Is This the Real World (MA). Director: Martin McKenna. Starring: Sean Keenan, Greg Stone, Julia Blake, Charlotte Best, Susie Porter, Matt Colwell. 88 minutes
This one seems to be straight out of the First Time Filmmaker's Playbook (Australia Edition): 1: Take an introverted adolescent protagonist. 2: Wrap him in angst. 3: Give him a troubled past that sets him at odds with his natural environment. 4: Send him off on the path to catharsis, via gauntlets of trauma. 5: Add some bravura stylistic flourishes and a melancholic tone. 6: Call it art.
Is This the Real World, TV screenwriter McKenna's big-screen debut, is the second first-time feature of this ilk to arrive this month — the other being Grant Scicluna's rather more interesting Downriver. Scicluna's film, about a young man coming to terms with a crime he committed as a child, is steeped in themes of sin and redemption, and draws reams of symbolic meaning from its rural setting.
McKenna's film doesn't achieve the same levels of gravitas, some exceptional performances and a handful of superbly executed scenes aside. Its protagonist Mark (Keenan) is a prototypical kid in crisis; the middle child of a single mother (Porter), whose older brother (Colwell) is an ex-con, and who himself has been kicked out of the private school to which he had earned a scholarship.
This last fact brings him into the orbit of Mr Rickard (Stone), vice-principal of the public school at which Mark winds up. Rickard claims the credit for having lifting the status of the once struggling school, and identifies in the smart but troubled Mark both the potential to do well and a danger to his own legacy. From day one, Rickard takes a special interest in this enigmatic new student.
"It is only through her small revelations that we glimpse a man who failed as a husband and is failing as a father."
Mark, meanwhile, sees in Rickard a misguided do-gooder and, later, something a little more dangerous: an ambitious man whose ego is the flipside of insecurity. A battle of wills commences. The verbal and psychological power games the two men play are the richest vein of dramatic and thematic tension the film contains, executed with restraint and subtlety by Kennan and Stone.
It is regrettable that Rickard's life outside school is not explored more fully. Mark pursues a relationship with Rickard's daughter Kim (Best), and it is only through her small revelations that