Not so much a screwball comedy, but a screw loose comedy, FRIENDS AND STRANGERS makes friends with the audience despite, or maybe because, of its strangeness.
Written and Directed by James Vaughan, FRIENDS AND STRANGERS is a surreal curve ball that explores displacement, disconnection and ennui in contemporary Australia through Ray, a middle class millennial muddling through the miasma of modern living.
Title card sequence reminds one of Australiana place mat art, a wonderfully kitsch and subtly subversive choice. The film then treats us to a languorous walk through a labyrinth lane way city-scape as Ray and Alice drift through discussion banal and profound.
They’re getting to know one another as they drive into the country side and make camp. The audience instinctively reads this as unfolding as a rom com, much as Alice does, but it’s a misread, and Alice recedes from the action. But not before a couple of interactions between an old codger and a precocious young girl.
The second half of FRIENDS AND STRANGERS allows the audience to discover the reasons for the first half’s dashed expectations and follows Ray’s first forays into his fledgling film making career as a videographer, out of his depth when hired for an upper middle class wedding event.
Fergus Wilson as Ray is a writhing mass of indecision and insecurity. Emma Diaz as Alice exudes a deep mystique.
Also impressive is Malcolm Kennard as some kind of mysterious remittance man and Amelia Conway as the bride to be who has a close encounter with a cactus, a prick to potty mouth expletive definitely not deleted.
Boldly framed with contextual and contrasting images of inner city cul de sacs and open harbour views and delicately layered in characterisation, FRIENDS AND STRANGERS presents an existential picture of casual employment, limp romances and entropic entrepreneurial schemes.
FRIENDS AND STRANGERS plays 12,18 & 22 March at Golden Age Cinema, Sydney From 17 March Dendy Newtown Sydney Q&A EVENTS Friday 11 March @ 6.15pm – Golden Age Cinema, Sydney
Saturday 12 March @ 4pm – Dendy Newtown, Sydney
Monday 14 March @ 6.30pm – Randwick Ritz, Sydney
View trailer here