He Died With A Felafel in His Hand (2001)
Based on the book by John Birmingham
Principal Cast:
Noah Taylor as Danny
Emily Hamilton as Sam
Romane Bohringer as Anya
Alex Menglet as Taylor
Brett Stewart as Flip
Damian Walshe-Howling as Milo
Torquil Neilson as Otis
Sophie Lee as Nina
Francis McMahon as Dirk
Ian Hughes as Iain
Robert Rimmer as Derek
Tim Robertson as Suit 1
Robert Morgan as Suit 2
Sayuri Tanoue as Satomi Tiger
Principal Crew:
Producer/Director/Writer/Editor Richard Lowenstein
Producer Andrew McPhail
Producer Domenico Procacci
Line Producer Helen Panckhurst
Director of Photography Andrew de Groot
Sound Recordist Ben Osmo
Production Designer Iain Aitken
Costume Designer Meg Gordon
Art Director Rebecca Cohen
Casting (Australia & NZ) Alison Barrett Casting
Casting (Brisbane) Tracy Lemin
Unit Publicity Tracey Mair Publicity
Stills Photographer Lisa Tomasetti
Running Time:
107 minutes
Production companies:
Fandango (Italian-owned)
Notorious Films Pty. Ltd.
Distributors:
Village Roadshow
Release Dates:
Australia – 30 August 2001
Italy – 16 November 2001
Box Office Performance:
Debuted at No. 10 on the Australian Box Office and showed on 20 screens nationally for 3 weeks, grossing $501,787 (AUD) in that time. In its fourth week of release, it had dropped to No. 19 and was showing on 17 screens nationally. In its fifth week, it had dropped out of the Top 20 films and therefore no more data is available on its performance. At the fourth week, the film had made $580,416 (AUD) overall.
Budget:
$3.9 million (AUD)
Technical Specifications:
Film negative format – 35 mm
Printed film format – 35 mm
Awards/Nominations:
AFI award nomination for Richard Lowenstein for Best Screenplay adapted from another source.
Interviews with the Filmmakers:
Richard Lowenstein
· www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=5216&s=Interviews
· 2001, "The Director's Cut" in Cinema Papers, No. 137, p. 11-13.
Noah Taylor
www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=5217&s=Interviews
Reviews of the Film:
Reviews by
www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=5202&s=Reviews
Review by Jake Wilson at "Senses of Cinema" website, accessed from Rotten Tomatoes website:
www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-10000717/reviews.php?critic=all&sortby=default&page=2&vid=281857
Note: Rotten Tomatoes is one of my favourite websites because it has links to reviews written by various American publications and then rates the films as either fresh (more than 65% favourable reviews) or rotten.
Official Website:
www.felafel.com
Sources for this film information:
The Internet Movie Database
www.imdb.com
Rotten Tomatoes – The Movie Review Website
www.rottentomatoes.com
Urban Cinefile
www.urbancinefile.com.au
Media Information Kit for He Died With A Felafel In His Hand from Roadshow Film Distributors
Murdoch University Library Web Search
wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au
Additional Information:
Interview with Richard Lowenstein
By Michelle Daly in Metior Newspaper
A felafel is a deep-fried ball of crushed chick peas. A felafel roll is the combination of felafels with salad, tabouli and hommus, which is rolled together in a pitta bread. So began my interview with Richard Lowenstein – writer, director, producer and editor of "He Died With A Felafel In His Hand". The titular felafel should in fact be a felafel roll and Lowenstein mentioned that it has been "confusing people all over the world as they either don't know what a felafel is or they go 'isn't that a hard crunchy ball of crushed chick peas?'". I wonder if its too late to change the title of the film to "He Died With A Felafel Roll In His Hand"? It doesn't have the same ring, does it? It's a bit too lengthy. Okay, at this stage, I should assure you that the interview was not all about felafels – we did talk about the film several times.
"He Died With A Felafel In His Hand" is basically about the trials and tribulations of modern-day share-house living in Australia as seen through the eyes of the neurotic, yet likeable, Danny played by Noah Taylor ('Almost Famous', 'Tomb Raider'). That being said, it's more of a character-based movie rather than a collection of wacky stories, which it so easily could have been. Instead of taking too many scenes from the book and causing the movie to be overly plot-centric, Lowenstein succeeds in creating a strong narrative thread that leads the audience through each scenario while allowing enough time to get to know each main character, particularly Danny. We meet Danny, who is in his late twenties, living in his 47th share house in Brisbane with a bunch of macho guys (among them Damien Walshe-Howling of "Blue Heelers" fame) and one woman, Sam (played by British actress, Emily Hamilton, last seen in a UK television adaptation of "David Copperfield"). The arrival of Anya (portrayed by French actress, Romane Bohringer, "L'Appartement") and her musings on the 13th lunar month (or moonth) bring on one of the funniest scenes of the film which subsequently throws Danny's life into turmoil. With that he is off to the house number 48 in Melbourne. From there, we are treated to more bizarre events of the share-house kind and throughout the film, Danny is trying to be a writer whilst also struggling to figure out life, love and the meaning of existence.
As it stands, "He Died With A Felafel In His Hand" is a complex film written by Richard Lowenstein and based on the book by John Birmingham. Lowenstein explained that it all started about six years ago in 1995 when he and Birmingham "worked for two weeks together, pulling out the best scenes" from the book and did so by saying to each other – "okay, you write down your favourite twenty and I'll write down my favourite twenty" and they then "cross-referenced and sort of agreed on fifteen scenes" to use in the script. After the two weeks of writing, Richard remembered John saying, "I've churned out a lot of shit, so what you decide to keep is up to you and I'm not going to get upset or whatever, as long as I can have it all back". Richard explained that John "never came on board as a scriptwriter and was happy to be credited as being involved only in story development and as original author". John was still involved, however, during the re-writes, as Richard said that "every three months or so I would send John the latest draft and he would send back notes like 'this draft was funny' or 'Danny's a bit of a toss-pot' and I would say 'yeah, but I know a guy (Noah Taylor) who can make that toss-pot work'. Therefore, in the end, the character of Danny is kind of an amalgam of the experiences of Birmingham, Lowenstein and Taylor.
Also, in re-writing the script, Richard explained that "the scale of the film came down, as initially it was packed full of a whole variety of stuff, but it was becoming obvious, through not only budget restraints, but also the structure of the piece, that we had to start thinning things back and making it a more minimal piece". This seems to have disappointed some fans of the book who were expecting more, but Richard has countered that "there is still enough material in the book for three or four more films and John is quite prepared to sell them to other people" which may serve to placate some of the more die-hard fans of the novel.
An interesting aspect of the film is its production design which gives a distinct set of characteristics to each house in order to reflect aspects of the city in which it was located. During the pre-production stages of the film when they were collating the story, Lowenstein explained that "as the book goes back and forth between cities and is a bit haphazard, it became clear that rather than spread the story out over all these different houses that what we should do is pick three distinct houses, one in each city, as the last of say, 50 houses" and so along with the production designer, Iain Aitken, "we decided to take all the cliched, stereotyped aspects of each city and we pushed them to their maxims". Richard said the "decision not to go into the area of realism, but into one of heightened realism was because that's how we found ourselves describing each city to people". He described Sydney as "always sunny, with a big, white apartment like Melrose Place on Acid where you can just imagine a psycho Kimberley-type person who has strapped herself with dynamite in the middle of a plush, expensively decorated room". Brisbane has a lazy, tropical feel and Melbourne is like a Kafka-esque nightmare, where its always raining. This production design was well done as it allows style to reflect substance which takes the pressure off the script as the only source of meaning. Ultimately, the film is well-made, with good performances from all the actors, reflecting a well-written script and solid direction, which bodes well for the future of Australia's film industry.
Lowenstein explained that next on his agenda was to "produce a series of ten, half-hour shows with John Saffran of 'Race Around the World' fame, called 'John Saffran's Musical Jamboree'. A sort of satirical look at the music industry around the world, almost like a current affairs exposé where Mike Moore meets the music industry. As well as this, I'm working on a kind of anti-conspiracy theory thriller with Domenico Procacci that will show that all conspiracy theories are just the result of chaos behind the scenes. Its actually based on the true story of the only female computer hacker and will be a great role for a female lead as it involves a character who is severely dysfunctional and enjoys bringing great institutions to their knees just for the sheer hell of it".
Published in September, 2001.
Towards the end of last year, something simultaneously strange and heartening happened to the way I think about Australian films. I found myself counting Moulin Rouge, Lantana and He Died With A Felafel In His Hand among my favourite films for 2001. My favourite of these was He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and it contains characters and themes that are common to many Australian films, such as the anti-hero and the importance of platonic friendships. However, while Felafel's content is similar to other Australian films, it's style is resoundingly different. The original "look" of the film contributed greatly to my admiration of it and also garnered good reviews from other critics. The director, Richard Lowenstein's vision for the film was innovative and his cast and crew helped make the production into a well-rounded film. Audience uptake of the film and it's overall value as a text, situates it within the Australian National Cinema as a medium-sized cinema and helps us to gauge the place of Australian films in the world today.
Felafel shows the lives of some young Australians to be a very scattered experience, which resonated with me when I saw it late last year as I was feeling similarly muddled in my life. It follows the hapless and undeniably neurotic, Danny Kirkhope through three nightmarish share-houses in Australia as he struggles to be a writer while dealing with bizarre housemates and strange incidents. The film begins in lazy, tropical Brisbane in a weather-beaten house that barely manages to look worse than our anti-hero, Danny. Here, it is a life of cane-toad golf, bucket bongs and complex kitchen table discussions about, among other things, the politics of dating a new flatmate. Danny never seems to do anything apart from stare at blank, white paper in his typewriter whilst trying to gain inspiration from a piece of paper stuck to the wall saying: "Black is the ultimate...it eclipses everything". He has writer's block and seems resigned to his state of depressed limbo. He is, however, occasionally jolted out of physical limbo by strange happenings, such as a wall being chain-sawed off the back of his house, and is compelled to move on. His move from Brisbane takes him to share-house number 48 in Melbourne.
In Melbourne, it is constantly raining and Danny lives with a health-food Nazi called Iain who complains about the fact that 2-litre juice bottles are not big enough to store dried linguine. To Iain, this equates to Government conspiracy and basically sums up the paranoid atmosphere of this household. Danny is followed by his previous Brisbane housemates, Taylor (previously an army nut who is at this point getting into gambling and prostitutes); and the naive, drug-addict Flip; as well as Sam, post break-up with Anya. After Sam's suicide attempt, Danny and Sam have sex but this does not seem to change their relationship from the platonic friendship they already have. This incident, along with a visit from the trigger happy Victorian police who are trying to find culprits for the Brisbane fiasco, sends Danny packing to Sydney.
Life in Sydney is portrayed as superficial, yet stylish and comfortable. Danny lives with Nina and Dirk who squabble over petty things, such as the rightful place of tinned fruit on shelves, and they personify the phrase: "hell is other people". Once again, Danny is followed by Sam, Taylor (now transformed into a domestic male who cooks most nights), Anya and Flip. Danny is nearing the end of his self-made limbo at this stage and Flip's death gives the film its name and Danny the reason to start living a less stagnant life. He is finally jolted out of his mental and emotional limbo, and then by ridding his life of his pretensions, most importantly his Underwood typewriter, he is able to be less neurotic and more open to a mature relationship with Sam.
He Died With A Felafel In His Hand has similarities to other Australian films in terms of characters and theme, but it is different for its style. Danny is the quintessential anti-hero, seemingly revered for his ordinariness within Australian films - the lovable underdog, a kind of 21st century quasi Aussie Battler. For example, for most of the film we don't really see him do much except sit in baths, in front of his typewriter or around the kitchen table, yet his existential musings and general ambition to be a writer, but not knowing where to start, gives the viewer a reason to identify with and like him. So, his mix of laid-back everyman with a good dose of anxiety is endearingly similar to naive, yet knowing everymen characters within some other Australian films, such as Mick Dundee from Crocodile Dundee. Apart from characters, Felafel has some similar themes compared to other Aussie films. An obvious theme is the importance of platonic friendships and same-sex relationships over heterosexual romantic relationships. For example, Sam and Danny's platonic friendship is more important than their subsequent sexual relationship. Sam's choice of Anya for a romantic relationship instead of Danny at the beginning and towards the end of the film is also telling. Not to mention, Danny and Flip's friendship is an important element in the film, providing the strongest narrative thread (Flip's death starts the film and provides Danny's turning point) and the title of the film. This is similar to other Australian films, such as Muriel's Wedding and Proof where same-sex friendships take precedence over heterosexual romantic relationships to begin with (O'Regan, 1996a, p. 12).
He Died With A Felafel In His Hand is not, however, a carbon copy of other Australian films, the content of the film is original and the style of it is thoroughly distinctive. The style of the film is different in terms of it's mise-en-scene, costume and cinematography. Apparently, "Richard [the director] didn't want to create another inner-city, grunge, cluttered film" and he succeeded in designing distinct looks for each of the three cities (Media Information Kit, 2001, p. 8). Lowenstein explains that:
Ian [production designer] takes us beautifully through the 'Melrose Place-On-Acid' feel of the designer sparse Sydney penthouse apartment, through the rambling Queenslander-style house in Brisbane and the Melbourne inner-city terrace.
-Media Information Kit, 2001, p. 8
The challenge was to capture the character and spirit of a city inside the four walls of a house (where the entire movie is set) and let the style of the film become an important element in conveying the story. Lowenstein admitted that doing this would draw on stereotypes of these Australian cities and push them to their maxims so that, for example, in Melbourne it is implausibly raining the entire time (Daly, 2001). To me, this gave the film a very surrealist quality that somehow managed to enhance the reality of the characters and situations, rather than detract from them.
Along with the mise-en-scene or production design of the houses, the costumes of certain characters also change as the film progresses. The costumes, as an extension of a character's expression, seem to be influenced by the overall production design, so that the viewer is subconsciously seeing the character's personality change perhaps as a result of the environment they are living in. For example, in the darkly-lit Melbourne, Taylor is a leather-clad hoodlum and is only interested in the seedy underworld of gambling and hookers, but in the brightness of Sydney, he becomes a SNAG who cooks and cleans whilst wearing jeans and shirts. A similar progression can be seen in Sam, who goes from being a redhead, casually clad and slightly naive in Brisbane to Sydney with her short, funky-blonde hairstyle, trendy clothes and wised-up attitude. These kinds of costume changes are used subtly in many films, but this was one of the more overt uses of it and one of the first I've really noticed in an Australian film.
As we have seen, mise-en-scene and costume seem to serve the purpose of conveying story and character points, and not surprisingly, cinematography also conveys meaning to the viewer about the story. The main purpose that the cinematography of this film seems to serve is to convey an insidious feeling of claustrophobia. The use of deep focus in many shots (large depth of field so that each character in a shot can been clearly seen, no matter how close or far away from the camera they are) allows as many as five characters to be included in one wide shot. As the film is dialogue-driven, discussions are a vital part of the story and the coverage of characters within these sequences is paramount. The claustrophobia created by these shots also serves to convey the experience of living in a share-house to the viewer - the characters appear to have very little privacy and space of their own in such an environment. Therefore, the film space created by the interesting use of camera techniques serves to convey as much meaning as what is within the frame (mise-en-scene and costume) and what is beyond it in the offscreen world. Style, in all of its aspects, is distinct in He Died With A Felafel In His Hand and cannot be underestimated in the creation of this classic Australian film.
My good opinion of the film was shared by most critics who reviewed it. David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz from The Movie Show both gave Felafel four out of five stars when it was released. Margaret Pomeranz reviewed it as: "dialogue-driven but visually inventive, cheekily wry about sex and the cities and very convincingly performed by an ensemble cast" (http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow). Jake Wilson's article entitled "Sharing, Not Caring" is an in-depth review of the film that while praising the film for its expertise, also questions the film from a social perspective. As his title suggests, the characters in the film are living together, but how much do they really care about each other? Wilson wants the reader to consider Felafel as a possible reflection of Australian society in general (Wilson, 2001). Other critics, such as Evan Williams from The Australian newspaper, also gave favourable reviews, but access to these reviews is limited to those willing to pay for them via The Australian website. Therefore, the critical uptake of Felafel was impressive, but this did not translate into lots of "bums on seats", therefore it could be considered a financial failure.
With the knowledge that the production was a laborious, yet loved one and the end result was critically acclaimed, it seems that much more disappointing that the film failed to make a profit. The production process of financing, shooting and completing the film took Lowenstein five years to do. Most of the time was spent in developing the script with the author of the book, John Birmingham, as well as searching for the all-important money to make it happen. By coincidence, Lowenstein met Domenico Procacci, an Italian-based producer who had co-produced the Rolf de Heer films, Bad Boy Bubby and The Quiet Room, who agreed to fund about 35% of the budget so that the FFC would find the rest of the money (Media Information Kit, 2001, p. 5). In the end, the film was funded by Fandango (Procacci's company), Village Roadshow (Australian & New Zealand rights), Intra (rest of the world rights), Festival Records, the Australian Film Finance Corporation and the FTO (NSW Film and Television Office) (Media Information Kit, 2001, p. 5). From there, they cast Noah Taylor in the lead role and secured an international and local cast for the production. So, with difficulty the film was under way and by all accounts the shoot went smoothly (see the official website at http://www.felafel.com/ for more background information). With the completion of the film, the release and marketing of the film was next on the list and their strategy was to target young audiences, particularly university students. Therefore, the university papers in Perth were invited to interview the director and I was lucky enough to interview Richard Lowenstein for Murdoch's paper, Metior. It was the correct marketing strategy to take (for the budget) and I identified and loved the film. This experience made it doubly disappointing for me to see the film get largely ignored by the film-going audience because it only managed to make $580,416 in its four weeks in the Top 20 Films. With its budget of $3.9 million, its loss on the market may prevent another film like this from being made for awhile which is a shame to me.
Lowenstein's previous work on Strikebound (1984), Dogs in Space (1986), Say a Little Prayer (1993) and the ABC series Naked, along with his latest film, Felafel, suggest that he has a lot more to offer the Australian film-going audience. At the time of my interview with him, he mentioned he was working on an anti-conspiracy theory movie about the first known female computer hacker. This film sounds more like a genre film that seems like an easier project to tackle after the hard work of Felafel, in terms of funding and pre-production. Considering Felafel's place in Australian Cinema market (box office figures) as being quite minor, it provides the perfect reflection of Australia's minor role in the international trade of national symbolic images (O'Regan, 1996b, p. 77). Hollywood, as the dominant English language cinema, places too much pressure on local product to perform and by comparison, Australian films find it difficult to compete. The fact that Felafel, showed on 20 screens nationally for only four weeks is the most telling sign that most modestly made Australian films will struggle to find a large cinematic audience. Most can only hope to recoup some of the cost through video rental and sales later on. The truth is that Australia cannot manage to churn out blockbusters, but alternatively we can feel proud that we make worthwhile films that have great style and are filled with likeable characters.
He Died With A Felafel In His Hand was a groundbreaking film to me because it made me feel proud to be Australian. Whether it was financially successful or not becomes less important when at least one person can feel better about their country's place in the world after they see that one good movie came out of it. It's ultimately inspiring and creates a hopeful start to the next 100 years of Australian cinema.
References
Daly, Michelle 2001, 'Interview with Richard Lowenstein', Metior Newspaper, 5th Edition.
Media Information Kit: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand 2001, Village Roadshow Distributors, Sydney.
O'Regan, T. 1996a, 'Australian Film in the 1990s' Oz Film site; in Peter Tapp (ed.) and James Sabine (associate ed.), Australian Feature Films, Melbourne: Informit, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australian Cinema Reader, 2001.
O'Regan, T. 1996b, 'A medium-Sized English Language Cinema', in Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, pp.77-110.
Wilson, J. 2001, 'Sharing, not Caring: He Died With a Felafel in His Hand' [online] in Senses of Cinema, Available: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-10000717/reviews.php?critic=all&sortby=default&page=2&vid=281857 (Accessed: 1/5/02).