THE FLIP SIDE
Australia, 2018, 91 minutes, Colour.
Eddie Izzard, Emily Taheny, Luke McKenzie?, Vanessa Guide, Tina Bursill, Tiriel Mora, Hugh Sheridan.
Directed by Marion Pilowsky.
This is billed as a romantic comedy, a feel-good movie. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
This is a South Australian film, proudly made. There are many sequences in Adelaide itself but the screenplay takes the leading characters out into the Barossa Valley, to Handorf, to the Vineyards, out into the desert and the range of South Australian scenery. One presumes the South Australian tourist bureau will not be unhappy with the promotion (even if they might have some difficulties with the film and its screenplay, especially a lot of derogatory remarks made by a French character, especially about wines, names and French propriety of names.)
Emily Taheny is a strong screen presence, well-known to ABC television viewers from her skits and spoofs in Shaun Micalef’s Mad as Hell. In many ways, she holds this film together. But, while her character might have seemed consistent on paper, it doesn’t seem quite so consistent on screen. And this is true of each of the central characters.
Emily is Veronica James, Ronnie to all her friends (but not to the French character, Sophie, played waspishly by Vanessa Guide and referred to by Ronnie has a “French Bitch�, rather an understatement given the dominatingly catty behaviour. Ronnie was in love with a visiting British actor, conceited and fickle, played with a certain self-absorbed charm and lack of charm by Eddie Izzard, the audience wondering why he came to Australia to make this film. He had promised to take Ronnie to England but went back home without her. There is a telling sequence where he is back in Adelaide promoting a new film, doing a Q and A, playing to the audience but self-focused.
Five years later she is in a partnership with a high school science teacher and would-be novelist, Jeff. Again, he is played with some contradictions by Luke McKenzie?, most of the time a real gawk, unintentionally flirting with the French woman and she leading him on, but finally something of a man of principle. The actor pretends to take an interest in the novel he has written, talking of making a film but, of course, is not read the manuscript to Jeff’s ultimate dismay.
A comment often made about actors not particularly connecting in their performances is that there is little chemistry between them. Not much chemistry here despite some effort by Emily Taheny and Luke McKenzie?.
And, some audiences will have problems with the humour – often strained at best. The trip to the Barossa Valley and beyond, a car crash when it hits a kangaroo, a local garage manager with an over-coarse mouth delaying in fixing the car, a scene where a boomerang is thrown – and actually comes back with injuries.
There is a subplot concerning Ronnie’s mother who was in a home for the aged, Ronnie running up bills at the restaurant she has established, unable to pay for her mother’s care, her mother a mixture of common sense and incipient senility.
Perhaps the film is too flip.
