Life in Australia - film critics I have known

Saturday, 11 February 2006

It's been eight months and one day since I got on that plane to Hanoi. In that time, I've gone from being an exhausted, distracted workaholic, to a decadent, productive, functioning artist with an inspirational day job. The bookshop cafe I was involved in for two years back in Australia seems a distant memory. Everything they say about the stress of running a small business is true - I doubt I'll ever try it again in the West. Perhaps elsewhere; in Vietnam everything seems possible. Even in the face of police raids on bars and censorship at work, it's like a frontier here. My skills are in demand and I have something to offer. I've even been interviewed on radio about solutions to (the immense) traffic problems in Hanoi. Just because I have an drivers' licence, which in hindsight required rigorous study, I am now an expert.

Well it's not that simple. Occasionally I am an expert, particularly when it comes to things I don't need to know. Trivia competitions and the like. And I actually learned quite a bit when studying journalism, which comes in handy. These folks at VOV need my ruthlessness, skepticism, humour and passion for the fundamentals of journalism. That's right, I'm talking about the Who, What, When, Where, How and Why. You don't know how important these principles are until they are no longer applied: what should be news becomes chaos. And I want to create order.

Life in Australia...how do I remember it?

Very, very long working hours. The ecstatic buzz of live radio, uneasily combined with the mundanity of my day job. The coalface of website maintenance at the Department of Justice, mitigated somewhat by some of the best water cooler conversations ever. Man, I hit it off well with nerds. The amount of people sitting around me who not only had the same taste in movies, but also recognised the crucial importance of Pride and Predjudice (the 1995 BBC series with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, not that nightmarish Keira Knightley thing) was comforting.

And movies, that was pretty much all I did for a year. 20 hours a week watching them, observing the strange rituals of professional moviegoers and gradually being included in their exclusive circle. What a strange bunch they were. Philippa Hawker, all black and red Asian-style elegance, and surprisingly easy-going. Her kids got it good - they were hauled to many a PG-rated preview screening. Tom Ryan and his passion for punctuality. Many an usher or fuschia-clad PR were lambasted by him for never starting on time. It was annoying, but because they were almost always running late, it was also reliable. I don't think he'd like the public transport in SE Asia, which can run up to four hours late. At some stage, I'll have to tell you about my hellish 16-hour trip to Chiang Mai from Bangkok, third class. Third class doesn't sound appealing? There's a reason for that. Listen to your intuition.

(Ladan, Colette and Peter at The Victorian Department of Justice, late 2004)

Other characters around the scene included the ubiquitous, brash and badly-dressed Jim Schembri, who was also one of the shortest men I'd ever met (at the time - now I live in the land of the dwarves). A few years back, my hatred of his reviews in the Friday EG (Entertainment Guide) inspired me to enter the review business myself. I couldn't cope with him giving 1 1/2 stars to Shakespeare in Love and 4 stars to Air Force One. And many agreed with me; at that time, The Age weathered a letter campaign calling for his resignation. But since then, I'd written a few scathing theatre reviews by that stage myself and mellowed towards his writing. As a reviewer, he was useless. But as a writer, he was gifted, and definitely amusing. Considering how much I adore comedy, for me it's almost the same thing.

There was Adrian Martin, a reviewer's reviewer, to whom I was too scared to talk to. Whenever I read his articles, I remembered my lack of a major in media studies. With his wild curly hair, chunky black-rimmed glasses, and a laugh that sounded like a donkey braying, he added a certain amount of colour, not to mention credibility to our regular screenings.

And the location sometimes bordered on the decadent, particularly when slipping into a seat at Theatrette 606, in Toorak. It's part of a decaying sumptuous mansion which transports me to the 1930s. Now it's difficult to return to a regular cinema when you're used to the intimacy of a small screening space. Where a cough warrants a glare from an adjacent viewer, and if your mobile phone rang, you'd have to leave the city. I almost had nightmares about that, actually.

There were the old guard, some of whom had been in the biz for 20 years, and the satellites, the other reviewers for small papers radio stations and websites. So many of us were unpaid, but more than any other form of reviewing, film reviewing is a labour of love. I didn't mind too much, although my friends did so for me. And if I'd stayed in Australia, I would have found a way to get paid, simply because working 60 hours a week made me feel like I was dying.