Australian director/co-writer Jaydon Martin presents his debut feature, Flathead, a dramatized look at the real lives of two working-class men in the town of Bundaberg, Australia. We meet scrappy old-timer Cass Cumerford and his friend Andrew Wong, proprietor of a fish and chips shop. Alone in his 70s, Cass has returned to Bundaberg after years away. He is looking to rationalize a life that didn’t go as he’d hoped. Bad decisions haunt him, and the uncontrollable winds of fortune have brought Cass both joy and tragedy. He seems to be thinking about mortality now, as he gets an MRI and talks to doctors.
Then Cass turns to religion, meeting an evangelical preacher and getting baptized. In his 11th hour, he embarks on a quest to seek meaning, or perhaps to avoid damnation. Despite his late-life interest in the spiritual, he still loves to go to the bar to drink and smoke. Andrew runs the chippy he inherited from his father, which is up for sale, and spends his off time making weightlifting videos. He seems uncomfortable in the shop. He’s trying to honor his father’s work, but this is not his passion.
Flathead is in black and white (except for color in home video clips), giving it a clean, sophisticated look that keeps visual distractions to a minimum. This sets the tone to explore the austerity of life in Bundaberg and extends to the landscape. It is rough and rural, where blue-collar recreational activities don’t go much beyond drinking, smoking, watching fights outside the pub, and doing donuts in the mud in your ute (utility vehicle). The title of the film comes from the fish served in the chippy, a bottom-feeder metaphor for the modest lives shown. The soundtrack features ethereal gospel songs.
“Alone in his 70s, Cass has returned to Bundaberg after years away. He is looking to rationalize a life that didn’t go as he’d hoped.“
The film is described as “docufiction,” meant to present an authentic sketch of working-class Australian life. While we are not always seeing the real events, we are getting the concentrated essence. As author Neil Gaiman says about his mytho-poetic works: none of it happened, but all of it is true. Despite knowing this, Flathead feels like a documentary, so this approach is uncomfortable. The events are specific, not stylized parables, and they seem to be in situ moments depicted as Cinéma vérité. The viewer can’t tell how much of it is fiction.
This begs the question of how best to assess the film for a review. If this is a drama, then the script is dull, drags on, and lacks a denouement, but if we are seeing real people, we need to consider that life is not structured like a script. By muddying the distinction, is Martin trying to have it both ways? Perhaps he’s just not interested in what critics think (if so, then respect). Even though it’s semi-scripted, Martin has eschewed a traditional three-act structure and instead follows emotional waves to pull back the curtain on an unacknowledged way of life.
Landing somewhere in the middle, we can say we have journeyed with some version of both Cass and Andrew. How you feel about their experience is left to you. Their lives are either depressingly mundane and lacking in scope, or they are fully emotionally realized roads travelled by working-class folk in Bundaberg, and they would not want more. Beauty can be found even in these simple moments out here at the edge of the world.
Learn more at the official Flathead website.
"…beauty can be found in simple moments out here at the edge of the world."
