Wake in Fright

This is an Australian movie from the 70s, "lost" due to its depiction of the male dominated culture of Australia, which while embraced by international audiences, faded at the Australian box office. It re-screened at Cannes a few years ago (where it also won a prize in 1971) and is only one of two films to screen at Cannes twice in that festival's history. The film stars actors mostly unknown to me, except Jack Thompson in his first screen role, and Donald Pleasance, although the other actors are apparently well known in Australia.

It concerns a young British teacher, John (Gary Bond), who is kind of in servitude--teachers have to pay a sort of bond for their jobs, to prevent them from abandoning the job since the outback locations are pretty desolate and isolating. During the Christmas break from school, John tries to travel home to spend time with his girlfriend, but since he has no substantial money, ends up stranded in a small town nicknamed the Yabba, where he had planned to travel on to Sydney. In Yabba, he meets several locals here, including a policeman (Chips Rafferty) who buys him drinks then introduces him to a gambling game, an English doctor with shady methods who finds the Aussies are less discerning about his credentials (Pleasance), and a man who buys him a drink (Al Thomas) and takes him home where John and he spend time with his friends (including Thompson), and, other than John, ignores his wife (Sylvia Kay, the director's wife at the time).

At first John does try halfheartedly to get home, but his degeneration into drinking, gambling, and other male pursuits leads to a week of near-insanity. At the end of it John rejoins "civilized society" but we question what has changed in him now.

Throughout the film almost every male character's behavior, except John, is some sort of passive/aggressive (but sometimes not so passive) assertation of maleness, whether it is an accusation of being unable holding one's liquor, goading John to shoot a kangaroo in a nighttime hunt, derogatory behavior toward women such as the wife, disgust of homosexual behavior as well as some homoeroticism, places such as the bar and gambling areas that are open only to men, etc. Also throughout, John finds it difficult to pry himself loose from these various men, becoming in this short time addicted to gambling, drinking, and shooting--and at the end of the week John becomes almost as depraved as them, but as we see, it is "normal" behavior there.

I thought this would be much more graphic than I had heard, but the depiction of John is more of his degeneration into a more base and animalistic human being instead of the supposedly refined schoolteacher--a comparison of Australia to the outside world. The most graphic portion is when John and his new friends go on a nighttime kangaroo hunt--a real hunt that the director filmed with professional hunters spliced together with footage of the actors. The sense of maleness is very prevalent throughout the film, perhaps a little exaggerated for dramatic license, but from other Australian films I've seen of this era, a very real depiction of life there.

The film also shows the Australian people having very little to occupy their time, or them choosing not to try very hard to expand their horizons by reading or music or something more artistic. All they seem to do is work in order to get money to drink or gamble, and occasionally deign to acknowledge that their wives exist.