Burke And Wills

Synopsis: The adventures of Burke and Wills, not the famously incompetent  explorers who died in 1861 after having traversed Australia from south to north, but two young men sharing a house in inner suburban Sydney.

This self-funded labour of love from Oliver Torr and Matthew Zeremes who wrote, directed, produced and acted the leads is a clever film that is almost too clever for its own good. For much of its length it appears to be one of the many descendants of Kevin Smith’s 1994 classic slacker comedy Clerks, only not as good. But stick with it and it rewards the wait.

Kicking off with a convincing shouting match between a mother and daughter, we are introduced to Wills (Zeremes), an annoyingly self-preoccupied wanker (literally), who’s been leeching off his girlfriend (the aforementioned daughter, played by Elizabeth Richmond). Forced to find accommodation, he moves in with Burke (Torr), a slightly older and deeply reticent individual, who provides a sounding board for Wills’ seemingly endless ruminations on himself. This is the slacker part of the film. As is typically the case with such fare, unless you find witless time-wasting (sitting on a couch watching television, playing Monopoly, talking about your bowel movements and such like) and the just-out-of-the-nest fumblings of post-adolescents amusing, this is unpromising stuff, albeit harmless enough. 

About half-way through the film, however, Burke’s grandmother dies and this event and its aftermath which includes meeting up with his father, from whom he is grievously estranged, derails him. Rapidly his behaviour becomes aggressively dysfunctional, leading to a disastrous denouement. This strategy of shifting typological gears is a risky one and some will not like it but for me at least it worked, transforming the film from what it initially appears to be, a who-needs-yet-another-blokey-grunge-comedy about a couple of losers, to an empathetic tale of youthful alienation and emotional misadventure.

Made in 2003 in black and white on 16mm for a tiny budget but only released theatrically in Australia in 2007 after it managed to get selected for the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005, the film not only deserves attention for its genre-crunching headstand. Zeremes and Torr also show a good deal of skill in turning their budgetary limitations into an aesthetic positive, the black and white photography, novel camera angles, all-over-the-shop audio, jump-cut editing and simple one-guitar-plus-voice songs combining effectively to depict their protagonists’ tragic journey into No Man’s Land.

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