Sex, drugs and Woop Woop: the latest crop of Australian films test the boundaries of taste and tolerance

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

t's been a hard day's night for Ari, and it's only just begun. He's snorted speed off a toilet lid, had plenty of dope and casual sex, and freaked out like any other unemployed 19-year-old. Ecstasy, police detention and amyl nitrate at a sex club are to follow. But for now, Head On's antihero (Alex Dimitriades) is chilling out in a quiet Melbourne back street with his potential lover Sean (Julian Garner). But not for long. Their tender moment is cut short, first by a punk girl vomiting against a wall, then by the sudden arrival of Ari's best friend Johnny (Paul Capsis), now dressed as his drag alter ego Toula, who tells Ari: "Never, ever, ever think anything is too much."

It could be a theme for this season's crop of Australian films, each--like Ari--searching wildly for fulfillment. Opening next week, Welcome to Woop Woop, Stephan Elliot's follow-up to The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, pushes the envelope of bad taste to bursting point, while the current Crackers turns family fodder into an M-rated ode to vulgarity, replete with fart jokes and a barbecued dog. At the same time, a darker road leads to the danger zones of The Boys, Rowan Woods' excoriating portrait of suburban evil; the narcotic nihilism of Head On, which opens in Australia on Aug. 13; and Rolf de Heer's upcoming Dance Me to My Song, which looks at, among other things, the sex life of a young woman with cerebral palsy. "They're all strongly individual," says Head On's Jane Scott, who also produced the acclaimed Shine. "I think that's the beauty of it--that there is no predictable pattern."

Australian films have for a long time danced to a different tune. In 1994's Oscar-winning Priscilla, director Elliot gave a kitschy glamour and disco beat to the outback odyssey of three Sydney drag queens. In Welcome to Woop Woop, about an American bird-smuggler (Johnathon Schaech) held hostage in a desert town of inbred rednecks, Elliot goes for similar tricks: garish production design (fictional Woop Woop is one big '70s flashback), crazy costumes (a dress made from the lining of a wine cask!), a smorgasbord of song (mainly Rodgers and Hammerstein), and eccentric Tarantino-style casting (Gilligan's Island's Tina Louise, Barry Humphries as a blind petrol pump attendant, veteran Rod Taylor in a Collingwood jumper as the town's crusty Daddy-O). But Elliot's sense of rhythm seems to have deserted him. Only once, when the locals mime I'm Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair at the town drive-in, does the film attain Priscilla's giddy high.

Where Elliot's film often feels like a soundtrack in search of a movie, Head On, Ana Kokkinos' adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas' angry 1995 novel Loaded, plays like a music video, but one always in touch with its chaotic emotions. "I think I can feel a Greek record coming on," says Ari, as his father leads him into an impromptu Zorba dance in the family kitchen. His Walkman soundtrack of silverchair, Ammonia and Primal Scream, however, doesn't fit the life his migrant parents plan for him. "Find a girl, get married," his fortune-teller aunt tells him over a coffee-cup reading. Pressures both chemical and hormonal leave him reeling, as fragmented as the light from a disco ball.

Ari asserts himself through sex. And it's been a while since a movie rebel has burst to life this viscerally on screen. Checking out his appearance before his night out, Ari kisses the camera, a teen Marlon Brando, all rippling muscles and pout. His brushes with rough sex in back alleys show a body rebelling against social constraint, and Kokkinos' unflinching camera rarely cuts away from his eyes, reminding us that Ari is as much in search of freedom as pleasure. "He's a classic antihero," Kokkinos says. "He is someone who absolutely is testing the limits of his skin, the limits of his body and mind."

Welcome to Woop Woop, too, is a movie in search of freedom and fun. "I'm as happy as a pig in shit," Daddy-O's freckled backpacker daughter (Susie Porter) tells her American lover Teddy (That Thing You Do!'s Schaech, who seems strangely immune to the high campery around him). But Elliot gets marooned in an ill-tempered wasteland, where the denizens of Woop Woop shoot dogs for pleasure, chainsaw kangaroos for pet food, and put out their dead on a rubbish dump marked by a crucifix made of beer cans. "Too f______dry, too f______ hot. Too many flies, but it's ours," says Daddy-O. "It's Woop Woop." But being ours isn't enough this time.

Ari's relentless dive to the gutter could also be difficult to embrace. But Kokkinos gives Head On some quietly reflective pit-stops along the way. A scene where a Walkman-wired Ari reaches out to touch his father's head borrows from Antonioni, while the use of archival shots of migrants arriving by ship after World War II reminds us that the lives of Ari and Johnny (a funny and touching Capsis) can never be as simplistic as their parents', but must be reinvented. Following a searing sex scene amid the refuse of a fruit market, Kokkinos' camera swoops up from Ari and over a wall to find families going about their daily chores. It's both confronting and fascinating to see these two worlds collide so forcefully. But Head On's real strength is to give this youthful struggle across Australian society a mature depth of focus and moral weight.

How to be a man is a painful question for Ari, and one not easily resolved. Yet Dimitriades gives an urgent complexity to his plight, from his Clint Eastwood swagger to the naked vulnerability of his police cell incarceration. "I am a sailor and a whore," Ari concludes. "I will be till the end of the world." Yet his dance toward maturity-- like Australian film--seeks transcendence, and finds freedom in motion.