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AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
BLESSED (2009)
Screen Australia / Film Victoria
d. Ana Kokkinos; pr. Al Clark; scr. Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas; ph. Geoff Burton; ed. Jill Bilcock; m. Cezary Skubiszewski; cast. Frances O'Connor, Miranda Otto, Deborra-Lee Furness, Victoria Haralabidou, William McInnes, Sophie Lowe, Tasma Walton (113 mins)
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ORIGINAL MOVIE POSTER
Mothers, Daughters & the Multi-Character Mosaic
The new Australian film Blessed hinges on one irony in the relationship between mothers and their children: specifically the notion that children are a blessing from God and that a mother has been truly divinely entrusted with the responsibility of raising a new life.
However, the film is structured so as to subvert this rather romantic Christian notion of familial responsibility in a study of socio-economically ravaged, welfare dependent lower Australia (actually western Melbourne). Expertly directed by Ana Kokkinos the film takes material that had been reduced to mindless, execrable conformity in the dire Sarah Watt film My Year Without Sex and makes the subject of inner-urban generational turmoil seem vivid, dynamic and, finally, despairingly tragic.
PREVIEW
Blessed is Australian drama based in award-winning theatre - the play Who's Afraid of the Working Class initially commissioned by the Melbourne Workers' Theatre some 13 years ago to explore the socio-economic crisis' impact on inter-personal mother-child bonds - and unfolds in this screen adaptation with rare grit, courage and ambiguity in its treatment of maternal responsibility and youthful angst. Kokkinos has tackled adolescent sexuality and independence in previous films (Only the Brave, Head On, The Book of Revelation) but here looks to the subject of maternal responsibility and the consequences of such behaviour upon children and adolescents, handling a multi-character, multi-layered narrative with the complexity and skill that such directors as American Paul Thomas Anderson have in such as Magnolia.
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Slicing Through the Rhetoric of "Family Values" in Australia
Set in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Blessed offers a cross-section of some dozen characters in two parts.
The first part concentrates on the lives of seemingly directionless and unloved children pushed into rebellion, crime and driven to run away from home. The second part turns to the mothers, re-staging some scenes and elaborating new scenarios from the point of view of the mothers as they deal (or not) with their wayward children. In this way, the horrendous reality and attitude of these children is revealed to originate in failed inter-personal relationships with their mothers, who emerge as just as vulenrable to their miserable circumstance as their children - there is no easy answer here, and no blame, director Kokkinos admitting:
"one of the ideas running through the film is that we all have to look like who we are, or society will irretrievably break down. That's a really potent idea; we often judge a book by its cover, but if you delve deeper into what is really happening to a person, you're going to find that their heart is ticking in the same way that yours and mine is. It's about letting go of judgements and prejudices." (Film Ink, Sept. 2009, p. 73)
The myth of Australian “family values” is dissected by Kokkinos and found a shallow and tragic irrelevance, flawed at its very core. Indeed, “family values” here are non-existent in their traditional sense except as an offscreen standard found wanting in comparison to the social reality of the lives under scrutiny:: children run away from home, mothers seem indifferent to their children (in the children’s eyes) but must cope with the pressures of economic hardship and advancing age (the women here are in their 30s and 40s and face the burden of mortality upon their psyche and their bodies) to the point where many of them can barely conceal their vulnerability beneath their weary or stubborn facades. The Australian family (as depicted with such bourgeois, banal and boring conformity in My Year Without Sex) is an illusion – there is no such thing in Australia as “family values”.
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Despair, Pathos & the Failure of Australian Socialization
Drenched in a desperate pathos, Blessed is unrelenting in its despair. The compassion that Kokkinos maintains for her characters ensures that the film maintains a kind of detached but empathetic pity for its characters, all of whom are victims of circumstance: a bleak Australian naturalism infecting this film.
Economic pressure, individual identity and maternal responsibility act upon individual women and children in different ways and the cross-section of characters displayed here, all recognizably Aussie, avoid caricature in the veracity of the performances, most notably Frances O’Connor, who returned to Australia for the role after spending several years abroad. Beginning with a profile of the disaffected children, Blessed explores the issue of youthful identity within malfunctioning maternal-parental bonds. Children can only gauge their mothers (and their mothers’ love) through the appearance and interaction they are given by the mother. Thus, they only ever receive a part of the complete story and react accordingly - their reactions and interaction with their peers creating expectations about the mothers which the second section of the film undercuts and inverts for a rare balance of humanist empathy. The first part of the story thus functions to present the children as troubled and desperate, driven to crime in the drive to rebel and be independent against the parental pressures they feel do not relate to them as individuals: these children often despise their mothers and bring their resentment into the cause and effect of petty crime.
Correspondingly, the mothers are often so wrapped up in their own financial pressures or selfish concern with themselves that they are losing contact and communication with their children. Often unaware of the impression they give, they struggle as best they can, maintaining a pride in their role even though - as in O'Connor's case - they may be inadequately prepared and socialized themselves to deal with such family pressures.
It is this gap in inter-personal communication which destroys the relationships between mothers and children. In a culture which lacks educational instruction as does this depiction of lower socio-economic Australia, inter-personal relationships are based on individual codes of maternal identity, with children forced into a reactive stance, rebelling against what they consider a lack of empathy, love and understanding. This is typified in the relationship between O’Connor (pregnant again) and her children: it is she who says that children are her blessings and yet she is so pitiful as a mother that she already has children in foster care and two runaways whose horrendous fate almost destroys her as a human being, forcing her to react as best she can to try and escape the desperate trap of her sociological circumstance and welfare dependence. But, there is no escape from this world except perhaps in death.
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Humanist Failure and Self-Loathing in "the Clever Country"
ANA KOKKINOS INTERVIEW
There are various sub-plots in Blessed, evocative even of the plight of the “stolen generation” in the story of an Aboriginal man raised by a white mother. Yet, loss, desperation and the lack of communication underlie Blessed, making for a depiction of Australia which is devastating in its sense of familial chaos.
Humanity and specifically femininity are too complex for simple categorization under the rubric of “family values” as maintained by such political parties as the Christian Democrats and Family First. In this, Blessed exposes the sad complexity of mother-child relations in such a way as to reflect on what Kokkinos suggests but never states – the failure of Australian values to produce a valid socialization process to ensure the stability of the family home and the development of a stable and responsible adolescent psychology amongst those who live in lower socio-economic environs. Behaviourally, Blessed ironically inverts its title and presents a harrowing, ironic vision in which Australian humanity is empty.
Blessed is ultimately a film about Australian failure which mocks the country’s oft-quoted references to itself as “the lucky country” and “the clever country” – as Blessed reveals, Australia is neither: it is a land of emotional desolation in which humanity is troubled, scarred and slowly perishing in relentless despair and/or escapist fantasy (hence the false hope the pokies provide one mother – Miranda Otto).
The cross-section of characters, mothers and children, and the structural device of showing the children’s view before that of the mothers suggests that the fundamental problem in such lower socio-economic Australian familial situations is a lack of proper communication and associated socialization. Presented with the appearance of indifference, these children act as if the future is irrelevant: confused, they react with desperation, seeking an individuality that is found only in criminal rebellion, defiance, suicide and death. Australia as a nation has rarely been as affectingly desolate as depicted in Blessed, the latest in a trend within Australian cinema to expose the façade of “Australian values” so beloved of the former Howard era. On her part, director Kokkinos concluded after the film's premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival: "I'm trying to... connect with audiences on a deeper level. I want to make them feel things. I want them to think about things rather than having the experience of going to watch a film and walking out of the cinema, literally forgetting about the film the moment you walk out the door." (Film Ink, Sept. 2009, p. 73)
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