(Ted
Kotcheff/1971/Australia & USA)
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| ©Vranckx |
John
Grant, an Australian school teacher in an outback town, packs up for
the Christmas holidays to head back to Sydney and his waiting
girlfriend. However his journey goes awry as he awaits a flight in
the sweltering heat of “The Yabba” and he begins a series of
encounters that take him on a hellish journey to the lower echelons
of humanity. Wake in Fright is like an Australian Aguirre crossed
with Deliverance. It touches on some menacing, repressed aspect of
Australian psyche but projects it out, expands it to a universal
theme of underlying animal instinct. The oppressive, heavy atmosphere
of heat and testosterone hums off the screen as Grant relentlessly
wades into ever more brutal scenes. The kangaroo hunt in particular
is still controversial; it certainly wouldn’t get made today or
passed by the censors. But Kotcheff is an avowed vegetarian and
fully stands by the scenes.
It’s an
essential, early example of Australian New Wave and the genesis point
for a long line of films that use the extremes of the Australian
landscape and culture to examine extremities of human behaviour in a
variety of cinematic genres; films such as The Cars That Ate Paris,
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Mad Max, Razorback and Red Hill amongst
others. Wake in Fright is visceral and shocking but in a more considered way than a lot of modern Australian films that attempt to
shock and overindulge in gore without necessarily provoking thought.
(3.5/5)
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