One question sometimes asked of the Australian film industry comes straight from the lips of Heath Ledger’s Joker: “Why so serious?”
There’s a perception that locally made films designed to make us laugh are in short supply. Popular ones – smash hits such as The Castle, Kenny, Young Einstein and Crackerjack – tend to play broadly, intended for mass consumption.
But if comedies – which tend to target more specific adult demographics, such as political comedies – are like Aussie cinema’s four-leaf clovers, one of the reasons concerns turnaround time. Australian film-makers work with much longer development periods than Hollywood and run the risk if they make, say, a satire about a political system that regularly exchanges one prime minister for another that by the time the film gets through the pipelines it’s likely audiences will have moved on.
For his feature film debut, the director Michael James Rowland presumably, and quite rightly, figured discussion about refugees and asylum seekers wouldn’t be disappearing from the zeitgeist any time soon. Eight years down the track, Lucky Miles remains not just highly topical but a thoroughly distinctive film about foreigners coming to terms with the Australian landscape.
The premise is a bunch of Iraqi and Cambodian refugees on a rickety fishing boat make it onshore, landing somewhere in remote Western Australia. They are perplexed by the desolate landscape – “Where are these people, these Australians?” asks one – but have a blind faith they will be treated decently.
Most are caught quickly. The boat they arrived on sinks on the way back, forcing two shady people smugglers to return. One from each of the groups – Cambodian, Iraqi and the smugglers respectively – meet up and form a trio: Arun (Kenneth Moraleda), Youssif (Rodney Afif) and Ramelan (Sri Sacdpraseuth).
They evade capture but journey through the desert landscape with no comprehension of the distances involved. Frustrated back-and-forth banter cooked up by the screenwriters (Rowland and his co-writer, Helen Barnes) somehow finds freshness in constant reiterations of “where the hell are we?” The film is like Dude Where’s My Car? but in a bone-dry outback instead of a parking lot, with no car and very little hope.
The premise hardly rings of non-stop hilarity but Lucky Miles is surprisingly effective as a comedy, using the increasingly exasperated characters to draw regular laughs without looking down on them nor using their plight to push an overt message. When Arun stumbles on to a grubby outback shed, he enters and finds Youssif eating from a dirty can of fruit salad. “Welcome to paradise,” Youssif says, beautifully encapsulating the film’s dry whimsy.
The cinematographer, Geoff Burton (who shot The Sum of Us and Hotel Sorrento), resists the familiar arid, heavy, sun-kissed aesthetic, instead opting for a crisp and even autumnal look. On occasions the direction-challenged characters seems to reflect the structure of the film, which could have been sliced more judiciously in the editing room.
But mostly it’s a wonderful lark and highly original take on being lost in Australia. It’s not animals the characters need to worry about but the sheer size of the land and the existence of policy that doomed them well before they arrived. A tragic undertone lingers close to the surface but Rowland understands he doesn’t need to draw attention to it: it’s there, contextualising everything, but never getting in the way of the comedy.
