Photo credit is Phil Erbacher.
“Where I found entitlement” parapraxes local politician and adoptive father of a Sri Lankan orphan musing on an alleged ashram visit. It’s an enlightening malapropism, illuminating the self serving councilman’s principles and passive white supremacy.
It’s one of the true zinger lines in Chenturan Aran’s script, CUT CHILLI, a tale of adoption, culture and identity.
Jamie (Ariyan Sharma) is in a red hot relationship with activist podcaster, Zahra (Kelsey Jeanell). She is from Trinidad and Tobago and he is an apparently abandoned baby from Sri Lanka, adopted by the McKenzie’s (Brendan Miles and Susie Lindeman) and brought up in a serene sandy beach town in Western Australia.
Zahra, while undoubtedly fond of Jamie, also sees him as fodder for her next podcast, an up close and personal expose of international adoption. The couple go West to meet the parents and prodded and prompted by Zahra, Jamie demands the truth from his adoptive mother, Katherine.
CUT CHILLI certainly has bite, and is anchored by a mesmerising performance by Susie Lindeman as the locked secrets custodian, Katherine. There’s a hell of a lot more going on in the deep buried past of this woman than the surface appraisal of a sad, suburban dipsomaniac and Lindeman skips and skirts around the submerged truth, skating the thin ice tip of the iceberg.
Brendan Miles is suitably self absorbed as her populist pollie spouse and there’s added comic relief from Noel Hodda as his politically incorrect brother and campaign manager, a cliché that is mercilessly recognisable in the wake of woke.
Ariyan Sharma and Kelsey Jeanell make an attractive couple bringing a palpable playfulness to the production.
Overstuffed with zinger one liners that don’t always ring true to character and an audio-visual component that becomes superfluous, stunting the pace, CUT CHILLI nevertheless opens up the conversation of cultural identity, displacement and difficult histories.
