CAST AND CREW
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Writing credits (in alphabetical order) |
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Cast (in credits order) |
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Alan |
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Jude |
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Steph |
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Brian |
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Jass (as Samantha Healy) |
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Johnny |
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Kath |
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Thuy |
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Sandy |
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Chen Poh |
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Maria (as Caroline Mignone) |
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Kenny Carter |
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Grandpa |
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Dave |
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Thommo (as Adrian Shirle) |
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Personnel Officer |
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Peach Queen |
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Executive |
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Junior Manager |
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Cherie |
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Security Guard |
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Pregnant Jass |
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Dave's Mate #1 |
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Dave's Mate #2 |
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Gregory |
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makeup department head |
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stand-by props |
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art department laborer |
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assistant set decorator |
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sound re-recording mixer |
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digital compositor |
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digital compositor |
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digital compositor: Rising Sun Pictures |
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assistant costume stand-by (as Samantha van Gyen) |
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BOX OFFICE
Budget
AUD 5,500,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend
AUD 80,799 (Australia) (13 June 2005)
Gross
AUD 406,604 (Australia) (22 February 2006)
AUD 208,236 (Australia) (21 June 2005)
AUD 63,124 (Australia) (19 June 2005)
AUD 145,112 (Australia) (15 June 2005)
Filming Dates
24 March 2003 - May 2003 (6 weeks)
Copyright Holder
Hopscotch Films
REALEASE DATES
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(Montreal Film Festival) (premiere) |
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(Boomerang Australian Film Festival) |
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(Hollywood Film Festival) |
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(Adelaide Film Festival) (premiere) |
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(Cannes Film Market) |
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INTERVIEWS
Infilm Interviews
http://www.infilm.com.au/features/craig_monahan/index.htm
At The Movies
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1386701.htm
The Sydney Morning Herald – Sue Smith
http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/questions-for-sue-smith/2005/06/26/1119724514956.html
The Sydney Morning Herald – Hugo Weaving
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Hugo-is-not-a-dirty-word/2005/06/02/1117568304652.html
REVIEWS
Variety
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117925038?categoryid=31&cs=1
Our Brisbane
http://ourbrisbane.yourmovies.com.au/index.cfm?action=movieInfo&title_id=12806
Adelaide University Film Society
http://www.aufs.org/reviews/film/peaches.php
Catholic Church in Australia
http://www.catholic.org.au/filmreviews/viewreview.asp?fid=529
Producers and Director’s Guild of Victoria
http://www.pdgv.com.au/news/2005-06-11_00.html
Australian Film Institute
http://www.afi.org.au/latestnews/news_detailed.asp?id=47
Darwin Palmerston Sun
http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/universe/document?_m=16221a7b7039da4571820f9ef74b5b34&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVtb-zSkVA&_md5=dc7b9710f13fe70bcac0f2fca685c5b3
Daily Telegraph Sydney
http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/universe/document?_m=16221a7b7039da4571820f9ef74b5b34&_docnum=19&wchp=dGLbVtb-zSkVA&_md5=00d28b6c65beb80e056623e8c80ef14a
ONLINE PRESENCE
NineMSN
http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/film_reviews/article_1799.asp
At The Movies
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1386327.htm
Movie Vault.com
http://www.movie-vault.com/reviews/GnaXqIhqBHOQoSpN
Xpress Mag.com.au
http://www.xpressmag.com.au/archives/2005/06/peaches_the_lun.php
M/C Reviews
http://reviews.media-culture.org.au/article.php?sid=1221
Search SA
http://www.searchsa.com.au/Review/Movie_Review.asp?id=247
Yahoo 7Movies
http://au.movies.yahoo.com/Peaches/movie/13921/featured-review/
Cinephilia
http://www.cinephilia.net.au/show_review.php?reviewid=657&movieid=2720
The Deep End
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/deepend/stories/s1387627.htm
Street News Service
http://www.streetnewsservice.org/story.html?StoryID=19061
Untitled
http://www.impactservices.net.au/movies/peaches.htm
PART 2
SYNOPSIS
The film “Peaches” is centered around a young girl named Steph, who throughout the course of the film, develops into womanhood. The film begins and ends around the image of a car leaving town; the first car contains Steph’s parents. While leaving town on the road, the car hits a black spot and spins out of control, killing both parents and leaving Steph as the “miracle child” still alive inside her mother’s womb. We next see Steph on her eighteenth birthday as two important events happen to her; she begins work at the town’s local peach factory with her guardian Jude and she receives her mother’s diary from her grandfather.
Steph is a quiet, shy girl who suffers from dyslexia. She lives with Jude, her guardian and mother’s best friend who smothers her in order to protect the “miracle baby” from ever feeling pain. Steph wants to learn about her mother and Jude’s past so she recruits Brian, a fellow worker at the peach factory to read her mother’s diary to her. Brian is Steph’s contemporary but he is everything she is not; he lives in a van on the edge of town, he is an ex-convict, and he has plans to escape, something Steph has dreamed of but never put into action. As Brian reads to Steph they begin to develop a bond.
The film continues through a series of flashbacks into Steph’s mother’s life. We see Steph’s mother (Jass) and Jude working at the factory when Jass was Steph’s age. The two stand up on the peach factory conveyor belt and put on a burlesque dance number for the workers. We also see Jass meeting and falling in love with Steph’s father and Jude falling in love with Alan (played by Hugo Weaving), a stuttering activist also working at the peach factory. The foursome has many adventures together (which include stealing a large paper mached peach and skinny dipping in the river) and become a very close unit. Steph finds that life in her town has changed severely from the life her mother led; the peach factory is no longer fun and Alan, Jude’s ex-boyfriend whom she no longer speaks to, has become a stiff boss with little concern for his employees. In order to recapture the sense of happiness that her mother experienced, Steph begins an affair with the most unlikely of people, Alan.
Steph and Alan’s affair benefits both characters; Steph gains self esteem and power over he life while Alan remembers what it was like to be young. Steph continues to spend time with Brian and we see her becoming more comfortable with who she is. Alan begins to relax in the work place and even concedes to some of the unions demands. At a party one night for employees of the peach factory, Jude finds out about Steph and Alan. She yells at both of them and the affair consequently ends. Brian invites Steph to leave town with him and Steph decides to follow him, but not without first speaking to Jude and letting her know that she loves her but needs to leave to grow on her own. Steph attempts to burn down the peach factory, to rid the town and herself of all of the problems of the past, then gets in the car to leave with Brian. After she is gone, Alan approaches Jude and the two seem to be heading towards reconciliation. Steph and Brian drive off on the road Steph’s mother tried to leave from, but this time they get past the black spot and are able to start a new life.
MY THOUGHTS : Genre
“Peaches” is a good film, Australian film reviewers concede that is a good film and I believe that it is a good film. It fits into the basic elements of a coming-of-age/teenpic movie and also uniquely displays a sense of Australianess. The only problem with “Peaches” is that it is only a good film; it never crosses over that line into being great. The Search Southern Australia website states the critical uptake and my own personal opinion of the film best; “it fails because it hasn’t pushed the boundaries enough and doesn’t have the big impact it so desperately needs. But it is still a nice, warm movie that is interesting enough” (Bruce, 1). Peaches is a movie worth seeing, but it is not provocative enough to revitalize the coming-of-age genre in Australian Cinema.
“Peaches” fits into the coming-of-age/teenpic genre. This genre has two basic elements; the first being a teenage main character that comes to terms with his or her relationship with a parental figure and the second being a teen picking a sexual partner (Gillard, 10). “Peaches” contains all of these conventions. Steph, through reading her mother’s journal, comes to terms with not only who her mother was but also who her guardian was and has become. Jude is an overbearing figure in Steph’s life, but through reading the diary, Steph learns that Jude was not always this way; she used to be a funny, lively woman who wanted to escape her town. As she reads more and more she learns that Jude stayed in town to be with Alan, the man she loved and only became the pessimistic overbearing woman she is today because of Steph’s mother’s death. By learning about Jude’s life, Steph is able to see the mistakes she made in the past and learn to not make the same mistakes for herself in her life. By Steph leaving town at the end of the film, she is able to do what Jude was not and is also able to free Jude of the responsibility of looking after her.
“Peaches” also centers itself around Steph finding a sexual partner. We see from the beginning of the film that Steph is automatically attracted to Brian, a boy close in age to Steph that works at the peach factory. While Steph is attracted to Brian, she lacks the self esteem and sexual prowess she needs in order to become close with him. Steph turns to Alan, played by Hugo Weaving, to find the qualities she lacks. While the audience is aware that Steph does not love Alan, we appreciate their connection because it helps them both become happier and stronger characters. By having an affair with Alan, Steph is able to enter the world of her mother’s past and sees that a happy world can exist for her.
If “Peaches” fits so well into the coming of age genre, why am I saying that this film is only good, not great? “Peaches” does look at Steph’s relationship with her parental figure and also with characters of the opposite sex, but it falls into the traps of convention and cliché. Steph begins her discovery of her mother and Jude’s life from reading a diary given to her by her grandfather who serves no other role in the film and is never seen again after giving her the diary. The Producer and Director’s Guild of Victoria’s review of the film was positive but they state that using a diary as means of starting Jess’s discovery of her parents is clichéd and has been used in many movies and books (1). Also, Jess does have a revelation about her relationship with Jude, her mother figure, in the film, but it feels lacking. In the flashbacks, Jude is so exuberant that we cannot help but like and connect with her character. By having an affair with Alan, Steph attempts to bring that sense of exuberance into her own life, and while we are told through words that she is happier and more excited about life, her face barely expresses any emotion and she is no where near as charismatic as Jude’s character. On the other end of the spectrum, we are able to buy Jude as being fun and charming in the flashbacks, but she is harder to believe in the present. She is supposed to be nervous and overbearing but the audience still sees that she has that fire and passion behind all of her words. The relationship between Jude and Steph is central in the film but both characters have a hard time truly displaying what we are told they feel.
The second key factor in a coming of age film is the search for a sexual partner. In the film Steph has a relationship with Alan, an older man, and with Brian, someone closer to her own age. The relationship between Alan and Steph is supposed to be passionate and smoldering, compelling both characters into change. Unfortunately, the film once again falls flat. A review on Movie-Vault.com states “In the lack of sexual chemistry between them (Steph and Alan) it's apparent that she's taking this initiation into adulthood cautiously rather than passionately” (Carruthers, 1). This comment encapsulates the problem with the film that the central sexual relationship is lacking in sexuality. The two characters appear to be more like father and daughter and almost look uncomfortable when having sex with one another. Steph eventually chooses Brian, Alan’s half brother who is more free spirited, to leave town with. Even Brian’s character has flaws, he wants to escape town and the one place he really wants to see is a footprint left from a dinosaur. The Media/Culture Reviews website states that the picture of the dinosaur footprint is a “disgustingly banal symbol of escape smacks of tackiness” (Schmidt, 1). His need to see this site does not have any context within the film and makes him appear to be a silly boy rather than a passionate man.
“Peaches” is a good coming of age film because it fits into the genre’s conventions by having the main character search for a meaningful relationship with her parents and with someone of the opposite sex, but the film does not enter the realm of greatness because it relies on clichés within the genre to display them.
Australianess
Another aspect of “Peaches” that allows it to be good but not great is its unique “Australianess”. “Peaches” is Australian in three different ways. The first way is that it displays (as most Australian films do) the importance of the land. The second two ways come from a book called Australian Cinema after Mabo written by Felicity Collins and Therese Davis. These authors state that Australian teenpic films from the nineties are different from those of the past in that the main characters are shown as inheritors of a nation divided. The teens in these films want to escape history and start fresh. The two main areas of division that teens come across in Australian teenpic films are social class divisions and racial, cultural divisions (154). In “Peaches” Steph inherits both of these divisions and is forced to deal with them on her own.
In “Peaches”, the Australian landscape is a prominent visual stylistic tool. The landscape matches the title; the sky always appears to be a shade of peach radiating the typical Australian sense of heat. While the film does display the landscape, it doesn’t have the same sense of Australianess that most films do. In other Australian films, the bush is very important. Australian is seen as a place with red roads, dry land, and beaches. In this film, the landscape is so smooth and calming that it looks as though it could have been shot anywhere in the world. I personally could not distinguish it from anywhere in the US. The road is often mentioned in the film as a symbol of escape and freedom, but when we see the road Steph uses to leave and start anew, it is a black paved roadway that does not necessarily belong to Australia or any country. While Monahan (the director) showcases beautiful shots of sunsets and the land’s natural fauna, none of the shots contain the unique sense of Australia.
The idea of Australian class divisions is very important in “Peaches”. The factory Steph and Jude work in is they key symbol of class. Alan Taylor is the boss of the peach factory and is obviously wealthy. Jude and Steph on the other hand are workers in the factory and no where near as well off as Alan. Throughout the entire film, the issue of moving workers from permanent to causal status is spoken of by Alan and is being fought by the unionized workers. Jude even attacks Alan in a meeting about the number of workers being laid off and wins her fight despite Alan’s protests. While the film does attack the current division of classes in Australia, the film does not press the issue, and merely touches on the subject. After Jude and the union members fight for their rights, they quickly learn that the factory is to be closed and sold for its parts. All of the importance put on the members of the union throughout the entire film are suddenly forgotten. There is no mention of how Steph will inherit the bad working climate in Australia; she simply hops in a car and leaves town.
Finally, the issue of multiculturalism is also brought into “Peaches”. Steph’s father Johnny was a Vietnamese man, therefore Steph is half Australian, half Vietnamese. Throughout the film Steph has side conversations with an Asian worker in the peaches factory and at the end of the film she dons a Vietnamese gown her father had given her mother. Although the issue of multiculturalism is touched on, it never leads anywhere in the movie. If coming of age films are supposed to deal with the problems the youth culture has inherited then “Peaches” has done a poor job. There is no mention that Steph might experience problems from being half Vietnamese and no mention of what she will do to change it.
Another area in which “Peaches” fails is in its direction from Craig Monahan. Monahan is famous for his first and only other film titled “The Interview”. This film also starred Hugo Weaving but “The Interview” won AFI awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay and Best Lead Actor (IMDB, 1). Monahan received international acclaim for the film. The New York Times claimed that it was a “technical showpiece” (Mitchell, 1) while the San Francisco Examiner claims it is an “intriguing cinematic experiment” (Johnson, 1). Australians also agreed that “The Interview” was a top-notch film. The Australian Online Movie Magazine gave the film five out of five stars and praised it for being an “excellent, gritty Australian flick” (Buckmaster, 1). “The Interview”, being Australian, did not have a huge budget and was simply shot, but the character development and plot twists gained it praise for breaking conventions and pushing the usual low standard of Australian films. Monahan’s first film revitalized the crime genre for Australia by breaking all conventions and still managing to tell a compelling story. “Peaches” got opposite reviews. Many reviewers felt that Monahan did not push the boundaries enough in the film and left the audience feeling as though they had just watched an Australian soap. M/C Reviews.com even compares some plot elements as being similar to the popular Australian show neighbours (Schmidt, 1).
Hugo Weaving is also an important element of the Australian film industry. While most of the reviews of “Peaches” state that Weaving’s performance is the best part of the film, the role still lacks the complexities of his other Australian films (Pricisilla Queen of the Desert, Little Fish, and Proof). Weaving himself states in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald that “The Interview” was "without doubt the best experience I have ever had making a film"( Molitorisz, 1). The audience of “Peaches” is thankful that Weaving is in the film, but we are also aware that this is not one of his most complex roles.
Summary
“Peaches” is a well done movie that I did enjoy. It has a steady slow pace, interesting characters, and an easy to follow plot. As an American, I felt that “Peaches” could easily fit into our generic teenpic films, but for the Australian film market, this simply is not enough. For the Australian coming-of-age genre to gain recognition, films have to do what “The Interview” did for the crime drama, they have to go above and beyond the clichéd conventions and really create a new interesting take on the regular beliefs.
Finding information online about the film online was not difficult considering it is a somewhat recent film. Finding information in books was more difficult for the same reasons. I came across information on the coming of age genre in books I read, but I found little information on “Peaches” itself.
Bibliography
1. Bruce, Christina. “Peaches Review”. Search Southern Australia. 2005.
Accessed April 15, 2006. http://www.searchsa.com.au/Review/Movie_Review.asp?id=247
2. Gillard, Garry. http://online.murdoch.edu.au/MED231s1/index.html
accessed April 20, 2006.
3. “Peaches is Very Tasty”. Producer and Director’s Guild of Victoria. 2005.
Accessed April 18, 2006. http://www.pdgv.com.au/news/2005-06-11_00.html
4. Carruthers, Avril. “Peaches”. Movie-Vault.com. 2005. accessed April 20, 2006.
http://www.movie-vault.com/reviews/GnaXqIhqBHOQoSpN
5. Schmidt, Christine. “Millions of Peaches”. Media/Culture Reviews. June 25, 2005.
Accessed April 21, 2006. http://reviews.mediaculture.org.au/article.php?sid=1221
6. Collins, Felicity and Therese Davis. Australian Cinema After Mabo. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 2004. Accessed April 21, 2006.
7. “The Interview” . The Internet Movie Database. Accesed April 22, 2006.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120714/awards.
8. Mitchell, Elvis. “Twisted Truths in Police Procedural”. The New York Times On the Web. June 16, 2000. Accessed April 23, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/061600interview-film-review.html
9. Johnson, G. Allen. “Interview Produces Interesting Results”. San Francisco Examiner. July 26, 2000. Accessed April 23, 2006.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/e/a/2000/07/26/STYLE9448.dtl
10. Buckmaster, Luke. “The Interview”. Australian Online Movie Mag. Accessed April 23, 2006. http://www.infilm.com.au/reviews/interview.htm
11. Molitorisz, Sacha. “Hugo is Not a Dirty Word”. The Sydney Morning Herald. June 3, 2005. accessed April 23, 2006. http://www.smh.com.au/news/Film/Hugo-is-not-a-dirty-word/2005/06/02/1117568304652.html