Visionaries, or The Cello of Katerina Valentine
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Helen Barnes-Bulley
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Helen Barnes-Bulley's biography and other articles by this writer
First, the director made a pitch. The film finance people told him to get a scriptwriter. ‘I've got a vision,' he said, but they told him he needed a script as well as a vision or otherwise they wouldn't fund the film and they wanted to fund it because they liked the idea of the sea and the cello-playing heroine and the nexus between the rhythms of the ocean and of the music and the dairy; the milking-machines, the cows, the leisurely coastal ebb and flow of peoples' lives – everything had a rhythm, they said. What was needed was a script.
A woman on a white beach in a sun hat, holding a walking stick, intricately carved, and walking a dog. Sunset. The waves are pale grey, vitreous, like glass in the making. The sun has lost its heat, darkness is imminent. The world is holding its breath. She stares out to sea, very still, and then the dog barks joyously and leaps but the woman doesn't turn. A man approaches and the dog runs to meet him, leaping higher now. Still the woman has her face turned to the sea and it is only when the man is right beside her that she turns her face to look at him. The woman's name is Sylvia Meridew, and she is almost deaf. She is also dying. Dying just like the dairy industry that once animated the coastal town and gave life to the farmers and the shopkeepers in the district. The man who has come to walk her back to her house is her son, Max. Max Meridew.
The director speaks. ‘My idea for the film, you know, is that it's a kind of a tribute to Truffaut and Goddard, maybe, and Visconti and Cassavetes and Altman, and Woody Allen and – well, all the ones I learned about at film school that play around with genres, and with all those references, you know, to other films in the same genre not taking their ideas but commenting on them, sort of like making a tribute, you know, being playful, and – appropriating, yeah, that's the word ... self-aware, you know ... but at the same time fresh, and dynamic ... I've got a writer but I wish I could write the script myself. I mean, if Woody Allen can do it then ... and Bunuel, yeah, he's the guy ... the magic realist guy ... wow. The thing is, THE THING IS: I've got Larissa Pero as my star. That's my ace. My lever. My calling-card for Hollywood. If Max was not smitten with Larissa Pero, the outcome might be – I'm not saying definitely, but maybe – quite different and he wouldn't now be on the run, a marked man in a stolen truck with a homesick dog and a shredded finger. This is real Aussie imagery you know ... out in the bush, the man alone, the truck – a ute, maybe the dog ... a faithful true-blue kind of dog, a border collie, or a kelpie ... makes you think of Brian Brown, you know, or Tim Winton ... those kinds of guys.'
Max lights the fuse at midnight. The bomb is a rather old-fashioned one, the kind you see characters making in movies that are set in a time before plastic explosives, terrorists with suspicious hand luggage or bank robbers with degrees in mining engineering. His reasons for manufacturing the bomb are as old-fashioned as the thing itself. A bomb is a bomb but it is also something other than itself. It is a metaphor.
The landscape – or more correctly, the seascape – is a metaphor, the director tells the assembled cast and crew, for Katerina's state of mind: it represents her dream, her vision of the future – the waves, the rhythm, the light on the water.
‘I've always wanted to be metaphorical, you know ... those guys at film school used to talk about visual metaphors all the time ... Welles, and Ford, and Lean and stuff ... well, I can do it too. I know how. I know how to be metaphorical, man. I've seen Tarantino and those hip Japanese guys ... don't know their names but I know what they mean.'
Larissa comes out of her caravan. She smells the salt. Her blue eyes dazzled by the brightness of the sea and the light bouncing off it. She's trying to zip up the world's tightest pair of jeans. She can't help thinking they might do some kind of damage. They're designed for Javez to get as many close-ups as possible of her assets. She might call the assets in question her buttocks, which is a comical sort of word, but Javez would call it something plainer, something more real.
The first time Max sees Larissa is on the film set at the factory. The machines are all still in use, the workers being paid as extras to do their usual jobs. The butter comes out at the end of the process and is wrapped neatly in its silver foil wrapper with the velvet cow logo in blue on the top. Very satisfying little bricks of creamy butter. Families in Baranda Valley have been farming fat dairy cattle for at least a hundred and fifty years. The river cuts through the paddocks in a long silver streak flowing down out of the Great Dividing Range and emptying itself into the silver-blue Pacific.
You can see why Javez Brown decided to shoot The Cello of Katerina Valentine here. More pristine than Byron, not so popular with tourists, not so commercialised. Stunning seascapes, lush green hills, sandy beaches virtually empty most of the year: it's perfect. Javez is not his real name. His real name is Keith. Javez wants to make magical realist films about the Australian experience. Keith is not a good name for a magic realist. It's not a magic name.
MAX HAS BEEN ASKED TO SHOW THE FILM PEOPLE AROUND THE DAIRY.
‘We want to shoot while you're all at work,' Javez tells the butter-makers. ‘I want that real kind of feeling, you know – nothing fake, just the way it actually happens.'
Max can't help noticing how the women have taken extra care with their makeup, how they have piled on lipstick and mascara they normally wouldn't bother with, how they've encouraged a curl or two to spring out from beneath the plastic caps they're wearing over their hair. The men are more concerned with watching Larissa Pero make her way along the concrete floor, stepping daintily over the puddles of leaky cream, a piece of poetry in her laminated jeans.
‘So you're Max Meridew,' Javez the magic realist says.
Max watches Larissa as she rehearses a scene with the leading man, a young actor whose eyes don't seem able to focus quite properly but he's handsome enough – which is, after all, what's required. Larissa is all pale silvery vulnerability. She has star quality. This is what Max would have thought if such a term were in his vocabulary, which it isn't – but he sees the way her face registers a dozen different transitions of mood and feeling and how the camera responds. It's a gift. Not just for an actor, but for life.
He went then.
He found his mother down on the sand as usual. The dog came racing across to greet him. Sylvia put out her hand and Max took hold of it.
‘Is it fun?' she asks.
Max sees that today his mother looks better than usual – not so tired and there's colour in her cheeks.
‘It's interesting,' he says.
He met Larissa one evening on the beach. He felt his heart ticking inside his chest.
‘That's my house,' he said when she inquired, ‘the blue one.'
‘It's lovely. A real beach house. It's a wonder Javez didn't snap it up for the film.'
Max didn't answer.
‘Who is the woman in the hat?'
Max pauses and stares out at the sea. The woman is standing motionless on the edge of the water.
‘That's my mother,' he says.
She waits.
‘One evening she'll leave the dog inside, lie her stick on the sand and walk into the sea.'