It was inevitable that Del Kathryn Barton’s debut feature, Blaze, would gather a swag of rave responses. Every new Australian film, no matter how bleak, depressing or sadistic, finds plenty of people willing to sing its praises. Too often this compulsive need to support the local product only helps perpetuate the artistic mediocrity that has settled on the local industry over the past two decades.
Nowadays I approach each new Australian movie with diminished expectations, but held hopes Barton would come up with something special. Her short film of 2018, Red, was a crazy, high-powered riff on feminine power – the central image being the female redback spider that consumes her partner, post-coitus. Woe betide the male spider that rolls over and falls asleep.
Barton is known as a visual artist, a winner of two Archibald Prizes, a painter of huge, extravagant figures – luridly-coloured, festooned with additional breasts or genitals. Freud’s term, “polymorphous perverse”, springs readily to mind. Blaze has plenty of arthouse moments, being packed with bizarre, symbolic imagery, stop-motion sequences, puppets, and the pièce de résistance: a larger-than-life dragon, called Zephyr, who only exists in the lead character’s imagination but manages to crowd out her entire bedroom.
The striking visuals are exactly what we would expect of an artist making her first motion picture. It’s the narrative that grates – like a cupboard in which the drawers and doors don’t quite fit. More precisely, there’s an awkward disjunction between the playful inventiveness Barton has lavished on the props, and the extended investigation of childhood trauma, which is the theme of the story.
Blaze (Julia Stone) is a 13-year-old girl being brought up by her father, Luke (Simon Baker). She’s a feisty kid, and Luke works hard as a single parent trying to understand his daughter and make sure she has everything she needs. He seems to be succeeding, until one day, Julia witnesses a terrible act of violence. In a suburban back lane, she watches a woman (Yael Stone), beaten, raped and murdered by a man (Josh Lawson), after she rejects his advances.
From this point Blaze’s world is upended. She finds it hard to talk about what she’s seen, but can’t stop thinking about the incident. She retreats into her fantasy world, but has to tell her story to the police, and then the court, in the presence of the murderer. She is able to put names to both the victim (Hannah) and her attacker (Jake), and look them up on the Internet, feeling an intense sense of injustice that the man is able to walk around freely while the case proceeds. Her feelings of powerlessness find expression in angry, irrational outbursts.
The bulk of the film is spent charting Blaze’s trauma and her reactions. Barton draws on personal experience to convey what the character is feeling, having been through her own bout of childhood trauma (which she declines to discuss in detail), followed by two decades of therapy. She stresses that the story is not autobiographical, but it’s undeniably personal. We feel at times as if we are watching an exorcism of the director’s own demons.
This makes Blaze a singularly uncomfortable experience. The subject of male violence against women is a blight on our society, and we are only beginning to recognise the extent of the problem. The exposure of children to violence, even as witnesses, is another subject we’d prefer to avoid rather than acknowledge. Barton’s willingness to take on such topics must be seen as courageous. It doesn’t, however, make for brilliant cinema.
Barton and her co-scriptwriter, Huna Amweero, don’t lack moral courage, they lack the narrative skills that make a movie more than a series of disjointed episodes devoted to a single, pervasive theme. Blaze’s trauma may be realistically portrayed, but it’s heavy going for the viewer who has no choice except to tag along for the ride. The procession is interrupted by the fantasy sequences in which Blaze retreats to the sanctuary of her bedroom and lets her imagination run wild. The problem is that these scenes don’t relieve Blaze’s morbid introspection or the viewer’s unease. They add a touch of distracting weirdness to a trail of misery.
With such a film one can’t be too critical without seeming indifferent to violence and trauma, let alone the director’s own experiences which have left life-long psychic scars. Instead of a simple value judgement such as ‘good ‘or ‘bad’, we say the movie is “difficult but valuable”, or something similar, suggesting that we’ll be better people if we sit through this disturbing tale.
By the end Barton drops the idea of Blaze as a victim, and wants us to see her triumphing over her fears and anxieties. It’s meant to be an inspiring finale but it feels forced, particularly as we’ve been watching Blaze for about an hour and seen little sign of personal development.
Teenager, Julia Stone, puts in a committed performance, as does Simon Baker, but the dialogue is never more than adequate to the task. One begins to look forward to the next fantasy sequence, if only to disrupt the gloomy domestic atmosphere. Zephyr, alas, is physically imposing but not dazzling company. A strange metamorphosis of Puff the Magic Dragon, immortalised in that twee song by Peter, Paul and Mary, Zephyr may look like he jumped off a float at the Gay Mardi Gras but he has all the personality of a Hill’s Hoist.
Many viewers will convince themselves that Blaze is an important film, but few will claim that it’s inspiring or entertaining. One wonders if it marks Barton’s emergence as a new talent in Australian cinema or if it’s essentially a cathartic exercise that releases a bad genie from her bottled-up memories. If there is to be a second feature the director will need to venture outside of her own head. It’s just too dark and arty in there.
Blaze
Directed by Del Kathryn Barton
Written by Del Kathryn Barton & Huna Amweero
Starring: Julia Savage, Simon Baker, Yael Stone, Josh Lawson, Remy Hii, Heather Mitchell, Ryan Hedges, John Waters, Bernie Van Tiel
Australia, rated MA 15+, 101 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 27 August, 2022