Australian writer-director James Vaughan’s debut feature is a strange exercise in tone and atmosphere. For sure, there are characters who wander around and do stuff – but almost nothing of consequence happens. This film is almost aggressively deadpan and oblique, to a degree that’s almost admirable so long as you feel it’s worth spending 82 minutes of your time watching a cinematic experiment. As one of the characters, a videographer in his 20s named Ray (Fergus Wilson), says about his work: “It’s all real, unless none of it is. It’s all smoke and mirrors.” Indeed, Smoke and Mirrors would be just as good a title, and about as randomly appropriate as the generic title it has already.
In the early section, Ray wanders around Sydney with a young woman named Alice (Emma Diaz) he seems to barely know, and on a whim they end up camping together in the bush. At the campsite, they meet a recently widowed man and his young daughter, and the dad offers up a wry monologue on the decline of Australian cultural life. A little bit of awkward fumbling between Alice and Ray fails to blossom into sex, and then the scene shifts swiftly back to Sydney. Some time seems to have passed and Ray and a friend have car trouble. They find themselves in a wealthy part of town full of art-stuffed villas for a job interview with a family who want Ray and his buddy to film the wedding of the eldest daughter (Amelia Conway). A neighbour is playing droning atonal music that makes the whole interaction feel like a horror movie before the gory part kicks in. And yet nothing happens, although the camera, as if guided by Ray’s viewpoint, does delight in zooming in on the shapely buttocks of women in the scene or even marble statues.
Meanwhile, there’s an undertow theme about Australian history and colonialism, but like Alice and Ray’s romance, or Ray’s car’s engine, that sort of splutters and dies away. The way Vaughan and his team film and edit the movie, using lots of still long takes, suggests we’re either supposed to think it’s all comic or profound. In the end it’s neither, but not uninteresting.
• Friends and Strangers is available on 10 November on Mubi in the UK and screens at the Sydney film festival.
