It began with a simple premise: what would my thirteen-year-old-self think of thirty-year-old-self?
Although it might not be explicit, for my co-writer Daniel and I, this film began as a study in depression, and a means to reconcile our personal demons.
Mate centres around estranged father and son, John and Jack, and it was always important for this to be true two-hander. Told from exclusively from either character’s perspective, it might have made for a satisfying story, but it wouldn’t have been the full story. Indeed, a key element of Mate is the transition and ambiguous inheritance, the handing over of perspective and legacy from father to son. We come into the film firmly tethered to John, but as the narrative progresses there is a gradual shift of perspective to Jack.
Jack is something of a blank slate, threatened to be overwhelmed by the force of John’s personality. However, John is a man unable to move with the times. His identity, views, attitudes toward women, and his compulsive, ill-considered bravado resemble that of bygone era, to say the least. How can Jack find validation in a father in a crisis of masculinity, as each of them struggles with their need for connection?
The third main character really is world in which story takes place, that particular form of suburbia found ringing the outskirts of Australian cities. This isn’t the glittering Sydney of harbour postcards and tourism brochures, in fact it’s as far from the Harbour Bridge as you can get before hitting the mountains. John might be a product of this insular working-class pocket of Sydney’s periphery, but unlike John, his environment is in a state of flux. New buildings and infrastructure projects are sprouting up all around, reshaping and redefining Sydney’s west, physically, economically, and culturally. One day Jack may reap the benefits of this protean new west, but there is no space in it for John.
This is a film about a lot of things, maybe too many: familial ties, personal legacy, fear of maturity, toxic masculinity, the challenges of growth within a changing social landscape, but ultimately, it’s about the paths in life you take. Metaphorically, John and Jack are like the same character in different stages in their lives, John looking back on the former life he lost, Jack looking forward to an uncertain possibility, unable to avoid the question: can people really change?
My main priorities when making this were the authenticity of the story-world, and the performances, and in many ways, they are both intimately connected. Our locations around Penrith, Werrington, and Westmead created an immersive world for our cast. It’s rough, raw, lived in and imperfect world, and this was mirrored in both the photography and the approach of working with the actors. Although this a dialogue driven film, there was a lot space given to improvise, and make it their own, embracing the realism and chaos of the story at any given moment. This was always going to live or die with the performances, and I’m in awe of our two leads, Joshua Brennan and Jeremy Blewitt, for bringing this story to life.
There were many challenges in making this film, as you would expect in the middle of the COVID pandemic. We lost key crew, cast, and locations with little notice, and had to delay, regroup and reschedule shoot dates several times. Fortunately, we found a sweet spot in between lockdown restrictions. But, although COVID was our biggest impediment, in many ways we couldn’t have done it without it.
I speak for my whole team when I say I’m really proud of this film, proud of the multilayered and un compromising story we crafted, proud of the cast who brought their characters into human forms, and proud of all the professional, creative and technical collaborators who gave it their all in times of such uncertainty, as well as everyone who offered favours and sacrifices big and small.
I hope you enjoy.
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It was with no little astonishment and an enormous sense of honour that we listened to the announcement: the winner of the International Grand Prix at the 2022 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival was our film Mate.
That Mate might be the first Australian film ever win the Grand Prix at Clermont-Ferrand is a mark of pride that everyone who worked on this film will carry with us for the rest of our careers.
In all honesty, we had no idea how the film would be received, especially by an international audience, who might not be as attuned to its local particularities. It is after all a film that applies a very Australian lens to its subject: the changing face of a suburbia not always forgiving to an individual trying find their own way in life; the social ties that can be loosened in the process of this change; the sometimes fraught task of how individuals find a way of living with the people they’re born to; even, obliquely, the national mania for self-definition through real estate.
It was always important to us as storytellers to show a side of our city that didn’t feature the harbour or the opera house, a story far truer to a sense of place that we had been accustomed to seeing.
The film is in many ways deals in a series of binaries: not only of the characters of John and Jack (intense and engaging performances by Joshua Brennan and newcomer Jeremy Blewitt, respectively), old and young, father and son, but each also representing a certain social and cultural strand heavily linked to the places they come from. John is a throwback to the darker side of an older, more working-class iteration of outer-Australian suburbia, getting by on the inertia of a fading larrikin charm, for whom rugby league and rock & roll represent the horizon of his sullen dead ends; this is a world that undeniably exists, but also one in the throes of massive change and dislocation, as waves of migration of both people and capital transform the patchwork quarter-acre fibro bungalows of the outer-west into, in some parts, multi-cultural ethnic communities from all corners of the globe buzzing with a striking new verve and contrast, and in others, paradoxically, architecturally homogenous identikit developments of a curious assortment of types, from fervent and confident Pentecostals, to a thriving and self-contained managerial middle-class, to people like those John might have gone to high school with, now seeking to climb the Jacob’s ladder of social mobility.
John as an individual is in many ways trapped by this changing social context, stuck as he is the airless stasis of its slipstream, desperately nostalgic for a time that almost certainly never existed, reduced to pleading with Jack: “Johnsy’s a friend of mine”. Sure he is, mate.
Jack, for his part, only timidly engages with the world: when we meet him we’re struck by a shy boy, with a first-hand knowledge of what it might like to be bullied at school. Like all kids, desperate for a parent’s understanding and support. He’s also hopelessly out of his depth: what 13-year-old gets his dad a tie for his birthday?
Their differences, the things that start to intimate a life’s trajectory, start to really show at that classically Australian social institution, the smoking section of the pub, where all the social and individual strands that run through the film first meet. It’s here that Jack, previously passive, begins to perspectivally assert himself, the narrative having passed the torch, so to speak, from one generation to the next. A kind of Bildungsroman develops, but what kind of dialectic is traced? John may have learned nothing from the experience of the weekend, but surely Jack has done some growing up? Will he respond to the confusion of his world better than his father, or will be fall into a similarly desultory repetition?
It’s in the symmetry of two long shots (another binary) that the end of John and Jack’s exploring arrives where it might be thought to have begun. In the first the camera lingers on John’s face as he awakes on the couch; for John, the moment he first wakes up is the worst part of the day, the hardest point to steel himself for another performance of himself. This dovetails with the final scene of Jack standing in his mother and step-father’s driveway looking at John drive off, incredulity and bewilderment on his face, as well as something more, something deeper. He stands against a backdrop of high-tension lines and as-yet undeveloped countryside, a smudge of smoke staining the afternoon sky. Then he turns around and goes inside.
There’s another binary made up of the words “mate” and “loser”. There’s an ambiguity to the way Australians use a word like “mate”: as a term of endearment, sure, but only towards someone you don’t really know. It’s placeholder, a bit of almost exaggerated bonhomie to do the heavy lifting of any more substantial affective work. Surely nothing could possibly signal John’s cluelessness, the fact that at the end of this experience he’s learned nothing, more than his embittered disappointed and disbelief: “I thought we were mates.”
For John the idea that his usurper Brent is in some way a “loser” is clearly important: the uplift that comes with the denigration of others smacks not only of ressentiment but also is linked with a latent physical violence: Jack is asked to flex his muscles; eventually the coiled violence towards a “loser” comes to be directed at John himself. Is this an act of self-assertion, or some perverse form of connection? Is there somehow validation in the bruises?
It is with a great sense of pride and humility that I thank the jury and organisers of the 2022 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (Festival du Court Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand) who saw fit to bestow on us an honour we never thought even remotely plausible. Their faith in us hopefully allows us to take our film to more places, to more audiences, that its existence might speak to people wherever they might find themselves, which is, after all, why we do this.
We never set out to make a beautiful film, unlike so many others, seduced nature’s histrionics and the sensuous, austere sunlight of Sydney, but rather one that does some justice to a few of the complexities of the place, one that tries to show the flickering grace in the propulsive ugliness that powers our lives. As Fredric Jameson once said: “The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it; that is why, finally, all beauty is meretricious”. And if we give up on beauty, we might as well find ourselves at a closed Werrington Station on a Saturday night.
Ben Tarwin, Co-Writer/Producer
