Celia (1989) Dense, Political and Brilliantly Evasive (Review)

Australian cinema is exceptionally hard to get hold of here in the UK, due to so little of it being released on these shores. The only saving grace is that the ones that do make it over here have something approaching classic status, whether earned and deserved or unsung – and, being perfectly honest, most are the latter. Tony Williams’s Next of Kin (1982) was a recent title that Second Sight pulled from international obscurity, now, in 2021, it is Second Run’s turn with Ann Turner’s 1989 debut, Celia – which is receiving a blu-ray reissue after their previous DVD release. Another theme that ties Turner and Williams together, besides their antipodean filmography, is that they both have had directorial careers that don’t quite measure up to their clear and obvious talents.

A drama with a very dark heart, Celia has been dubbed by some as a horror film – in fact, there is a talk from a convention, on the disc, called “There’s Something About Celia (2021)” with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, author of ‘1000 Women in Horror’ that labels it so. Personally, I don’t believe Turner’s movie is so easily pigeonholed.

In the opening scene, the titular character (Rebecca Smart) walks into her Granny’s room to her find her off-colour, contorted, dead. Being so young, Celia doesn’t quite know how to process what just happened and starts to imagine creatures from the book she is reading romping around her home and garden – goblin-like creatures called Hobyahs as a manifestation of grief. Then, Turner changes the focus to the new neighbours who are as openly communist as you can be in a 1958 Australia going through the “red scare” – somewhat comparable to what America was living through. Celia becomes obsessed with the neighbour kids and their Mother, Alice (Victoria Longley), as that is the only place she finds affection as her parents (Ray (Nicholas Eadie) and Pat (Mary-Anne Fahey) are somewhat aloof and standoff-ish. Then, again, it changes tact once more with the film looking at the treatment of rabbits as vermin who threatened to throw the Australian countryside into complete turmoil. In that discussion is the confusion between pets and wild animals and how it affects innocent kids like Celia and her beloved pet, Murgatroyd. Even if Celia does have the occasional horrific development and there are monsters in her garden, this is a much more complex picture than the horror categorisation implies.

If the previous synopsis was all Celia had to offer, it would require a lot to process. Only there’s more, there is the vicious rivalry between Celia and her cousin, Stephanie (Amelia Frid), and the significance of an old kabuki theatre mask. The occasional visits to the cinema to watch newsreels and noir detective dramas – that eventually bleed into reality as a further coping mechanism for Celia’s trauma. As a script, this massively ambitious directorial debut could fuel thousands of words of intellectual and historical interrogation, and luckily the contained booklet by film historian Michael Brooke and Professor Joy Damousi more than satisfies that itch. As an experience, though, Ann Turner’s teeming script misrepresents the much more patient approach the writer-director took in telling her story.

I would hesitate to call Celia slow, however, Turner takes her sweet time in giving each of the subtexts and arcs room to breathe. And that is an important stance to take when talking about the film, as there is a version of this very same script where the director talks about the effects of being a child under communism in 1950s Australia and does so without any of the flourishes that make it tick. Said flourishes that have seen it get adopted by the horror community and compared to stone-cold classic 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut). More important than any of the influence this widely-overlooked film has accrued in the 32 years since its release is the quality of writing and direction between the big swings, that punctuate the vast research that Turner did on kids of communism. Its characterisation and development, each of the major roles have been fully realised wherein all of their decisions make sense as part of the character’s logic. And this is important when you look at some of the big swings the film takes, especially the big one that saw the film garner some notoriety beyond the “Ozploitation” association. The shock comes from the path that leads characters to a dark place rather than the dark place as an isolated idea.

Personally, I had been looking forward to watching Celia for a good number of years, and now I’ve finally got around to it courtesy of a typically excellent and thoughtful second run release, I don’t really know how to process it. Part of that is down to the thematic complexity, most of it, however, comes down to the basic fact that it defiantly evades any sort of easy characterisation. Think of it as an Australian kinder-trauma version of stand by me with imaginary monsters, practical effects, rabbits and the communist manifesto. Actually, digging deeper, this is the perfect manifestation of what Second Run do in one single, weird, lost-Australian classic. Can’t say much fairer than that, really.

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THANKS FOR READING ROB’S REVIEW OF CELIA

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