Review: Sydney Underground Film Festival Report, Day 2
DAY 2:
Maya Newell's documentary short, "Two"
Two (Maya Newell, Australia/UK)
Maya Newell’s Two is a short documentary that follows a 57-year old British man named Julian as he spends a weekend in an adult baby nursery to celebrate his 2nd birthday (for the 40th time).
I was introduced to the adult baby fetish by the pope of trash himself, John Waters. “This filthy world” was Waters’ comic monologue in which he discussed his life of trash, his filmmaking career and various other things that disgusted him. Despite the trashtastic content of many of Waters’ films including images of chicken fucking, shit eating, and the famous singing arsehole, adult babies are a fetish that Waters cannot handle. Newell’s documentary paints this fetish in a different light. What strikes me about Two is that it is not celebratory in its nature. It does not relish in the freakishness of this particular fetish, nor does it revel in exposing such taboo subject matter. From the outset Newell presents Julian as a man who has lost his way. The film actually opens with a shot of Julian driving to the nursery, speaking to the camera about his introduction to the adult baby world but constantly being interrupted by the cold voice of the GPS ‘recalculating, recalculating!’ his journey. One can imagine that this computerised woman who tells him where to go is perhaps one of few comforts for this man who yearns to regress to a state of infancy.
As Newell documents Julian’s weekend in the nursery, she noticeably shies away from money shots of feeding time and nappy changing, instead favouring overhead shots of Julian speaking to the camera as he lies in his crib — the bars acting as a barrier between this fragile soul and the ravenous audience.
Through these bars Julian tells the camera that if he was ever offered three wishes he would only need two. He would wish for his loving parents back and to be the age of two forever. Following this, the camera lingers on Julian as he rides a rocking horse on his birthday and we’re left wondering: in the hustle and bustle of contemporary adult society, the world of monotonous 9-5 employment and the stress of looming deadlines, where we have to maintain our homes and our selves in a particular socially acceptable manner, where we have to face the often painful realities of attempting to form relationships with others - who doesn’t want to be cared for? Who doesn’t yearn for a simpler life?
Hybristo Honeymooners (Victoria Waghorn, Australia)
Love is pain. Especially in hell.
Created in a mere 48 hours (with cast doubling as crew), Victoria Waghorn’s latest film Hybristo Honeymooners questions whether serial killers should be exempt from wedded bliss. Ultimately interrogating the idea of hybristophilia- being sexually aroused by people who have committed violent and/or gruesome crimes – the film opens in typical cliché wedding-film style with a shot of a car; its bumper declares ‘JUST MARRIED’. The twist: these newlyweds are psychopaths. The husband goes into a fit of ecstasy as he sniffs WD-40 before his murderous rampage. The wife, whose rapture is initially misread as fear, gets similar kicks out of being chained up as she waits for him. Their marriage is not consummated with sex as we might suspect, but with the violent murder of a ‘slant eyed’ woman. Through these variations on the idea of wedded bliss Waghorn’s film depicts a literal threat to normative heterosexual marriage.
The most arresting scene: A fairy winged bride masturbating to the sounds of her husband murdering their kidnapped victim. A sheep skull rests on her chest; its hollow eyes return the gaze of the audience. The woman climaxes, the film ends. This film is beautifully perverse.
Piss Film (Clare Ferra, Australia)
A love story between two freaks, their fish, a baby and some dolls.
Think of a scene in which a masked pervert straps a set of plastic breasts to his body, and simulates breast feeding a baby doll. This doll has the plastic body of a baby but its head consists of an orange with a set of confectionary teeth glued to it and a hole cut out to represent the mouth. Suckling noises commence. After a few minutes the pervert lifts the doll, cradles it and then returns it to the other breast.
Another scene: simulated sex between two dolls. One is simply a head with arms and legs sticky taped on, the other a knitted body with the head of one of the Teletubbies. The legs of the first doll are inserted into the Teletubby ring of desire (the strange antenna on its head) and this perverse sex act is complete.
The likeness between this film and Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers cannot be denied. Both films feature suburban wasteland, masked perverts and children’s toys that are perhaps symbolic of the normative gender roles imposed on today’s kids. However, where Piss Film differs from Trash Humpers is precisely where this film truly shines. The latter features a clearly identifiable narrative that focuses on a group of perverted elderly folk who roam the streets at night smashing technology and humping trash. The former is less narrative based and Ferra truly appears to celebrate the obliqueness of the subject matter between scenes.
Piss Film opens with a shot that sums up both the film and the attitude behind it: before any image we hear perverted laughter (think of that horribly memorable cackling from Trash Humpers), and this is coupled with an image of a fish on a string being dragged along a suburban footpath. At times the flapping of the fish head seems to coincide with the disturbing laughter and distorted mumbling. It seems that this fish itself is laughing at its predicament. Perhaps it is laughing at the audience for attending this film.
