Blood in the 'burbs

Shock sisters: Alice Bell, front, and Emily Barclay. Picture: Graham Crouch

EMILY Barclay and Alice Bell were thrown together last year to make Paul Goldman's black comedy Suburban Mayhem, a film certain to add to Australia's recent reputation for mining the dark and seamy side of modern life.

Like Wolf Creek and The Book of Revelation, Goldman expects his film, written by his former girlfriend Bell and starring New Zealander Barclay, to disturb and divide audiences on its cinema release this week.

There is a lot of buzz about Barclay's tour de force performance, which brings to life the protagonist, Katrina, an uncontrollable 19-year-old single mother who will strike fear in the hearts of every parent in the audience.
The two young women are close, in more ways than one. Bell was also Barclay's body double, so when Katrina's acrylic nails are shown in close-up, sending a text message on her mobile phone, it's most likely Bell's hand we are seeing.

This interchange allowed Barclay, who is on screen for most of the film, to take an occasional breather.
Bell, 27, started writing Suburban Mayhem when she was 21, Barclay's age now. Barclay came from New Zealand for the part, then fully relocated to Bell's home town, Sydney, in March.

When they get together, as they often do, they act as if they are posing for the centrespread of a lads' magazine. Posing for Review's photographer, they wrap themselves around each other like lovers, stroke each other's hair and pick at each other's clothes.
One minute they are cooing in mutual admiration, the next sending each other up, acting aghast, then screaming with laughter.

It is compelling to watch.
We have been put through the wringer and had to grow up quickly, Bell says, by way of explanation. I feel like I have known Emily for much longer than I have.

After the adventure of shooting the film in Newcastle, NSW, last September, Barclay, Bell, Goldman and producer Leah Churchill-Brown went to the Cannes film festival in May, where the film screened in the section Un Certain Regard. Bell says there was a sea of young French people trying to get to Barclay and maul her after the film screened. Barclay interrupts with a story about the thrill of meeting American film-maker Tim Burton during one of many partynights.

I have never seen Alice at a loss for words. She was like a giggling schoolgirl, Barclay says.
Bell cuts in and contradicts her: We wouldn't shut up, we couldn't stop gushing, and finally he (Burton) said: 'Would you girls like a champagne?

' and went off to the bar.
Now the Suburban Mayhem team is on the local publicity trail, nervously awaiting the response from Australian critics and audiences.
The film also stars Michael Dorman, Mia Wasikowska, Anthony Hayes, Robert Morgan, Steve Bastoni and Genevieve Lemon.

But Barclay and Bell are in the limelight because of their youth, looks and talent, and because of the cockiness of the character they helped create.
Katrina is like one of those girl-women you see in old, souped-up cars cruising on the edge of some urban sprawl. You know the type: too much make-up for midafternoon, breasts squeezed into something very small, one set of red talons curved around a beer bottle, the other flicking a cigarette.

It is not as easy to visualise what Katrina does in Suburban Mayhem, which has a documentary feel. The film quickly and playfully shows that Katrina has risen from a family that has bottomed out, has a brother jailed for murder, has brazenly slept with every boy in town, likes to get her own way and has no regard for anyone but herself.
But by the time she has caused the lives of everyone around her to unravel, and a brutal death, she is more chillingly amoral than admirably audacious.

One critic described her as a wild animal (see box, right).
It was hard for me not to judge her and put my middle-class values on her, says Barclay, the elder of two girls born to a doctor and a landscape gardener, whom she describes as super supportive . When you play a character like that, you can't make judgments about her.

What I needed to do to make her real was to commit to her 100 per cent. I had to get to the point where I understood her, believed her and thought she was a good person, the only good person, who was doing whatever she could to protect her daughter and save her brother.
But playing the role was difficult: Paul gave me a lot of freedom, which was fantastic but at the same time scary.

In hindsight I should have just relaxed and enjoyed myself, had fun with it. I spent so much time beating myself up and questioning everything I did.
Before Suburban Mayhem, Barclay won accolades for NZ film In My Father's Den and appeared in the acclaimed ABC television miniseries The Silence.

By all accounts, she turned into Katrina during the five-week shoot. Bell says she was reckless and delighted in having consequence-free fun, and pashed both of Bell's younger brothers. Barclay squeals with mock indignation: That was Katrina.

It wasn't me. Once Katrina climbed into Barclay's skin it took some time to make her go away.
Inevitably you are affected by the characters you play, Barclay says.

It was only afterwards that I realised how anxious and angry and slightly disturbed I was (when playing Katrina). But it was not all bad: she gave me a lot of confidence, too.
It was in mid-2001 that TV commercials producer Churchill-Brown saw a magazine article about a murder and hired its writer to adapt it as a screenplay.

She and Bell, her assistant at the time, had a fascination for the murderous side of some families. Bell became the journalist's driver and sidekick during research trips and, just for fun, started writing scenes to make her boss laugh. She eventually wrote different scripts drawing on several murders, all clipped from the headlines and pasted intoscrapbooks.

It was the strength of Bell's script that attracted companies and individuals crucial to raising the $4.2 million budget: local distributor Icon, sales agent Fortissimo Films and executive producer Jan Chapman, who produced The Piano and Lantana and mentored the Somersault team.
Bell pooh-poohs suggestions she is the new voice of Australian film and reels off the names of admired contemporaries.

It is like sailing, she says. Someone gets the wind and you can't work out why because you are facing in the same direction.
Bell's story also had its critics: when the film-makers were in financing mode they were regularly challenged on the basis that Katrina was unsympathetic and unlikable.

Whether audiences have to like a character to like a film is an age-old question in film-making.
I wanted to say: 'Can you get off the formula', because it felt like they (some script assessors) had been giving the same notes for 100 years, Bell says. Now people see the film and say: 'I hate her but I didn't want to look away from her for one second', and that's what wewanted.

She set out to shock, to make people feel in awe of Katrina, but also to make her real: Kids are fascinated by these kinds of characters, have a perverse fascination for psychopaths like her. Everything teenagers are watching now has characters that are morally questionable.
But Barclay and Bell seem to have fallen a little out of love with Katrina.

When I see her on screen now I kind of hate her, Barclay says. It is so confronting and disturbing, very strange. I do not look at her and see part of myself up there.

Seriously, it is just someone who looks a bit like me.
Bell adds: We had to get into a mind space where we were on her side and if you look from her point of view, she was quite honourable ..

. It is only a year later that you look back and go: 'Mmm, maybe not, what was wrong with us? '
Katrina's anti-hero amorality, and its comic presentation, will divide audiences, particularly because she doesn't just get away with her bad behaviour, she benefits from it.

She is the ultimate, selfish modern girl but, in a sense, it is also a girl's empowerment story, Churchill-Brown says. We would discuss among ourselves that a lot of people would be angered by the film, and I am still nervous about that, but I am going to stick to my guns. We have not made a film that is complacent and, like it or loathe it, we live in a society that has these kinds of people in it.

At a recent preview screening, someone described Australian films as all about bottom feeders . Churchill-Brown suggests they see Kenny and BoyTown, and recalls it was only two or three years ago that everyone was whingeing about quirky comedies.
It is inevitable that some people will walk out of the film angry and disgusted while others will savour it, Goldman says, adding that just because Katrina is morally bankrupt, it doesn't mean the film is too.

At another preview he suggests flippantly that she is the monster child of Kim Beazley and John Howard. He is half serious, referring to Katrina's overwhelming sense of entitlement: She is bored shitless and she thinks she is entitled to have a good time all the time.
Goldman, known for the 2003 comedy about Frank Sinatra's Australian tour, The Night We Called it a Day, and Australian Rules, was intimately involved in the development of Katrina, and not just because he was the director.

When he came on board he was working for Churchill-Brown as a commercials director -- and still does between films -- and going out with Bell. When he cast Barclay as Katrina, some friends ribbed him because of her physical similarity to Bell. My psychologist says it is all OK, he jokes.

Goldman is old enough to be Bell's father. In response to a comment about that, he says: I have always gone out with younger women ..

. it is probably some inadequacy in me.
As an afterthought, he describes Bell as intense, demanding, smart and 28 going on 50 .

(He gets her age wrong and she is too loyal to provide his after he won't.) He also says her creativity reminds him of musician and scriptwriter Nick Cave, to whom he was once close.
Alice has that same kind of inquiring mind that synthesises everything all the time .

.. everything is grist for the mill.

You can watch her feeding that monster inside her. God help any one of us around her because she is taking mental notes all the time.
Relationships may erupt dramatically during film-making, turning friends into enemies.

The film ended Goldman and Bell's relationship, 2 1/2 years after it began and one week after the end of the shoot. But they remain important to each other. Goldman says: There was no getting away from the film ever and our relationship became about the film.

Goldman, who has a grown-up child, says the entire creative team is close-knit and like a family still. He describes Chapman as like a den mother to the four of us , Churchill-Brown as Bell's surrogate mother, and Suburban Mayhem as his, Bell's and Churchill-Brown's child.
Leah, Alice and I, and Emily and Jan: there is no one in that group (who) does not speak their mind, and sometimes very loudly and harshly, but everyone learned to listen very closely to each other and resolve things.

Goldman praises Barclay's talent as much as Bell's. He says that, by the end of a film, a good actor always knows more about their character than the writer and he is sure Barclay will go far.
She is needy and demanding, like actors should be, he says.

Asked to elaborate, he adds: People normally say that in a derogatory or flippant way but that is just what actors are. Emily's contribution to the film was hugely tumultuous on so many levels. She is sexy, intelligent, funny and f---ed up in a gloriously enjoyable way .

.. and in the way she should be at 21.

Barclay's next role is a world away from Katrina: she goes to London in January to play Anne Bronte in Angela Workman's film about the famous writer sisters, opposite Michelle Williams and Nathalie Press.
Bell was reared, along with two younger brothers, by a community of single mums . She, Churchill-Brown and Goldman are collaborating on another dark film, Skipping Girls, which asks whether a child who murders can be rehabilitated.

I am interested in families, suburban stories and murders in families, Bell says. Sad but true.
Suburban Mayhem opens on Thursday.