The Rage in Placid Lake
Directed by Tony McNamara
Starring Ben Lee, Rose Byrne
The name of this film is unfortunate, as I imagined it to be a sequel to, or at least in the vein of Lake Placid, but it certainly is not. The Rage in Placid Lake is a funny and engaging Australian movie centred around the life of Placid Lake (Ben Lee), progeny of insuperable hippy parents (Garry MacDonald and Miranda Richardson), who taught him to be eternally calm and accepting, and to see the good in every situation.
Placid was then thrust into a typical Australian schoolyard wearing a frilly white dress to ‘challenge their (ordinary folks) ideas of gender specification’. The tension between the expectations of his parents, and the realities of life lead to a crisis, where Placid decided to give up the good fight and go with the flow, for is their a point being who you are if that person is despised by society? A plan for happiness is embraced and a future in insurance, and corporate climbing begins.
The film shows the nature of rebellion aptly, and applies it to the rejection of unreasonable expectations rather than a limiting future, which is the treatment usually given to such subject matter. At the same time, it is not exactly a new idea; it is basically a protracted expression of the Monty Python skit of the poet’s son leaving to become a miner. Still, it shows vice in all its incantations, but is light enough not to get bogged down in it, and in the spirit of a coming of age film the conclusion is satisfactory.
The film deals succinctly with a number of themes, and uses an interesting method of working exclusively with caricatures to avoid singularising the message. It is a witty social commentary comedy of a high calibre and was voted most popular film at the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival. Co-starring Rose Byrne, it is perhaps the best Australian film since Two Hands.
Odin
