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Australia 1987
Directed by
Jackie McKimmie
83 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
3 stars

Australian Dream

It would come as a small surprise if Jane Turner and Gina Riley, creators of the very successful television series, Kath & Kim (could Kim's name be an acknowledgement?) had seen this satire of Australian suburbia with Noni Hazlehurst as Dorothy, a sexually-frustrated housewife and Graeme Blundell as her terminally-deluded butcher husband.

Jackie McKimmie's feature film debut which she also wrote, pokes fun at her home state of Queensland, notorious at the time for its conservative, right-wing ethos and more generally, mind-numbing Australian suburban monotony. Whilst McKimmie's film does not work as well as strict comedy as the more caricatural quickfire gags of Kath & Kim and the more demanding format of the feature film highlights its technical shortcomings (it was shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm) it is for the most part entertaining and deserves credit as a relatively early attempt to use humour to expose the limitations of the Australian suburban paradise.

 

 

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