WEST OF SUNSHINE
M, 78 minutes
Damian Hill in West of Sunshine.
★★★
Melbourne director Jason Raftopoulos shot this, his first feature, in 18 days with Vittorio De Sica's neo-realistic classic The Bicycle Thief as his model.
Damian Hill and real-life stepson Ty Perham.
It's an extreme example of bare bones filmmaking – independently funded, with cast and crew deferring their fees, and it's done pretty well for Raftopoulos so far. Its opening this week follows swiftly on its screening at the Melbourne Film Festival and its premiere was held at the last Venice Film Festival, where it was rewarded with a prolonged ovation.
It could well have been shot in Sunshine, the western Melbourne suburb known for its migrant communities and working class history, but Sunshine, says Raftopoulos, is a metaphorical destination where the sun never sets and all hopes are eventually fulfilled. Somewhere over the rainbow, in other words, and it's beginning to look as if Jim (Damian Hill), a delivery driver with a gambling problem, has no chance of ever reaching it.
The local loan shark wants his money by the end of the day or else, and Jim has to keep on driving or lose his job. His marriage is already in tatters and he's just realised that he has promised to look after his young son Alex (Ty Perham), who's on holiday from school. Alex views this arrangement with a complete lack of enthusiasm and as he watches his father bumble through the morning, he becomes an increasingly scornful presence in the front seat.
They're in Jim's beloved vintage car, which he's inherited from the father who abandoned him during his own childhood. He's been forced to use it on his delivery rounds because he's arrived at work too late to get one of the company's vans, and you don't have to be particularly prescient to see that he and the car have little chance of a stable future together.
It doesn't take too much effort to envisage the direction of the whole storyline. You've seen its like before – down to the midpoint reversal of fortune which has Jim's hopes rise before plummeting again to leave him in even more dire straits. So you have to forget about plot.
Instead, Raftopoulos is concentrating on the small truths to be found in Jim's frantic encounters as he tries to call in favours from friends and acquaintances, becoming more desperate each time. He's elaborating on a theme he's already explored in the much-admired short film Father's Day, and non-actors mingle with familiar faces. Kat Stewart plays one of Jim's old girlfriends, who's now running a drug courier service, and Arthur Angel is his best friend, Steve, who looks on, worried but helpless, as he falls further down the hole he's created for himself.
It's an innately frustrating scenario and you need an actor of great charm to keep you caring. A bracing shot of black humour can help, but there's no sign of that here. The tone is earnest and wistful and Raftopoulos is so intent on extracting atmosphere from Melbourne's back streets that the driving scenes finally brought me to my own point of desperation, the most urgent question being: "Are we there yet?"
Things improve when father and son begin to engage with one another. Twelve-year-old Perham, who happens to be Hill's stepson, had never acted before but, like so many children on screen these days, he has no affectations. And Hill responds to him with a warmth that invests his own performance with some much needed subtlety. Up to this point, he's been a man governed solely by the survival instinct.
The film realises Raftopoulos's desire to deliver a film that looks as if it's been distilled from reality but in this instance, naturalism isn't enough. The judicious injection of a sense of heightened drama could have made all the difference.
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