DEAD EUROPE

Australia, 2012, 84 minutes, Colour.
Ewen Leslie, Marton Csokas, Kodi Smit-McPhee?, William Zappa.
Directed by Tony Krawitz.

Christos Tsiolkas has become one of Australia’s celebrated novelists. There was a 1999 film version of his novel, Loaded, called Head On. ABC television produced an 8-part series of his multi-faceted The Slap. This version of his novel, Dead Europe, a large book, runs for only 84 minutes, offers key elements by brief episodes, succinct character sketches and pieces of dialogue which reveal character and plot quickly and economically.

Dead Europe is often a morose look at Greek migrants to Australia, their culture and their faith and their superstitions, especially curses, the secrets from the old country and the need for purging past guilts. It is also something of a morose look at present Europe, from Greece to France to Hungary. While there is some beauty and vitality, the film focuses on bitterness and hatreds, betrayals, drug culture and sex slavery. And leaves us with few answers to our queries and questions.
Ewen Leslie plays Isaak, a gay photographer, who is appaled by his father’s death and his mother’s talking of a curse. He decides to go back to Greece, the first of his family to do so, and scatter his father’s ashes in the mountains. He meets relatives who are hostile to his family, a cousin who had visited Melbourne and another friend (which leads to drugs and sexual gropings). But, photographing in Athens, he comes across a teenage boy who is being beaten and rescues him (Kodi Smit McPhee). The boy reappears throughout the film in different guises and in dreams. He becomes identified with a boy that Isaak’s father was to have sheltered during the war but failed him. Is the boy to be the instrument of vengeance and fulfillment of the curse?
Isaak’s journey takes him to Paris to connect with a friend of his father. But that leads nowhere. So, he travels to Budapest to find his brother who had left Australia long since and has immersed himself in a seedy world of drugs and exploitation of young boys – where the mysterious Josef re-appears, again confronting Isaak.
Whether this is an adequate version of Tsiolkas large novel, experts will have their say. What writer, Louise Fox, and director Tony Krawitz (Jewboy, The Tall Man) have done is to distill the core of the novel and the characters and to portray a man’s sometimes morbid search for the truth and for his own personal, family and ethnic identity. It is striking and challenging film-making.

1. The impact of the film? An Australian story? Europe and its legacy? Its a legacy in Australia? An Australian coming to terms with the European legacy, the Greek legacy?
2. Christos Tsiolkas and his novels? His career? Themes? Interests? Migrants, Greeks, the war and guilt, family, curses and religious beliefs and superstitions, sexuality, homosexuality, the collapse of European culture?
3. The title, Greece, France, Hungary? Observations? Critique?
4. Isaac’s story: his age, background, the bond with his mother, his interactions with his father, a photographer, observant? The harshness of his life? The critique? His brother in Europe? His sexual orientation? The legacy and his pursuit to understand it?
5. Vasili, the background of his life, marriage, family and children, upset, interactions with Isaac? His driving, the accident, suicide? The Greek orthodox backgrounds? The traditional values of Isaac’s mother, the curse? The symbolism of Vasili eating the earth before he died?
6. Isaac going to Greece, his time in Athens, the visuals of Athens, time of recession? His photographs? The realism of depression? Demonstrations and protests? His meetings? With Josef, his mother, the apartment, the photographs, his promise to return, the streets? The return, Josef and his disappearance? Isaac and the effect, his sense of responsibility?
7. The travels, the beauty of Greece, going to the village, the people, the relatives, hypnosis? The cousin and the boyfriend, the travel, the car, in the fields, the nudity, the sexual interactions? The effect on Isaac? The villagers, the war, the secret? scattering his father’s ashes? The story of Elias, the young boy, his father’s role, hiding the boy, his absence, the starving to death, the curse?
8. His being called to Paris, the reason, meeting Gerry? Gerry and the friendship with his father? Memories of the war, the past? The woman, migrant, at the mosque, Gerry wanting to him to smuggle her out of France? The difficulties? Gerry’s wife and hostility? Her anti-Semitic attitudes, her arrest? Isaac leaving the station?
9. Hungry, Budapest, the search, his brother? The character of Nico, the drug world, the pornography world, sex slavery, the boys, their being paraded, the clients, the pimp? Seeing the boy who resembled Josef?
10. Nico and his condition, attitude towards his family, drugs, depression? The story of Elias, denying it? Syd, the boss, unscrupulous, leering?
11. Truth, Elias, the role of Vasili, the sexual abuse, the starvation, the villagers and the curse?
12. Isaac and his visions of Josef, paying for the boy who resembled him, his character, symbol of Elias? Freedom, stabbing Isaac, fleeing?
13. The film as Isaac’s odyssey?