# Death in Brunswick (1991)

### reviewed by
Frank Maloney

                                 DEATH IN BRUNSWICK
                           A film review by Frank Maloney
                            Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney

DEATH IN BRUNSWICK is an Australian film directed by John Ruane, from a script by Ruane and Boyd Oxlade and adapted from a novel by Oxlade. It stars Sam Neill, Zoe Carides, Boric Brkic, John Clarke, and Yvonne Lawley. No rating, includes violence, nudity, graphic grave-digging scene.

DEATH IN BRUNSWICK is delightfully outrageous black comedy that was big box-office success in Australia and was nominated for a 1991 Australian Film Award. It played at the last Seattle International Film Festival where the reception was positive enough to encourage the film's North American distribution. This is its U.S. premiere in Seattle at the Metro Cinemas.

Brunswick is an ethnically-mixed, low-income suburb of Melbourne. It is the home to a middle-aged loser, Carl, whose has been psychologically mauled by his mum, nice, old Mrs. Fitzgerald, played menacingly by Yvonne Lawley (AMONG THE CINDERS). Carl is played by the chameleonic Sam Neill, who has held his own against such major scene stealers as Meryl Streep (CRY IN THE DARK) and Judy Davis (MY BRILLIANT CAREER). Neill is a master of timing and lifts the semiautobiographical story from the distasteful to a level of offbeat energy that redeems and illustrates its anarchic view of the world-as-loony-bin. Carl gets a job cooking at local dance club owned by a man who thinks his patrons deserved maggoty meat and cockroach-infested greengroceries. Carl immediately falls in love with a young bartender ("We all thought you were a pouf"), Sophie, played by Zoe Carides, and runs afoul of the cretinous, bullying bouncer. Carl's kitchen helper, Mustafa, played by Nico Lathouris, is more interested in dealing drugs and fencing boom boxes out the alley door than he is in scrubbing down the counters, but otherwise he's a mousy family man whose fate is more than the product of dumb luck than deserts.

In between ghoulish moments, Carl's life is lifted and then imperiled by his attraction to Sophie. They have a funny movie date at the Progress Cinema where the moppets around them are watching THE MARSUPIALS: HOWLING III when they're not jeering Sophie and Carl trying to make out. On the other hand, Mum is picking at him ("I know you think this is bohemian") mercilessly. Carl's mate, a gravedigger played by John Clarke, and Clarke have to deal with one of Carl's problems, but the generally drift of Carl's life by now is becoming rapidly more self-destructive than anyone else can stand. The final resolution of Carl's troubles to me means that he finally joined the nutsiness around him, that he finally gave up his quiet, desperate clinging to sanity and normality; in an insane world, only the sane are crazy.

This movie really tests the limits of good taste, but the first-time director, John Ruane, is too talented to let his movie slide over the edge. Ellery Ryan's cinematography is gritty and apt; the soundtrack sets an engaging mood from the beginning. It hard to like Carl, although he does redeem himself in a characteristically funky way. And the film does have a tendency to become a procession of increasingly outlandish incidents in the manner of AFTER HOURS and INTO THE NIGHT. But Ruane's wry humor and Carl's desperate unquenchability pull the film out of what could have been a tailspin.

I recommend DEATH IN BRUNSWICK to you if you get a chance to see it. Try to hold out for matinee prices; this film is too far from the mainstream to really justify mainstream prices.

    --
    Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney

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