Mullet
Directed by David Caesar.
Starring Ben Mendlesohn, Susie Porter & Andrew S. Gilbert.
Eddie ‘Mullet’ Maloney (Mendlesohn) returns to his hometown, the southern New South Wales fishing port of Coollowarra, three years after leaving without explanation. The biggest change in that time is that his ex-girlfriend Tulley (Porter) has married his brother and town cop Peter (Gilbert in an outstanding performance). Mullet’s natural talent for getting under people’s skin serves to bring latent tensions to a head.
The mullet reappears constantly as a metaphor for the unwanted, but the story is basically about the impossibility of integrating into a society on one’s own terms, and the difficulty of communication, the gap between a feeling, its articulation and expression. Mullet’s reappearance makes Peter and Tulley’s ordinary domestic incommunicativeness close to self-destructive. There is a moving scene where Tulley sings slumped against the kitchen wall while Peter packs for work: he doesn’t react, not because he is ignoring her or is callous but because he doesn’t know what, if anything, she expects him to do. His “You all right?” is both woefully inexpressive and speaks volumes.
The film starts with some contrived earthy ocker Sea Change-like banter but fortunately ditches this cliché and finds its own medium fairly quickly. The narration also thankfully doesn’t last long: its gist is that ‘this story is different from normal stories about country towns’ so it’s patronising as well as unnecessary — I can form my own opinion about its qualities, thanks very much. My opinion is that it’s not massively original and I spent a fair bit of time wondering what the point was. This might be because Mullet is the made the central character though Tulley’s and Peter’s relationship is actually the central feature. It’s a relationship film and a this-is-Australia film so it’s not ground-breaking but it does succeed in a modest way.
Guy
