Nothing is sacred in the delirious comedy from Priscilla’s Stephan Elliott – a sex romp that simultaneously celebrates and denigrates Aussie culture

If you watched the gloriously ‘Strayan trailer for the writer/director Stephan Elliott’s Swinging Safari, you might have assumed all the kooky bits were plucked out to make an outrageously cockeyed, slaphappy promo.



I can assure you the actual film is 10 times as batshit crazy as the marketing materials suggest.

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It is also a fabulously sly, cynical and cheeky coming-of-age story, comparable to the film-maker’s two rolled gold and beer-battered comedy classics: the immortal The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and underrated Welcome to Woop Woop.

Swinging Safari is set in a satirical, whitebread Australian yesteryear, circa Sydney in the 1970s. Or as narrator Richard Roxburgh puts it: “A decade with too much time, too much money and too much cask wine.”

The audience are whisked into a suburban cul-de-sac, which would be quiet and peaceful were it not for the many graceless dingbats who inhabit it. The introductory, densely narrated tour-of-location reminded me of the excellent Andrew Denton-narrated 1990 short film Union Street, directed by Wendy Chandler – except smothered in meat grease, drenched in vodka and set on fire.



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Fourteen-year-old protagonist Jeff (a fine film debut from Atticus Robb) is an aspiring film-maker armed with an 8mm camera; clearly a semi-autobiographical version of Elliott. The story unfolds from his perspective but screen time is spread more or less evenly between three families.



Top billing, star-wise, belongs to the Hall family: Guy Pearce as Keith, sells encyclopaedias for a crust and his mother, Kaye (Kylie Minogue), is an alcoholic agoraphobic. A good old fashioned neighbourhood key party takes place – with the kids upstairs, after rissoles for dinner – between the Halls, Jo and Rick Jones (Radha Mitchell and Julian McMahon) and Gale and Bob Marsh (Asher Keddie and Jeremy Sims).



The various shenanigans that consume the three sets of parents and their kids take place after a 200-tonne blue whale washes up on the local beach. This perhaps symbolises a lost and purposeless generation: at the very least, a lost and purposeless local community. Like the short films of stop-motion animator Adam Elliot, and his terrific 2009 feature Mary and Max, Elliott weaves a network of characters whose raucous and/or idiosyncratic behaviour is comedic scaffolding, covering up desperately sad lives.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Atticus Robb makes his ‘fine film debut’ as Jeff Marsh, an aspiring film-maker and son of Gale (Asher Keddie). Photograph: Vince Valitutti/Becker Film Group

“We were the first generation to wear full synthetic fabrics. We were also the last,” the narrator reflects, name-dropping Swinging Safari’s original title: Flammable Children. That title better reflects Elliott’s delirious, decorum-destroying approach to comedy, where nothing is sacred – least of all our national identity. Presumably the producers had an issue with a title that summons images of minors set on fire.

The writer/director, gawd love him, clearly did not. In Elliott’s hands the image of a beach umbrella does not merely evoke sun, sand, surf and the weekends of yesteryear; it is a weapon for sight gags, to wave around like a maniac. When Sims chases an umbrella down the beach as it is carried away by the wind, vision of it reflected in sunglasses of beach bums watching; the journey of the renegade brolly ends when it pierces a teenager, the pointy end delving deep into the poor kid’s gut.

In this moment much of Elliott’s sensibility exists. More than any other director of film comedies, he is able to celebrate Aussie culture while driving a stake (or umbrella) right into the heart of it. Visions of nostalgic Australia, most pronounced in the beach scenes, present the past as it is remembered rather than in realistic recreation, but with the opposite of rose-tinted glasses: blood red goggles, perhaps, to penetrate the mist of our memories.

The Swinging Safari cast is bonza, to use the sort of parlance preferred by the characters, though Kylie Minogue has little to say or do: a timid, mousy, largely intangible performance – perhaps in part a result of the large number of primary roles.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Stephen Elliot is able to celebrate Aussie culture while driving a stake (or umbrella) right into the heart of it.’ Photograph: Vince Valitutti/Becker Film Group

The crew reunites much of the team from Priscilla, including producer Al Clark, costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, production designer Colin Gibson (who recently won an Oscar for Mad Max: Fury Road) composer Guy Gross and editor Sue Blainey.

Blainey, along with two co-editors – Laurie Hughes and Annette Davey – bring a hell-for-leather rhythm, chopping the film up as if they were attacking a watermelon with a cleaver, bits of pulp flying everywhere. The lickety-split energy might have been overkill if Elliott wasn’t constantly making connections – many of them satirical, and most about human shortcoming in one form or another.

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Australians will appreciate Swinging Safari’s ability to simultaneously celebrate and denigrate, encouraged to laugh at themselves: the cinema of They’re a Weird Mob, without the antipodean perspective, or any semblance of civility.

International audiences will watch on, presumably in morbid fascination – as if they were, indeed, privy to some kind of urban safari, populated by very strange specimen.

Is this outrageous comedy sexy or revolting? Elliott proves – though this feels like the least of his achievements – that a film can be both.

• Swinging Safari is in cinemas 18 January