Bondi Tsunami

Synopsis: Four young Japanese visit Australia on a surfing holiday that takes them from Bondi Beach to Queensland’s golden shores.

Zen is in the air, or at least on our cinema screens. Gus Van Sant’s Gerry gives us a minimalist image of being and nothingness whilst David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees swings in the opposite direction with a busy talkfest about meaning and meaninglessness. It is too glib to say that Bondi Tsunami hovers somewhere in between but if you liked either of those films you should make the effort to see this remarkable debut feature during its short theatrical run.

Bondi Tsunami was written and directed by Rachel Lucas (who also did the costume design and wrote some of the music) on a $AUD150,000 budget and shot on digicam (once again by Ms Lucas). It is being self-distributed in the form of a round-Australia road tour. It is arguably the best Australian film of the year.

Film-making in Australia is traditionally a government-funded affair. Not everyone can wait that long or has the right connections and some decide to go it alone. Anyone who has seen Gary Doust’s excellent documentary Making Venus (2003) which took us deep into horror of credit card film-making knows how death-defying this plunge can be. Whilst that project never made it to our screens, this year we did see one independently-financed film, The Crop. Well you probably didn’t, unless you were a family member of its prime mover, George Elliot. It was a gutsy effort but the best you could say was that he got if off his chest and hope that he felt the money was well spent as therapy.

What distinguishes Bondi Tsunami from these sad tales and indeed from many government-funded films, is that it has an original idea. This is in itself an achievement but the fact that it is cleverly-articulated and very well-made, especially so considering its budgetary constraints, is, of course, what makes it a good film. With a good degree of accuracy the self-marketing touts the film as a “music video motion picture” but don't worry. The film is a series of loosely connected vignettes set to different pieces of music and enhanced with funky digital editing and graphic effects but it has sufficient wit to carry it well beyond and hour-and-a-half of MTV video clips.

I wasn’t able to take in much of the orientalist philosophising that the taciturn Shark enunciates periodically in halting sentences of broken English. Although I’m not sure that they mean anything (as they also appear as English sub-titles one might think that they did) they are an effective counterpoint to the often dead-pan humour of the storyline and simultaneously set a context for the road trip, giving it a frame of reference which is reinforced by the fact that there are no other characters than our four young adventurers. This was a brave gambit. The conventional strategy in this situation, as we have seen from Heaven’s Burning (1997) to The Goddess of 1967 (2001) to Japanese Story (2003) is to couple the Japanese stranger with a local buddy and carry the narrative along by their dialogic interplay. Lucas separates her characters hermetically from the landscape and culture which they are traversing. It is a strategy which works brilliantly. Here her casting is extraordinarily judicious. All four cast members, Taki Abe, Keita Abe, Miki Sasaki and Nobu-Hisa Ikeda, are compelling presences. The beauty of well-defined young bodies, the interplay of humour and philosophical abstraction, the energetic soundtrack and the fluid collage of visuals work together to create an experience that stands out in Australian film and bodes well for its future.

I have only one criticism and that is that the film is a little too long. There is a point near the end that returns to the opening shot of a close up of Shark’s face. The rhythm of the film suggests that is where it should have finished but it continues for another 10 minutes or so only serving to outstay its welcome as a very entertaining guest.

Bondi Tsunami is a film for those at home outside the square. Whether it becomes a cult classic, as its makers hope, remains to be seen. It certainly has the right credentials.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?