Siam Sunset
Australia/United Kingdom 1999
Reviewed by Claire Monk
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Perry, creator of colours for a British paint company, attracts mysterious disasters. After his wife Maree is killed by a fridge falling from a plane, he becomes preoccupied with mixing a new colour, 'Siam Sunset'. He wins a tour of the Australian outback, but it is on a boneshaker bus with an inhospitable driver and Anglophobe passengers, and he is soon keen to leave. Meanwhile Grace, called to testify against her violent drug-dealer ex-lover Martin, flees with Martin's money and boards the bus.
She is drawn to Perry, but Martin forcibly joins the tour and threatens the pair. The driver crashes the bus while racing a rival coach, leaving Martin unconscious. The group take refuge at Eric's, a derelict diner. Perry tells Grace about his wife's death. They make love, and he finally finds his dream colour. Martin recovers, tries to kill Perry and demands the money, but dies in events triggered by Grace throwing a snake. The group conceal Martin's death and are rescued by the rival coach operator. Perry and Grace stay on in the desert.
Review
Siam Sunset shares with 1994's international Australian hit The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert a producer (Al Clark), a central plot vehicle - bickering, disparate characters are thrown together on a rickety bus travelling across the outback - and, one presumes, the same global commercial ambitions. How far actor-turned-director John Polson's debut film will achieve these ambitions is hard to predict. It's a comedy-adventure-romance - heterosexual in counterpoint to Priscilla's faux queerness - which sees no contradiction in marrying a callous attitude towards its characters with sentimentality. Its callousness is selective: we are meant to feel moved rather than sneer when Perry explains to Grace that the elusive colour he is seeking (and can't find in England) is "peace". The film's moments of horror, on the other hand, are played for laughs, requiring a more cynical mode of engagement from audiences. The psychopathic villain, Martin, spends the film's climax on the rampage with third-degree burns before meeting an imaginatively staged death by electrocution while impaled on a coat hook.
Where Priscilla toned down and conflated transsexuality and transvestite camp for mainstream consumption, Siam Sunset's unique selling points - Perry's semi-magical gift with colour and his curse of attracting unexplained, often fatal physical events - are less flamboyant and more esoteric. Both devices are rich with allegorical as well as comic potential, but the film exploits them rather superficially, as if its makers regard conceptual vigour as incompatible with comedy. Perry's lovemaking with Grace sparks an amusing cacophony of spinning fans and fusing lights, but the causes and meaning of his capacity for attracting kinetic mayhem are left unexplored.
But these gimmicks are not Siam Sunset's main attraction, and neither, really, is its romance. As the lovers, Linus Roache (slyly charismatic as the English paints specialist Perry) and Danielle Cormack (as Grace, on the run from her violent ex Martin) give likeable performances. It's just that the film's checklist of romantic conventions - unconvincing mutual wariness at first, then shared trials which lead to a predictable epiphany - bleeds their courtship of any tension.
Siam Sunset functions best as a comedy of cultural differences and prejudices. Its humour derives from its details: in particular, the script (by Max Dann and Andrew Knight) is astutely observant of character, individual as much as national. While Roache's Perry is initially set up as a stereotypically reserved Englishman, the film soon subverts this cliché. He's a rare sight in late-90s movies: a middle-class Englishman who inhabits a recognisable late-90s culture. He works in a modern office, lives in a modern house and knows how to make a customer complaint. (Within minutes of boarding the coach, he is branded a whinging Pom for asking to be moved because an air-conditioning duct has just collapsed on to his head.)
The film's Australians are, by contrast, mostly portrayed as hidebound, inward-looking and self-deluded on the matter of their nation's greatness. In short, they embody the flaws which used to be attributed to Britons. The tour's wonderfully petty driver plays his commentary tape for non-English-speaking tourists a day early "so that we don't waste everyone else's valuable time tomorrow." As the bus limps through a barren landscape blighted with pylons, a fellow passenger brags at Perry: "Your country's finished. Why would anyone want to live in Britain when you could have all this?" Ironically, Siam Sunset was part-financed by the Australian Film Commission and two Australian regional bodies. Its self-puncturing humour may cause as much annoyance at home as Notting Hill has to some audiences in the UK, but it's a much funnier, less self-regarding film - and at least it finds something fresh to say about British identity.
Credits
- Director
- John Polson
- Producer
- Al Clark
- Screenplay
- Max Dann
- Andrew Knight
- Based on an original idea by
- Max Dann
- Andrew Knight
- Jan Marnell
- Director of Photography
- Brian Breheny
- Editor
- Nicholas Beauman
- Production Designer
- Steven Jones-Evans
- Music/Music Arranger/
Conductor - Paul Grabowsky
- ©Australian Film Finance Corporation Limited/The Premium Movie Partnership/
South Australian Film Corporation/New South Wales Film and - Television Office/
Artist Services Pty Ltd. - Production Companies
- Australian Film Finance Corporation presents
- in association with Showtime Australia
- an Artist Services production
- Financed by the Australian Film Finance Corporation in association with
- Showtime Australia/
Channel 4 UK joint venture - Produced with assistance & finance from South Australian Film Corporation/New South Wales Film and Television Office Developed with the assistance of Film Victoria
- Script developed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission
- Executive Producers
- Andrew Knight
- Peter Beilby
- Associate Producer
- Max Dann
- Production Supervisor
- Elizabeth Symes
- Production Co-ordinator
- Heather Muirhead
- Unit Managers
- Michael Gill
- 2nd Unit:
- Gary Buss
- Location Manager
- Mason Curtis
- Post-production Supervisor
- John May
- Assistant Directors
- Phil Jones
- Toni Raynes
- Clair Parker
- 2nd Unit:
- Lindsay Smith
- Jacqui Canty
- Continuity
- Kristin Voumard
- Casting
- Ann Robinson
- Mullinars Consultants
- UK:
- Andy Pryor
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- David Foreman
- Camera Operators
- Brian Breheny
- Laurie Kirkwood
- Visual Effects
- Rising Sun Pictures
- Additional CGI Effects/
Butterfly Sequence/
Digital Film Scanning/
Recording - DFilm Services
- Special Effects
- Filmtrix
- Peter Stubbs
- Jeff Little
- Kevin Turner
- Gordon Barber
- Tim O'Brien
- Carl Sorger
- Andrew McCallister
- Ray Landsman
- Model Maker
- Simon Ingerson
- Graphics
- Andrew Crouch
- Art Director
- Richard Hobbs
- Scenic Artists
- John Haratzis
- Additional:
- Guy Allain
- Georgia Allain
- Storyboard Artist
- John Forrest
- Costume Designer
- Louise Wakefield
- Costume Supervisor
- Graham Purcell
- Hair/Make-up
- Supervisor:
- Sue Taylor
- AdditionalArtist:
- Tina Gordon
- Additional Make-up
- Fiona Rees-Jones
- Hair/Make-up/Prosthetics Artist
- Nicole Spiro
- Prosthetic Design
- Mark A. Nichols
- Titles
- Optical & Graphic
- Optical Effects
- DFilm Services
- Boy Soprano
- Jonathan Ryan
- Orchestra Leader
- Rudi Osadnik
- Music Co-ordinator
- Mike Grabowsky
- Engineer
- Robin Gray
- Music Consultant
- Christine Woodruff
- Soundtrack
- "Raindrops" - Alan Brough; "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" - Adoration on the Gospel Train;
- "Hallelujah"- Vince Jones; "A Swingin' Safari"
- Sound Recordist
- John Schiefelbein
- Recordists
- Mauricio Hernandez
- Julie Pearse
- Mixer
- Phil Judd
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Andrew Plain
- Dialogue Editors
- Jane Paterson
- Additional:
- Peter O'Brien
- ADR/Atmos Editor
- Nada Mikas
- FoleyArtist
- Les 'Spider' Fiddess
- Aboriginal Heritage Advisers
- Ian Crombie
- David Crombie
- Stunt Co-ordinators
- Johnny Hallyday
- Glenn Boswell
- 2nd Unit Armourer
- Marcus Bosisto
- Dog Wranglers
- Angela Dixon
- Geoff Thomson
- Snake/Scorpion Wrangler
- Peter Mirtschin
- Butterfly Wrangler
- Todd Downs
- Cast
- Linus Roache
- Perry
- Danielle Cormack
- Grace
- Ian Bliss
- Martin
- Roy Billing
- Bill
- Alan Brough
- Stuart
- Rebecca Hobbs
- Jane
- Terry Kenwrick
- Arthur
- Deidre Rubenstein
- Celia
- Peter Hosking
- Roy
- Victoria Eagger
- Rowena
- Robert Menzies
- Eric
- Eliza Lovell
- Michelle
- Heidi Glover
- Stephanie
- Lachlan Standing
- Ben
- Esme Melville
- Dot
- Chuong Dao
- Mr Nguyen
- Alan Lovell
- Stan Porter
- Victoria Hill
- Maree
- Arthur Percival
- Harold
- Roger Cardwell
- Mr Waugh
- Dominic Pedlar
- paint factory worker
- Charlie Barnes
- bingo caller
- Marlo Grocke
- surgery receptionist
- Paul Simpson
- Les
- Len Firth
- truck driver
- Denis Noble
- country cop
- Rebecca Harris
- cellist
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Blue Dolphin Film & Video
- 8,269 feet
- 91 minutes 53 seconds
- Dolby Digital
- In Colour
- 2.35:1 [Panavision]