Kolkhoz is a new weekly independent film blog premiering exclusively on SEXBEAT every Wednesday. The name derives from the Russian communist theorem ‘collective knowledge for individual thought’. Stay tuned.
Fucking brutal. SNOWTOWN intimately illustrates a much darker side to Australian living, with an all too familiar route to evil. Justin Kurzel’s compassionate depiction of sexual abuse, mental turmoil and inevitably serial murder, offers a heartbreaking rendition of events that devastated the south of Australia across the 90’s.
Following John Bunting’s enlistment of lost souls, mentally unstable vagrants and easily corrupted communities; Kurzel explores how a seemingly attentive father figure leads his devoted “family” into a depraved social cleansing. The confessional dream, lead character Jamie Vlassakiss (Lucas Pittaway), opens the film with immediately assures us this is not your classic episode of Neighbours. This introduction into his mind, accompanied by the cigarette smoke choked community he exists in, is only the precursor to the misguided life we grimacingly watch unfold before us.
With no sense of authority whatever throughout the film, we see a community left to its own devices, isolated and increasingly paranoid. Stuck within this rightfully fearful town, a ramshackle collection of unlikely dad shaped replacements, including a cross-dressing fag-hater, and the good word of the Lord, take the Vlassakiss boys swiftly under their self-appointed, community-policing wing. Kurzel’s empathetic interpretation of being accepted into a friendship, even in such sinister forms as throwing dismembered Kangaroo limbs at a suspected pedophile’s house shocks us, well of course, but sustains the focus of the good intentions that seem to provoke this act. It is simply the bleakest form of uplifting cinema.
The focus on family togetherness and a somewhat ironic instilment of traditional values is merely the beginning of the purification of the community of Snowtown, “an Australian Tradition” as referred to by Bunting. We come to expect it after first seeing the three Vlassakiss boys posing naked for their neighbour’s camera lens, but Kurzel’s effortless application of unease is incessant. Torture and murder forcibly become a part of Jamie’s life, by his own means or not, this pattern of events is inescapable. The delicate, childlike character Kurzel makes of Jamie, is a harsh contradiction to the world of murder and prejudice thrust upon his somewhat meaningless, but honest life. This representation completely inverts our concept of a serial murderer. The amazing cinematography definitive of Kurzel’s films molds the character of Bunting, from a heartwarming mentor into the controlling narcissist that made murderers out of children.
Snowtown is as grim as it comes, but I assure you, you will never feel so compassionate towards a serial murderer than Jamie Vlassakiss.
