On Tuesday I met up with my elusive journalist friend, Madeleine, who has just bought a house in the next suburb. She told me about the auction process (the way most houses are sold in this area). She and her partner were one of four couples bidding, but the auction is staged in the street outside the property, and over 60 people had turned up just to watch. At their sale, the bidding didn’t reach the reserve, but as they’d made the highest offer, they was taken inside to negotiate an agreeable price, and 45 minutes later, they handed over a 10% deposit and the house was theirs – and that was that, there is no cooling off period. It sounds terrifying (as was the price that they paid!).
In the evening I joined Rachel at the Elsternwick cinema, to see the film ‘The Other Son’. Based on a true story, it was about two families who discover by chance that their 18-year-old sons had been mistakenly switched at birth by hospital staff. And one family happens to be Israeli, the other Palestinian. Although a little obvious in places (the two sons completely took after their biological families, not the ones they’d grown up in), it was an impressively unsensational film, full of well-observed and telling details.
Wednesday was a cool grey day, which started with a run round the perimeter of the Botanical Gardens – we were meant to do it twice, but I only managed one circuit (3.5km) before my bad knee kicked in. I did it in 20 minutes though, which wasn’t so bad! Maisie and I walked back through Albert Park in the rain, and there were so many wonderful birds. A flock of pelicans were sieving the lake for food with their big floppy pink beaks – a rare sight as you usually only see them in the distance circling out to sea. There were also parrots – white corellas with brilliant blue eyes and blush-pink heads, and salmon/grey galahs. And various types of cormorants, flocks of tiny grey crakes, purple swamphens (black with brilliant indigo chests), lapwings, ducks, swifts and swallows.
Another Indonesian film in the evening, ‘Love but different’, about the impossible love affair between a young Sumatran Christian girl and a Muslim Javanese chef, who meet in Jakarta. Although it had a serious point to make, it was culturally adrift, clumsily aping a Western teen movie. She was a Fame-type contemporary dancer (the routines she performed were excrutiating!), he worked in a Gordon-Ramsey-style Italian establishment (‘yes chef’!) and their rigid traditional families were comedic.
The weather on Thursday was beautiful – in the morning the sea was like turquoise glass, more brilliant than the sky. We went down to the beach in the afternoon, the sun a blinding white glow reflected back by the sea, as it gradually sank towards the horizon. Maisie was happy just to sit and watch the world go by. And there were some interesting things to see – including a guy on horseback trotting along the promenade dressed in a full Mexican cowboy outfit with huge-brimmed black and silver hat. He’s a local character we’ve read about in the paper – apparently various people would like to stop him roaming the streets on his horse, but there are no bylaws that can prevent him doing this!
On Friday evening I caught a new Thai film at ACMI. With the catchy title of ‘In April the following year, there was a fire’, it was a meandering autobiographical feature framed round Camus’ four stated conditions of happiness (life in the open air; love for another being; freedom from ambition; creation). A young engineer (the film-maker) loses his Bangkok job and returns home to the quiet of the countryside to pursue his passion for film-making and discover what it was that shaped his family’s course in life. It was a lovely film, meditative but not offputtingly mystical. On my way home I spotted the glass-baubled deer glowing through the glass wall of the NGV.
My Saturday afternoon escape was to a showing of a forgotten 1950s musical entitled ‘Les Girls’, starring an ageing Gene Kelly, with music by Cole Porter. It was a clever story (apparently based on the strucutre of Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’) about a libel court case, where three completely different accounts (told in flashback) are given of the same events. The story is of three showgirls and their lascivious (or not?!) co-star and manager and it was full of smart quips, dashing dance moves and gorgeous costumes. It was a treat to see such a lavish and colourful production on a huge screen.
Out in Federation Square, a large crowd was gathering for the opening spectacle of the second Melbourne Indian Film Festival (a big deal, with several multiplex cincmas involved and free open-air showings of classics). The event was a Bollywood Dance competition, judged by top choreographer Farah Khan, director Kabir Khan, and ‘India’s Michael Jackson'(!) Prabhudeva. Everyone was very excited (lots of families and young people, mainly of Indian origin), and armed with banners handily provided by the sponsors, which were waved enthusiastically at the end of each act. The competition was open to anyone, so it was a charming mix of wonderfully polished dance-school numbers and brave stars of their own bedrooms. Popular acts included a transvestite comedy rendition of a 1960s lovelorn classic, a chubby young guy doing his best Akshay Kumar moves (one of Bollywood’s worst dancers, and my least favourite as he never fails to look and act like an accountant!), and a slickly choerographed super-high-energy bevy of pre-teens in silver and aqua sequins. The host of the evening, a slight, heavily pregnant lady insisted on asking the judges what they thought of each performance, and their answers were always supremely diplomatic.
On Sunday we discovered an interesting commercial art gallery at the heart of our favourite Melbourne shopping mall, the QV – so yet another excuse to go there, if Big W (Australia’s equivalent of Argos), and the Asian food court (cheap sushi, paper rolls, bubble tea and green tea flavour iced yoghurt) weren’t enough. The exhibition was of work by the Designer’s Republic, graphic designers active in the 1990s with a Japanese/technological bent, who are known for their work with Warp records and a number of pop/electronica bands. It was a striking collection of bright spiky images in a grey concrete space, being admired by monochrome-clad visitors. Maisie was in a foul mood, so it was hard work to have a proper look at any of it! We went on to Federation Square, where there was an exhibition of temporary shelters for disaster areas designed by well-regarded Australian architects. There were two types of project – those that were designed to be constructed out of any surviving materials – sheets of corrugated metal, plastic piping, fabric remnants, plastic bags, earth etc., and those that were flatpacked to be parachuted in. I was impressed by one that was sort of like a stack of wooden boxes – it was tall and solid, with an architectural form which included a tower, making it distinctive and helpful to navigate by (it reminded me of the beacon towers that were successfully introduced in a Soweto township to help make sater routes across them). An igloo made of plastic bags full of earth was a nice (and cleverly soundproof) idea, but perhaps not quick to erect.
I went on to the Kino cinema to see the Danish film ‘The Hunt’, concerning frightened children and a horribly insular rural community. It starred Mads Mikkelson, an immensely successful (and impressive) but very strange-looking actor, as a man viciously persecuted by this community when he is (wrongly) suspected of abusing a lonely young girl. It was an unnerving watch, extreme but always plausible. It reminded me of Michael Haneke’s ‘The White Ribbon’ (although that’s almost too hard to watch, whilst being utterly brilliant!).
Monday was another stunning autumn day. I met up with Sally in the magnificent Fitzroy Gardens, where Maisie ran as far away as she could, swishing through the crispy brown leaves, and a bleary-eyed Iggy kept tight hold of his mum, refusing to smile and refusing to sleep. But the gentle warmth and rays of white-gold sunshine flickering through the tree branches made that a little more bearable for Sally.
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