Australian director's Richard Roxburgh's first feature film, Romulus, My Father, was released in the U.S. 31 May 2007. It is unlike American movies for the sparsity of action. The frames load quietly, with long cuts and dialogue rationed out as abstemiously as water in the parched Victoria pastureland. Much is left to the viewer to figure out and the sometimes inscrutable Australian accents add to the near-incomprehensibility of the viewing. The paucity of details actually adds to the power of the film. Events sometimes happen one after the other while for stretches there is only the pantomimic display of seemingly insignificant activity. Romulus, helping to prepare a field for winter by burning the brush down; Romulus, hammering red-hot metal that he shapes into cast-iron furniture; the boy, Rai, riding his bicycle up rocky hills. The images burn themselves into the brain, colors sere like the brown earth, red rocks, and tiny bright yellow and purple flowers like tiny stars in the sky's huge, black firmament.
The film is based on the critically acclaimed memoir of writer and philosopher, Raimond Gaita as he comes of age in Frogmore, Victoria in the early 1960s. It tells the story of his father, Romulus, an emigrant from Romania, and his beautiful German wife, Christina. Christina is highly unstable but Romulus always welcomes her back even after she moves in with his best friend's brother in Melbourne. The story is tragic and with his wife's suicide Romulus, too, sinks into psychotic depression. With so much tragedy, the movie nonetheless leaves me with an impression of lyrical beauty. The struggle I feel many a day in my own life palls by comparison; I live after all in affluent America.
The film's story is set among poor Australian immigrants who somehow eke out a living doing whatever they can. The movie to me therefore is a story of immigrants, how migrating to a so-called first-world country is not always what we think it promises to be. Life is hard but here at least we have the freedom to pursue our lives however deprived it might be, and the opportunity to earn a living if we are industrious enough to do whatever work comes our way.
Roxburgh, an actor who directed plays before he made this movie, offers video diaries of the making of the movie at http://www.romulusmyfather.com.au/diary1.html
As I trudge along, beginning now to make videos in fits and starts, I dream of being able to create experiences in the viewers comparable to movies like Romulus, My Father. Obviously, the story of Rai and his father appeals to me because of my own issue-ful relationship with my father, but content perhaps is only the initial motivation for doing anything creative. When I am able to immerse myself in a project no matter how small I discover feelings and intuition that surprise me. I didn't know I had these in me. I think this is at the core of why I want to explore this aspect of my productivity. In working with images, words and emotion I find bits of myself that sometimes fill up the wide sky of an unimaginably bittersweet world.
At one point in the movie, Hora, reads a quotation from a book to Rai: "Wasted time that you enjoy is not wasted." That's my scripture lesson for the day.
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