Praise Reviews

A slyly touching, doomed romance between two absurdly mismatched outcasts, this 1998 Australian feature is based on Andrew McGahan's best-selling first novel. Lethargic layabout Gordon (Peter Fenton) lives in a squalid Brisbane rooming house, surrounded by destitute old men and peeling paint. His pastimes, pursued with a certain enervated determination, are drinking and smoking; an asthmatic, he's puffing himself to a strangled, painful breathlessness that saps what little energy he was born with. Though Gordon has always nursed a crush on childhood friend Rachel (Marta Dusseldorp), he can't even rouse himself to pursue her. Enter plump, plain barmaid Cynthia (Sacha Horler), skin mottled by disfiguring eczema that bleeds at the slightest touch. She takes an inexplicable and ferocious shine to Gordon, and having set her sights on seduction allows nothing to deter her — not even Gordon's flaccid libido, which is in no way up to her enthusiastic sexual demands. They're a preposterous couple, incompatible in every way, but for a short while their neuroses somehow draw them together. Cynthia animates Gordon, forcing him to do things: Play Scrabble, go to bars, clean house, take drugs, cook, apply for welfare and, of course, have sex. Gordon in turn takes the edge off her hyperactive self-destructiveness, slows down the perpetual motion machine of her aimless flailing, until he's just too exhausted to take it any more. McGahan's novel was compared to Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero in its depiction of anomic slackers numbing themselves with drugs and impersonal sex. But Charles Bukowski's pickled oeuvre is the better comparison; McGahan and filmmaker John Curran lack Ellis's delusions of glamour and their tour of the low life is sordid without being exploitative, coolly compassionate without in any way glossing over Gordon and Cynthia's crippling personal deficiencies. Their doomed fling is oddly hypnotic and ultimately haunting.