Deep currents of joy and grief, love and loss flow through Flathead, Australian director Jaydon Martin’s lightly fictionalised documentary set in and around the small city of Bundaberg in Queensland. Mostly shot in starkly beautiful monochrome, with sparing detours into colour, Martin’s impressively confident debut feature is part intimate character study, part observational road movie and part free-form poetic reverie. It world premieres this week in the Tiger Competition section in Rotterdam, where it looks sure to generate positive reviews, further festival bookings and potential sales interest.
Martin opens Flathead with a brief explanatory note about agricultural workers in Australia’s rural regions pushing up the cost of living in its cities, and concludes with an earnest dedication to “the Working Class, Migrant and Indentured Workers of Australia”. This framing device sets up expectations of a far more austere, politically engaged film than the impressionistic montage movie that unfolds between these two credits. Admittedly there are brief scenes depicting agribusiness factory workers, mostly from immigrant families, but these feel like incidental details in a broader, more diffuse narrative.
Named after a fish widely caught and eaten in Australia, Flathead is notionally an ensemble portrait of a small community, but two characters dominate. The prime protagonist is Cass Cumerford, a scrawny, laconic widower in his seventies who maintains a genial demeanour and a relentless chain-smoking habit despite serious health problems and a colourful life story peppered with tragedy. In his youth, Cass and his late wife developed speed and heroin addictions because, he explains with typically dry Aussie humour, “we had no other hobbies”.
After leaving the city and returning to his native Bundaberg, Cass now appears to live in a tumbledown trailer in the middle of a dusty field. Perhaps feeling the weight of his own mortality, he is also exploring different religions, attending a born-again Christian church one week, a Buddhist body-cleansing ritual the next. Garrulous and funny, Cass is a natural on screen, at ease with voyeuristic cameras, whether stripping naked or sharing painful memories. A cosmic clown laughing in the face of an absurd, tragicomic universe, he could almost have stepped out of a Samuel Beckett play.
The other main player in Flathead is Andrew Wong, a second-generation Chinese immigrant who works at one of Bundaberg’s fish and chip restaurant, with a sideline making fitness and life-coach video for online broadcast. Andrew’s father Kent owns the restaurant and dies during the shoot. Martin includes footage of his funeral, which becomes a bonding event for Andrew and Cass, two lonely souls united by grief and loss. It is Andrew who nudges Cass towards Buddhism, cheerfully pitching him the joys of reincarnation and living fully in the present moment. How much of these wry vignettes are authentic reportage, and how much a kind of performance, is a moot point. But Martin insists we are watching “emotional truth” even when scenes feel lightly staged or scripted.
Flathead ends with a quietly devastating revelation from Cass, which lends extra context to his soul-weary, spiritually hungry outlook. But there is no neat dramatic arc here, and Martin’s editing decisions feel almost random at times, driven more by strong visual composition, atmospheric sound design and haunting soundtrack choices than by any sense of narrative cohesion. Indeed, music is a crucial element in the mix, with prominent use of religious hymns, folk songs and ambient soundscapes. There is even a ragged bluesy ballad co-written and performed by Cass and cinematographer Brodie Poole, who also cameos in the film in a kind of itinerant hippie role.
Viewers expecting a more formal documentary structure, or even just a satisfying sense of closure, may find Martin’s freewheeling snapshot of small-town life too fuzzy and open-ended. But Flathead is also a feast of gorgeous monochrome cinematography and a compassionate, humane, modestly profound work. Sometimes films about nothing are, on another level, also about everything.
Director, screenwriter: Jaydon Martin
Cast: Cass Cumerford, Andrew Wong, Kent Wong, Brodie Poole
Cinematography: Brodie Poole
Producer, editing: Patrick McCabe
Production design: Cornelia Van Rijswijk
Sound design: Lachlan Harris
Music: Angharad Van Rijswijk
Production company, world sales: Portmanteau Pictures (Australia)
Venue: Rotterdam Film Festival (Tiger Competition)
In English
89 minutes
