Last weekend our Arts Picturehouse showed 2 in its screenings of LAFF films, Noise directed by Matthew Saville and All of my Friends are Leaving Brisbane by Louise Alston with writer Stephen Vagg. These are two very different films. ‘All of My Friends’ is a banal and deeply uninteresting tale of the love lives of a group of young unattractive white professionals living in Brisbane. One of them, Michael, comes close to wry observations on yuppie Brisbane life and comes closest to being an interestingly drawn character. Where are the Asians, Greeks, Croatians or black people in Brisbane? Would it be possible to have some anchor points to political life in this city? I felt this film was attempting gentle satire on this group but offered the same love will have its way outcome that it might have been critiquing. Despite people around me laughing continually, I came out of this movie feeling frustrated.
Noise on the other hand was much more multilayered, equally rooted in Australian culture, this time set in Melbourne. Noise opens with us following a young woman onto an underground train carriage. She is wearing large headphones, keeping the noise in – or out maybe. Out of the corner of the camera’s eye we notice a passenger slump sideways and a few moments later we realise that everyone in the carriage is lying in pools of blood having just been murdered by a man we later meet. The central characters are this woman and a tired, jaded but interesting cop, Graham McGahan, who has tinnitus (reminding me of James Stewart’s trouble with vertigo in Hitchcock’s film about a cop and a woman involved in murder). Our hero is a misfit in the police force which is full of cynical ‘grown ups’ (officers) or wooden beat cops and in a difficult relationship with a woman he lives with – also a cop. Posted in a police caravan set up for the public to give information about another murder over a depressing Christmas Graham McGahan meets and talks to a local man whose fiance was one of the victims. He expounds a theory of death and destiny that we return to at the film’s end.
Noise seems to stand for a kind of isolation that both McGahan and the female witness of the murders are released from (even temporarily) to make contact with a reality around them and their own destinies. Everyone else seems caught up in incessant noise and miscommunication. In the final moments McGahan is bathed with the possibly transforming searchlight of a helicopter and also bathed in its noise.
Casting is startling in its inclusion of difference that is never made an explicit part of the plot but certainly part of its texture. In the opening a close up of an investigating woman cop shows she has a hare lip, one key witness has learning difficulties; even one of the murder victims in the train we see is in a wheelchair. The murderer, it turns out, can’t stand difference that he says is characterising his neighbourhood.