Screen Machine

Review: Love, Lust and Lies

Love, Lust and Lies is a new installment in Gillian Armstrong’s documentary series centered on the lives of three working class Adelaide women. Like Michael Apted’s Seven Up series, the film concentrates on specific moments in the lives of its subjects, starting at age 14 and concluding at around age 50. The documentary reflects Armstrong’s pervading interest in femininity. It offers an investigation into the conflicts which can be experienced in familial relationships and motherhood, as well as exploring matters of sexuality and emotional development. These are themes which are consistently examined in her feature films including Little Women, (1994) Charlotte Gray (2001) and My Brilliant Career (1979). Unlike the aesthetic dynamism found in her approach to the feature film, Armstrong resists experimenting with the aesthetic potentials of the documentary genre. Instead Love, Lust and Lies is a film which – although captivating for its revealing interview material, is a simple rehashing of the industrial codifications of the documentary. The result is a rather banal film that fails to produce any poetic justice to the themes the documentary explores.

By conforming to the preconceived notion of the documentary, a so-called realist mode of viewing, Armstrong has produced a film which is largely non-cinematic, conformist and dull. The women’s struggle for social power, particularly within the family unit – as well as concepts of female sexuality are codified, stereotyped and made cliché because the film is constructed so banally. In fact, this is one of the remaining documentaries to receive funding from Screen Australia for cinematic release. The majority of documentaries produced in Australia today are intended for release on television only. Yet even made-for-TV documentaries experiment and pervert the industrial construct of the documentary. As discussed in his article on the subject in Screen, John Corner exposes the potentials of aesthetic pleasure in the voyeuristic snap-shot the documentary produces. Truth is found, not through the typical interview process, but through candid moments of discussion, the interviewees’ body language and the framing of the body.

The potential for documentary film to combine strong aesthetic values with nonfiction representation has been realised by many great filmmakers since the 1970s. Examples include the work of James Benning as well as works such as Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite (1980) and Kiarostami’s Five: Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu (2003). These are films which convey the sensual pleasures that can be found in looking, combined with a telling or revelation about the state of things. Corner outlines the potentials of the documentary film to exist well beyond the industrial conventions. “Its fusing of the reality of world with the motivation of imaginative design is often stimulating in its bringing together of recognition with kinds of ‘making strange’ or, less radically, what we might just call ‘re-seeing’”. In this sense, Armstrong had enormous possibility to produce a film which was both a representation of the lives of these three women, as well as being aesthetically rich. Unfortunately it appears Armstrong virtually ignored this opportunity and thus produced a film completely bound by the industrial format of the documentary film.

Overall, it must be said that despite its audiovisual banality, the film is quite enjoyable. Archival footage from Armstrong’s previous documentary films, in conjunction with photographic stills from the women’s past, all work to provide a marvellous display of the kinds of lives these working class women have led, from adolescence until adulthood. The film is at its best when Armstrong relaxes the documentary conventions and projects candid images of the women in their day-to-day existence. The interviews are generally filmed in close-up, which works wonderfully on the cinema screen. Armstrong is, at times, excellent with body language and facial expression. In this sense, the film is a delight to watch. It is aesthetically pleasing to view the lives and emotions of these women. They have lived difficult, turbulent lives but reveal themselves with such honesty; one cannot help but be in admiration and awe. Diana’s sharp and lively personality juxtaposed with Josie’s bubbly, kind hearted spirit and Kerry’s warm, even tempered soul are delightful to discover and analyse through Armstrong’s crafted visions of their everyday lives. However, when the camera turns back to a constructed, documentary mode – the film loses its beautiful quality. The pleasure of the gaze is quickly lost because Armstrong conforms to superficial documentary conventions.

Moreover, the film is saturated with Armstrong’s sentimentality. Inter-titles, which profusely thank their involvement throughout the course of production, consume the screen. The tacky fonts and amateur dissolves between sentences detract from the beautiful insight the film offers. The result is something akin to Clara Law’s Letters to Ali, another film which relied too heavily on subjective input and poorly used inter-titles to explain content in the film. In both cases, the filmmaker has ignored the documentary’s potential. Too often, Armstrong places herself or her voice in the film. Toward the end, Armstrong sits square in front of the camera, with the women on either side. They share a glass of champagne and celebrate the fulfillment the filmmaking process has provided them. The result of this hugely subjective display is a forced separation between the viewer and the scopic pleasures of looking provided by previous sequences. Armstrong reinforces this separation with a clichéd questioning of the women, “What have you learnt about love?” She asks. The women respond with stereotypical answers to this convoluted question. These sequences cloud the otherwise wonderful beauty of the film.

A film which succeeds in reworking the documentary form and thus provides an invaluable insight into the lives of women is Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite. It is a beautifully poetic film on the subject of conflict, choices, abuse and motherhood. The film combines poetic clips of home movie footage with two actors staging interviews that were previously held with over 40 women. Like all documentaries, the content is staged, subjectified, changed, altered, re-perceived and perceived again. Citron is aware of the way the spectator perceives nonfiction footage and crafts a wonderfully scripted piece on the struggles of womanhood. Love, Lust and Lies is Daughter Rite’s poor cousin. Overall, Daughter Rite is successful because it does not build toward a general conclusion or point – a mainstay of the documentary film. Instead it focuses only on the pleasure of looking, understanding and comprehending the lives of others. In Keith Beattie’s book on the genre, Documentary Display, he argues that the most successful documentaries are those which combine representation and aesthetic value. It must be, “an active process of representation, which contrasts with a (direct cinema) observationalism that is capable of verging on the passivity of surveillance footage. The various stylings result in works which produce a viewing experience which is captivating, exciting and pleasurable”.

The question is then: “Should one bother to see this film?” The answer: Absolutely. But not without having first seen Daughter Rite.

(Writers note: For Melbourne Uni and RMIT students – a rather scratchy VHS copy of Daughter Rite is available at your university library).

Lauren is a PhD student in Film & Television studies at Monash University, specialising in the representation of pregnancy in cinema.

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