Bran Nue Dae: something nue under the WA sun
A retro, indigenous-themed musical satire starring pop stars and an out-of-control Geoffrey Rush? Bran Nue Dae is all that and more, writes Paul Hayes.
They’ve started doing it again in Hollywood. They do it all the time in Bollywood. So why doesn’t Australian cinema make musicals? In terms of genre, the musical has at best been sporadically represented in Australia. Baz Luhrmann has certainly done his best to breathe some local life into the genre from the music and dance oriented Strictly Ballroom, to the out and out musical show piece Moulin Rouge!, but for the most part home-grown musicals just don’t seem to be our thing.
With that in mind, for the first Australian musical to hit our screens since Nicole and Ewan danced in a Paris nightclub to be a retro, indigenous road movie is certainly one from outside the box. Director Rachel Perkins’ Bran Nue Dae has seemingly created a new niche within cinema all by itself.
“It is a rare genre,” the film’s ‘villain’ Geoffrey Rush understates when he talks to Encore.
Produced by Robyn Kershaw and Grame Isaac, it is based on the successful stage play which first premiered at the Perth Festival in 1990, Bran Nue Dae is being called Australian cinema’s first Indigenous musical. Isaac first optioned the rights nearly a decade ago, and at some point Kershaw considered turning it into a telemovie, before the project evolved into the $6.5 million film it is today – with investment from Omnilab Media, Screen Australia, ScreenWest, Film Victoria, the Melbourne International Film Festival Premiere Fund and the ABC.
A semi-autobiographical story originally conceived and written by WA musician Jimmy Chi, Bran Nue Dae is the 60s-set musical adventure of a teenage Aboriginal boy named Willie who is trying to get home to Broome after running away from his Perth seminary school.
Starring Rush, Ernie Dingo, Missy Higgins and Deborah Mailman, as well as Australian Idol’s Jessica Mauboy and newcomer Rocky McKenzie, this is a film that covers several bases. As far as both Rachel Perkins and Kershaw are concerned, there is no reason for the musical genre to be so underrepresented in Australian cinema. In fact, they argue that it is in our blood.
“We certainly don’t have a strong culture of musical as a form, like India or the US, but we do have that tradition as part of our theatre background,” Kershaw told Encore.
Perkins, who also wrote the screenplay with Reg Cribb, agrees that Bran Nue Dae is far from completely alone in terms of being an Australian musical, or at least musically themed film.
“We have seen Baz Luhrmann, who is possibly the great leader of a musical resurrection,” she said. “Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert also had musical elements to them. And also Gillian Armstrong’s Starstruck (1982), which is a great Australian film that has been a little bit forgotten.
So while there have been relatively few examples of the genre, a stage had been set.
“There is no reason our voice shouldn’t be stronger in that area because we have delivered success in the form in the past,” Kershaw said.
While she looked at classics such as The Wizard of Oz, Perkins cites the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou as a reference, because of its roots-influenced music (country, blues, folk), larger-than-life characters and unrealistic circumstances.
“The musical form allows you to be surreal, giving you a heightened reality because people accept that in a musical things go a little bit crazy, a little bit mad. It allows you more freedom to be heightened in your choices of what’s acceptable in the world you’re creating,” she said.
There was so much creative freedom that Perkins even admits a certain Scooby Doo influence in the hippy characters and the madcap tone of the film.
To avoid the dreaded ‘filmed play’ feel that has afflicted so many Hollywood musicals, Perkins and DOP Andrew Lesnie decided the camera should always be intimate with its subjects, and move like one more of the dancers in the musical numbers. The entirely new choreography, designed by Bangarra Dance Theatre artistic director Stephen Page, was created to suit the laid back nature of the film and the resources they had.
“It’s a reasonably large budget but we didn’t have the time and money to throw away into rehearsals,” admitted Perkins.
THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF BEING FUNNY
Given that by their very nature, musicals are often lighthearted and whimsical in tone, it may seem a surprising way to look at some very serious issues from Australia’s still recent past: including racial and cultural assimilation.
But for Perkins (Radiance, First Australians), looking at a serious issue in a more irreverent way in no way diminishes its importance.
“Some people may take offence at the humour, but I think Indigenous people are entitled to laugh at themselves just like everyone else,” she said. “I again put this film in the tradition of films like Priscilla and Muriel’s Wedding, in that they are very irreverent and treated subjects like coming out in Australia or homophobia in that way.
“That is a very strong tradition in Australian cinema and I see Bran Nue Dae being positioned in that genre.”
In a post-apology Australia, where people both black and white have become more aware of and sensitive to these issues, the question can be asked: Is mainstream Australia ready for a light-hearted, musical take on Indigenous people and their relationships with white Australians, including the Catholic Church?
Rush, who plays a German missionary hot on the heels of Willie as he tries to get back home, cuts directly to the heart of the matter when he says that ultimately the representation is not as important as the story itself.
“I don’t know about what the readiness means,” he said. “If a story communicates something that captures the imagination of an audience, then it will work.”
And at its heart, Bran Nue Dae has a story that many can relate to.
“It’s the quest of a young guy having the world tell him that this is the direction his life should go in, but he is making heartfelt, serious decisions about the direction that he wants his life to go,” Rush said. “That is a very powerful, classical theme.”
As Perkins found however, just because something is funny and lighter in tone certainly doesn’t make it any easier.
“It’s terrifying to make cinema that’s not serious. That’s madcap,” she admitted. “It’s a really serious business trying to be funny.”
It is the ability to laugh, such an integral part of the film, that is an important element in Indigenous life, Perkins said.
“In terms of the Indigenous community, humour is a great binding force that ties everybody together,” she said.
Recent work by other Indigenous filmmakers is evidence of that.
“It’s great to see that humour on screen in film’s like Stone Bros. and Warwick Thornton’s earlier short films, like Mimi and Nanna. We just haven’t seen a lot of it.”
INDIGENOUS IS NOT A GENRE
The very fact that the last 12 months have seen the release of films like Samson & Delilah and Stone Bros., not to mention a certain upcoming indigenous retro musical, has been something of a watershed moment in Australian cinema. While local films focused on Indigenous people and their stories have certainly been around, more often than not the features that have reached a wider, mainstream audience have been made by non-indigenous filmmakers.
In a year when Australian cinema as a whole has met with great success, both artistically and commercially, Indigenous films have stood out as some of the best examples. Samson and Delilah has been universally praised both in Australia and internationally while also netting more than $3 million in local box office. And while strictly less successful, Richard Frankland’s Stone Bros. was hailed by many the first straight Indigenous comedy. These are Indigenous films by Indigenous filmmakers.
“It feels to me a little like what happened in terms of the Whitefellas industry 30-odd years ago back in the 70s when we came out of 40 years in the cinema wilderness,” Rush said. “In the last year it feels like we are in a very creative explosion where the nuances of Indigenous life are expressing themselves in mainstream culture.”
For Kershaw, this increase in output is a chance for a much wider audience to get a taste of Indigenous artists and their culture.
“It’s an incredible opportunity for Australians and the international market to see the diversity of voices that are coming from Indigenous filmmakers,” she said.
Despite the way these films are usually grouped by audiences and the media, Perkins is far less comfortable with the notion of a so-called indigenous genre or with Indigenous films being thrown into the same basket.
“There isn’t an Indigenous genre,” she said. “I am very proud to be an Indigenous filmmaker and to tell stories that come from my people. That is a label I carry with great pride, but what people mistakenly do is group all Indigenous films together, which is like saying all Australian films are the same because they’re from the same country.”
Perkins feels that any films that people would categorise as ‘Indigenous’ deserve to be judged on their own merits rather than compared to each other, judged as their own pieces of art.
“They are all very different films and you could not compare Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil to Samson & Delilah, or Samson & Delilah to Bran Nue Dae,” she said. “They are such different films.
“Ours is not a piece of ethnographic filmmaking; it’s a piece of entertainment. It does have that cultural element, but it’s not restrained by it… it was enriched by it, more than anything, because it meant we dealt with the communities in picking locations, creating the choreography, etc.”
INFECTIOUS AND POPULIST
A large audience will certainly have a chance to take in Bran Nue Dae and see for themselves. With a wide release planned for January 14, this is a film for the masses.
“Village Roadshow has a lot of confidence in the film delivering to a wide audience,” Kershaw enthused.
In addition to the appeal of popular singers such as Missy Higgins and Jessica Mauboy making their big screen debut, and the tickets their fans are likely to buy to see them, Kershaw also points to a certain built-in audience that exists due to the major popularity of the stage show that ran through the 90s.
“There were 200,000 people who saw it on stage all of those years ago,” Kershaw said. “I often meet people who say, ‘I never saw Bran Nue Dae but I know all about it. I have heard all about it.’ It’s really great fun and we think we have got a seriously wonderful family film.”
According to Rush, it is with a huge audience that the film is best experienced.
“When I first saw the stage show in 1993 I was absolutely blown away by its energy, its politics, its audacity and its humour,” he said. “The very nature of the film is a populist one.
“It just works beautifully with a crowd because the story has such an infectious energy.”
“Bran Nue Dae has seemingly created a new niche within cinema all by itself.”
Bran Nue Dae opens tomorrow.
