Erskineville Kings
Director: Alan White.
Cast: Marty Denniss, Hugh Jackman.
This is a rather straightforward film, focussing on the relationship between two brothers following the death of their father. It is set over one day, when Barky gets off the early morning train in Erskineville, an old decaying suburb of Sydney, having been doing rural odd jobs for the past few years. He tries to regain his place with the friends and places he hasn’t seen in a long time, but you get the impression he never fit in well to begin with. He and his older brother Wace are of quite different character, and they spend the film not reconciling on their different ways of coping with their family life. The filming is quite effective, with some good images of characters moving through a stationary frame of the run down streetscape or the even more run down King’s Hotel, though unsettling in that apart from the brothers and their mates, or more precisely, Wace’s mates, there is almost no-one else in the film, never anyone passing in the street or any other cars going by. Nothing much moves in Erskineville, there is very little in the way of resolution to the story. The film is obviously intended to be a realist look at the lives of some very ordinary people, but I found it lacked the something to make me able to relate to it. The acting and dialogue are a little stilted and artificial at times, and the whole film gives an overall sense of unchanging banality, which although it may be the intended effect, is somewhat unsatisfying. That said, this is not a bad effort.
u coping with their family life. Barky and his girlfriend he’d left behind and Wace and hiand and although it’s not a bad effort
people the main characters,
The film does indeed focus on the brothers, the only other relationship being between and the only other characters being Wace’s incidental VB-swilling mates.
Susan Love
