Australian film-maker Jaydon Martin makes an outstanding feature debut with this absorbing, moving and visually beautiful docufiction – a kind of guided reportage about two men’s lives in the regional town of Bundaberg in Queensland, the Australian Texas. It’s shot in a luminous monochrome, switching inscrutably to colour occasionally for the digital moments of home video.
“Flathead” refers to the fish used in fish and chip shops in the locality. One such, the Busy Bee, is now being looked after, prior to sale to new buyers, by a young man called Andrew Wong, whose late father was a Chinese immigrant who owned the shop, built the business through 50 years of toil and paid for the education of Andrew and his sisters. Andrew, however, seems committed only to his workout programme and bodybuilding goals.
Andrew’s mate Cass Cumerford is the film’s unselfconscious star: a rangy, scrawny, liver-spotted old guy whose scenes in the hospital MRI scanner hint at illness and imminent death. One gruesome shot of him throwing up into a toilet shows us a lower set of false teeth on the bathroom floor. And yet he seems pretty tough, with an unrepentant smoking habit, a liking for getting drunk and a way of swinging his forearms when he walks that reminded me of Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
Perhaps in search of redemption, or salvation, or just a narrative shape to his life at its end, Cass is exploring religious options. He has evidently befriended a Christian fundamentalist preacher who tells him about how all sins – including murder, robbery and child abuse – can be effaced by being born again into the faith. He talks easily and good-naturedly about his early life involved in drugs, which he then (with some regret) had to leave behind when he became a husband and father, and then discloses a private tragedy that puts everything into perspective.
Meanwhile, Andrew is brooding on Buddhist faith and what meaning his hard-working father’s death has for him.
And so Martin’s camera ranges loosely around the landscape, often in a car whose radio is tuned to the Christian station, sometimes in the company of Cass and Andrew, sometimes with others, such as the itinerant labourers who have kept the region’s ailing agricultural economy afloat or some good-old-boys who are cheerfully loosing off shot guns (“shotties”) and hunting rifles.
Cass gets drunk with lots of people, including a gnarled character whom he asks about his dreams and is told: “I’m not into this dreaming caper, mate.” Cass himself sings a song of his own composition, and sounds rather like a young Dylan.
The film is dedicated to the agricultural workers of Queensland and yet some of its poignancy and irony lies in the fact that its two key figures have not, in fact, got much or any work to do – although at one stage Cass helps a mate with some shovelling and muck-spreading. The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.
• This article was amended on 30 January 2024, replacing “documentary” with “docufiction” to more accurately represent the nature of the material.
