Silent Partner

Synopsis: Bill (Syd Brisbane) and John (David Field) are a couple of greyhound fanciers and born losers. When trainer Alex Silver offers John an opportunity to own his own dog he talks Bill into a partnership that promises to hold the key to their future. With no experience and more hope than brains, however,their pot of gold is further off than they imagined.

As an Australian film Silent Partner is relatively unusual in that it does not follow the well-worn approach of playing up the stereotypical cultural artefacts and idioms - there are some quietly amusing moments and the vernacular abounds but there are few of the endearing characteristics which would be appreciated by a home audience wishing to recognize itself, let alone an overseas market looking for familiar signs of our quaint eccentricities. Aside from the restrained reference to Sydney's mecca of dog racing, Wentworth Park, there is little in the way of contextualisation - the locations are few, devoid of recognisable features and much of the film is spent in Bill's kitchen, a veritable dump if ever there was one. In fact much care has been taken to create a visual equivalent for Bill and John's (in every sense) impoverished existence. Whether inside or out, the result is a colourless grubby world sustained by constant drinking. Like it or not, this is quite brilliantly done (one can virtually smell the Wentworth Park urinals).

This concentration on the two characters (there are no others), makes one feel, particularly in the kitchen scenes, very much like one is listening to the play (by David Keene) which provided the original text , the dialogue unfolding in a simple, and hence slightly contrived, statement-response-counter-response rhythm. The result is very much to foreground the universalities lying beneath the cultural specifics we witness. But just as the film avoids playing to the overtly comic it does not attempt to ennoble, but rather laconically describes the boys' feeble attempts to pick up some easy money. David Field (looking disconcertingly like Harry H. Corbett and with a strange Cockney-ish accent) and Syd Brisbane (equally disconcertingly looking like Stan Laurel) do a great job in portraying their sorry-ass characters, which although well-delineated are somewhat too mild-mannered to be realistic.

Although stylistically this somewhat is like an extended short film (there are a few different scenes which tend to repeat themselves rather than develop) and in combination with its resolute drabness it will not be likely to win much box-office success, for anyone interested in Australian cinema, it is a worthy piece of film-making that in all departments (writing, acting, photography, direction etc) displays solid craftsmanship. If I have one reservation it's the incongruous blue-grass soundtrack and Paul Kelly's overly literal American country-style songs.

 

 

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