An unsettling tale of hedonism and Australian ugliness abroad

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Price in Wish You Were Here, which paints an unflattering picture of Australians overseas.

April 26, 2012
Scott Murray
The Age

Film

• Wish You Were Here (MA15+)
• Limited Release (89 mins)
• ★★★

CONSTANTINO Arias coined the term Ugly American in 1948 for a photograph he had taken of an American tourist in Havana. It has since become synonymous with Americans abroad. Kieran Darcy-Smith's Wish You Were Here helps define a new term: the Ugly Australian.

Dave (Joel Edgerton), Alice (Felicity Price) and Steph (Teresa Palmer) are abusers of drugs, alcohol, foreign cultures, authority and family. They turn Cambodia into a hedonistic pleasure zone without a millisecond's concern for what their actions are doing to the locals or themselves.

Surely, this is one of the bleakest accounts of unlikeable Australians since 1971's Wake in Fright, that quintessential journey into our nation's dark heart.

Back in Sydney, the group self-destructs, with marriages and friendships torn apart by the fallout from the unexplained disappearance of Steph's boyfriend, Jeremy (Anthony Starr). The narrative resolution may be relatively easy to guess, but it doesn't stop the middle part of the film from being a claustrophobic and unsettling account of Australians out of their moral depth.

Darcy-Smith is a first-time feature director and delivers scenes that are clumsily covered (a car accident), confusing (dinner-table conversations where the eye-lines are bewilderingly wrong) and listless (the ''ad lib'' exchanges that sag under the exhaustion of actors trying to think up things to say and do). Weakest are the filler scenes in the film's first act, where friends just sit around drinking or playing cards. They remind one of the gaucheness of Australian ''alternative'' cinema in the 1970s.

Darcy-Smith certainly gives his actors a lot of freedom, but sadly not enough redirection where they go off-course. No characters should be portrayed as this unlikeable, be it their lack of joy for their children or a self-obsession that renders them immune to the essence of a ''foreign'' world, which is then blamed for anything that goes wrong.

It is a fundamental rule of drama that audiences have to care about the characters if any personal development or redemption is to carry weight. Dostoevsky managed to make us empathise with an axe murderer; Simenon with every one of his criminals, but Darcy-Smith fails with his yuppies.

Yet, no one can deny Darcy-Smith has given us a brutally honest and much-needed portrayal of Australian misbehaviour in times of self-created stress, taking us deep into the sort of territory explored by French novelist Michel Houellebecq (especially Platform). Wish You Were Here may misjudge how to tell its story, but it remains a fascinating and highly relevant film.