354 of The Big Issue, Australian edn.)

To read my interview with Gillian Armstrong at the Australian Film Institute click here.