Fran (Glenda Hambly, 1985) prod. David Rapsey for Barron Films, exec. prod. Paul D. Barron, Bush Christmas Productions, wr. Glenda Hambly, dp Jan Kenny, stills Skip Watkins; Noni Hazlehurst loses her children as wards of the state due to her failure as a mother; funded partly by the WA Film Council and shot in Perth; Eastman colour, 16 mm, 94 min.
Lynden Barber:
Fran has often been called a social realist drama but the film comes into clearer focus when it is viewed as a powerful modern tragedy. A vivacious character from a difficult social background is determined not to be a victim of circumstance, but her fatal flaw – an utterly desperate need for love – leads to regrettable decisions that harm both herself and those around her. This may make Fran sound drab and depressing but it’s not, thanks to Noni Hazlehurst’s life-affirming and emotionally wide-ranging lead performance and Glenda Hambly’s insightful direction and writing.
Initially, the film seems to be setting up a feminist story of a working-class battler, a proudly independent woman in a world of male louts. It quickly reveals a more complex position in which Fran reacts to ill-treatment by behaving in less than admirable ways. The film seeks neither to excuse nor to condemn this; rather, it sets out to reach an understanding of the social and psychological dynamics of her situation. Lynden Barber.
Lynden Barber adapts the key idea in A.C. Bradley's Shakepearean Tragedy, the 'fatal flaw', to the present context in a subtle and effective way. Fran is not Macbeth, but there is an inevitability about her trajectory in Hambly's conception that raises it above its documentary origins to produce the kind of cathartic effect that Aristotle saw as intrinsic to tragedy.
THE NATIONAL TIMES
November 29 to December 5 1985
FILM
Tough social realism
A CONSPICUOUS and unfashionable feature of Glenda Hambly’s film, Fran, which allowed Noni Hazelhurst to win the AFI best actress award this year, is that it is totally unambiguous.
There is no sitting on the fence between fact and fantasy, realism and surrealism the poetic and the mundane. Everything Fran has is on the surface, uncomfortably and sometimes stridently so.
It's a tough, honest, uncompromising piece of social realism which doesn't preach or pre-judge. Whether you actually like it or not depends mainly upon whether you like the principal character.
Fran is a pretty blonde in her 30s who lives in a drab Perth suburb with her three small children, two from different marriages, one from a de facto relationship. She is sexy, fills jeans nicely, and has no trouble in attracting men. Indeed, she can’t do without them, and she has no intention of settling down into the dull chocolate biscuit and TV dinner routine with the kids. Her current husband (Danny Adcock) who has deserted her, returns to beat her up for her promiscuity and she reacts by plastering make-up over her black eyes, putting on a shiny blue number that barely reaches her knees, and heading off to the local boozer.
Riotously drunk, she determinedly picks,up the taciturn self-centred barman Jeff (Alan Fletcher), and stays with him for three days, knowing that her long-suffering friend and neighbour Marge (Annie Byron) will as always pick up the pieces and look after her children.
Jeff, soon weary of Fran and her troublesome brood tries to escape by taking up a job in the far north, and Fran stakes everything on following him. She dumps the children for “a few days" with her reluctant foster sister, but in fact deserts them for a month.
From now on, Fran's life is to be an endless battle with debt collectors and Community Welfare officials.
Fran, we learn, never knew her father, but her mother, an alcoholic, ensured that she was never short of "uncles".
Not surprisingly she became a ward of the State. She has been left with a fierce hatred of the welfare system, and she goes into hysterics at the thought of her children, whom in her odd way she does seem to care for, being put into an institution.
Nothing if not spunky, she fights her corner well, but her world finally collapses when her elder daughter Lisa (Narelle Simpson) tells the Welfare Department's child psychologists that Jeff has sexually interfered with her.
Director Glenda Hambly, who also scripted, has not weighed the scales in any way. Fran is stupid, vain, vulgar and totally irresponsible, and she brings her misfortunes upon herself; this is in no way a diatribe against the fate of single mothers in an unfeeling and uncaring society.
If Noni Hazelhurst succeeds in making the character appealing in any way, it's because of a kind of blazing candour that she exudes.
Fran may not be admirable, but she has the vitality and honesty of a wild animal, and we finally accept her for what she is. Hazelhurst has won a best actress'award before — for Monkey Grip, in 1982 — and if she finds another role that suits her as well as Fran, there’s no reason why she shouldn't do it again.
I must confess, though, that what impressed me most about the film (which also features this year’s best supporting actress Annie Byron) was not any of the adult performances, but Glenda Hambly’s handling of children, and particularly of Narelle Simpson as Lisa.
Standing on the brink of an enforced early womanhood, Lisa is falteringly aware of her responsibilities — she will be left alone to feed the three when her mother has disappeared, leaving nothing but a tin of tuna in the house.
There is great subtlety in the delineation of her attitude towards her mother: one feels that,'incredibly, she understands and forgives. And there is a remarkable scene in which Jeff makes his first physical advances toward her: Lisa extricates herself with apprehensive tact, goes to the kitchen to make herself a drink, and makes bright, stalling conversation. A triumph of direction, this.
One jarring note — or succession of notes — should be mentioned. In the closing scenes, as Fran stares at a hopeless future, the sound track repeats a sequence or piano chords: they're obviously from the Arietta of Beethoven's last piano sonata, a 'masterpiece of emotional discipline, and an enthralling intellectual construction. Now, there's a cultural mismatch, if you like.
THE ARTS INTERVIEW
Mike van Niekerk
Glenda Hambiy shrugs her shoulders in defeat and looks happy at the same time: “I don't know why Fran is so successful, we didn’t think a cinema audience would want it,” she said.
Hambiy has good .reason to be happy. Initially rejected in concept stage by nearly everyone, then directed by Hambiy specifically for TV, the gritty realist drama about a mother on welfare sinking into debt and self destruction has, in four months at the box office, in the Eastern States, already recouped half the production outlay of $700,000.
The film has also been an unqualified critical success, vindicating Hambiy and producer David Rapsey in their unwavering belief, against formidable opposition, that Fran should be made.
One assessor, after reading a treatment of the script presented to the Australian Film Council, rejected it with the words, “No parent could act this way.”
Hambiy knew otherwise. The genesis of
THE WEST AUSTRALIAN SATURDAY FEBRUARY 22 1986 37
Producer David Rapsey and director Glenda Hambiy in the cutting room at Barron Films.
Fran began in her research for a WA Department of Community Services documentary. “Potential producers told us no one like that could exist,” she said. “But in the course of my work I had met people exactly like Fran.” This knowledge would have come to nought, after the department found it no longer necessary to make the documentary, if David Rapsey hadn’t literally looked over Hambly’s shoulder and urged that the material she had compiled would make a drama.
“Part of the reason,” Rapsey explained, “was because Glenda had a history of being prevented from doing dramas. I saw this as her opportunity.
"This industry doesn’t allow one to move out of one’s niche, particularly women.”
Hambly’s film experience began after a film course at WA Institute of Technology. She already had a degree in history and naturally gravitated into documentary work. “The problem,” she explained, “is in having some bank of recognisable work.” Disappointingly, Hambiy found after a trip to Sydney, there were no openings into the feature industry. She returned to Perth and documentaries.
But now the wheels began turning. After taking up Rapsey's suggestion Hambiy presented the WA Film Council with an outline and was instantly awarded a grant to develop it into a treatment — the blow-by-blow account of the movie’s plot.
It was, she conceded, one of the longest treatments ever presented, but that wasn’t why it was rejected out of hand by both the WAFC and the AFC in turn — the reasons quoted earlier being the major arguments against it. Nevertheless, Hambly was now determined. She spent 18 months — most of it on the dole — developing the treatment into a script.
“Then,” said Rapsey, “we sent it back to the AFC and told them: ‘You’d better be damn sure, you’ve made mistakes in the past'.”
Someone saw the light, assistance was assured and the project now moved to Barron Films, where Paul Barron began the arduous task of raising finance. Inevitably there was new resistance.
Part of the problem was that Hambiy, to everyone’s dismay, wanted to direct the film herself. “It’s a hard thing to say you want to do, but I knew I could do at least as well as anyone else.”
It was largely Barron's skillful entrepreneurial juggling that got the project moving. Risks were taken — such as beginning the production without all the finance in. But Barron could already flaunt the fact that he had made a pre-sale to ATN-TV in Sydney.
And his belief in Fran took the project a step further: A cinema release.
“We argued against Paul,” said Hambiy, “we couldn’t see who would pay $7 to see that kind of film.
In filmmaking terms a cinema release has been the best thing for Fran and its makers. A television screening can, in one go, have a huge audience. But when a film spends a great deal of time in the cinema it becomes a talking point, it gets reviewed and garners a great deal of publicity. That is accepting the film is good, which Fran decidedly is. Critics have unanimously praised its excellence, one going so far as to say it would be the best Australian feature of the year.
This is all terribly important for selling it overseas. Sales have already been concluded for a TV release in France and a video release in Britain. At the recent U.S. Film Festival in Utah Fran attracted a great deal of attention.
All this success under the most impossible conditions is heartwarming: Fran didn’t even have the whisper of a launch budget.
Moreover, apart from Hambly’s directorial debut, Jan Kenny also made history as the first woman director of photography in Australia, and the film has won three AFI awards, for best actress (the magnificent Noni Hazlehurst), best supporting actress (Annie Byron) and, naturally, best screenplay.
Now it’s on to new projects: “Another feature, which I'm going to direct myself again and," Hambly adds quickly, “it’s not about welfare.”
• Fran is being screened in the Festival of Perth film season tonight and tomorrow night at the Windsor Theatre.
THE SUN
21 November 1985
SOMETIMES Fran is a good mum to her three kids; sometimes she’s not.
When her restlessness, loneliness and inability to cope gets too much for her she is liable to get up and leave, relying on a friendly neighbor to look after things until she returns.
Life would be a lot easier for Fran without the interference of what she sneeringly calls the “department of good intentions," the Welfare Department in fact, which once made her a ward of the state and now threatens to do the same to her children.
To Fran the way of life she chooses has nothing to do with anyone else, and since she loves her children, why can't she be left alone?
Somewhere out there is the man who will want her as much as she needs him. and when she finds him, he'll marry her and all will turn out well.
Fran is a small gem of movie-making which tells its very human and moving story in a commendably unsentimental manner and with almost total believability.
The writing is free of pathos, the direction controlled, the acting natural and convincing, the situations drawn from life, but given dramatic shape and tension in the most subtle and unforced way.
Noni Hazelhurst's Fran is a marvellous performance, capturing not only the character's warmth, sensuality and spirit, but the vulnerable, feckless and childlike qualities which are her weakness. It is impossible not to like Fran, equally impossible to see her as a faultless heroine.
Writer-director Glenda Hambly has not written a feminist diatribe.
The men in Fran’s life treat her badly, but the kind of man Fran needs is not the sort to be attracted to this irresponsible, clinging and somewhat romantic dreamer.
And Hambly has ensured this is not merely a one-woman show by writing other characters in some depth as well, notably Marge, her caring, but clear-eyed, friend, and Jeff, her latest lover, both played with sensitivity and skill by Annie Byron and Alan Fletcher.
Hambly’s expertise as both director and writer is reflected in the performances throughout this film, which are exemplary even in the difficult area of making children act naturally and without falseness before the cameras.
Fran is the sort of film sometimes dismissed these days as a good telemovie but on any screen, large or small, its qualities will shine forth.
Fran (M) Russell Cinemas.
Verdict: Excellent.
Noni Hazlehurst as the irresponsible Fran.
MELBOURNE HERALD
21st NOVEMBER, 1985
Keith Connolly
FILM: Fran (M)
CINEMA: Russell
IF I’d been making a book on this year’s Australian Film Awards, Noni Hazlehurst would have been at very short odds to take the best-actress award.
Which she duly did, for her performance in the title role of Glenda Hambly’s Fran, as a single mother who is manipulated, used, disappointed and maligned by a society that doesn’t understand her any more than she comprehends its attitudes and strictures.
This is a poignantly realistic, touching little movie that out from the ruck of this year’s awards almost as much as Ray Lawrence’s winner, Bliss.
Writer-director Hambly also won a top award, for her screenplay, and Annie Byron, playing Fran's long-suffering neighbor and friend, took the best-supporting-actress prize.
Fran is a small-scale affair, probably aimed at TV, and in danger of being swamped by the teen-flicks, historical epics and program-fillers currently sweeping through the cinemas in anticipation of the holiday season. Yet no more worthy, or worthwhile, Australian film was released this year.
Noni Hazlehurst is convincing and winning as the feckless Fran, a loser from infancy. She has three children, by different fathers, loves and cherishes them, yet, almost inevitably, lets them down when they need her most.
For her part, Fran is dumped by a succession of men. She goes on being harmed and hurt By them because, in Fran’s experience and limited perceptions, this is what life — including the possibility of a secure and happy future for herself and the children — is all about.
In one way or another, she always has been under the care of (or, depending on your point of view, in the clutches of) the social welfare system.
The social workers who loom large in Fran’s affairs are presented neither as heroes or villains, but as less-than-perfect functionaries trying to do the best for those in their charge.
The baddies are Fran’s blokes. At the start, the latest in what we presume is a fairlv long line, villifies, then abandons, her. Then she sets her cap at, and temporarily wins, barman Jeff (Alan Fletcher), also with predictable results.
If this sounds like a down-beat chronicle, it is. But Fran rings true — in characters, events, outlook and non-glamorous Perth settings — provoking thought as well as compassion, indignation, and a few tears.
Some filmgoers rate such things ahead of happy endings.
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
November 24th, 1985
FRAN, written and directed by Glenda' Hambly, starring Noni Uazelliurst, Alan Fletcher and Annie Byron, with Narelle Simpson, Travis Ward and Rosie Logie. State Theatre 2. M.
Review by RICHARD DEUTCH
Annie Byron as the downtrodden Marge comforts Fran (Noni Hazelhurst)
Fran (Noni Hazelhurst) with her neglected kids Cynthia (Rosie Logie) and Tom (Travis Ward)
THIS stunningly beautiful film won Noni Hazelhurst an Australian Film Institute award as best actress but she really deserved about seven.
Her performance as Fran, a genuinely loving mother in her unpredictable moments of stability but a man-hunting bar crawler when her innate loneliness overcomes her. is better than excellent: it is multi-dimensional.
We can feel sorry for Fran. When she was five she was made a ward of the state when her mother was permanently institutionalised as a chronic and incurable alcoholic. Her lather, also an alcoholic, had long since disappeared.
She was shuflled from institutional care into a foster home and became paranoid and hateful of the Department for Community Welfare.
Coming of age she sought, stability in marriage. She bad no sense of her own worth as a person — how on earth could she have acquired any?
Her first child Lisa (Narelle Simpson) was born in wedlock. The marriage cracked up. Her second, Tom (Travis Ward), was the product of a de facto relationship.
Her third, Cynthia (Rosie Logie), is the product of an unhappy second marriage.
But when Ray (Danny Adcock), Cynthia's lather, bashes Fran one night, having found her in compromising circumstances with bis best mate, and leaves her with the kids, unpaid bills and that nagging loneliness that has terrified her all her life, we see another side of Fran.
"I'm going to have some fun," she says as she dresses up for a night out. She leaves the kids to their own devices.
She picks up a barman, Jeff (Alan Fletcher), and disappears for three days.
The children could well have starved since there was no food in the house were it not for the ministrations of her neighbour, Marge (Annie Byron).
Her absences become more frequent, her behavior more erratic. Jeff stays with her in her house from time to time but cannot stand the noise of the two younger kids.
The fact of him staying is in itself irresponsible of Fran because with a live-in lover she stands to lose her pension.
Only Lisa, a pubescent girl, is tolerable to Jeff. Even attractive. And here is where Fran makes the first of her biggest mistakes.
She leaves Lisa alone in the house with Jeff.
And the second.
She goes on a camping trip with Jeff leaving the kids with her foster sister and a brother-in-law who despises her. She says she will be gone for four days. When there has been no sign of her for lour weeks, the brother-in-law turns the children over to the Department.
Fran is declared an unfit and irresponsible mother, which she certainly is.
I have left out many of the details and subtleties. of the plot and of Fran's character so as not to spoil your enjoyment of this engrossing film. We feel sympathy for Fran, the orphan who feels that life owes her a bit of security and pleasure: but we cannot condone the way in which she ignores her children.
The other characters as played by a fine back-up cast are equally complex. Alan Fletcher’s Jeff is affable with the two younger kids but they grate on his nerves. He likes Fran in bed but hates the way she clings to him all the time. He does not like the idea of Fran as a mother and he loathes the thought of marriage.
When he tells Fran "I like getting out on my own,” and she replies, "you know, I'm just the opposite,” we get the whole picture. The characters - so true to life as it really is - don't.
As Marge, Annie Byron is also a morass o( interior conflict. She envies Fran her looks and sex appeal and sympathises with her for her bad luck with men — which she has shared — but she cannot understand a woman neglecting her children.
In one scene Fran teaches her how to fix her hair and apply cosmetics. Marge looks in the mirror quite astonished and smiles. "Joan Collins eat your heart out!”
But it doesn't last. Soon she is back into her baggy blue jeans and work shirt, with no make-up. her hair let down and unkempt.
She,like everyone else in this film, harbours visions of herself and others and the world that are in total conflict.
Glenda Hambly who wrote and produced Fran has been involved in the film industry for only eight years, doing mostly television, shorts and documentaries. This is her first major film and she has created a classic.
THE BULLETIN
19 November 1985
page 104
Noni Hazlehurst, left and Narelle Simpson In Fran: the drama and dignity of tragedy
FILMS
By SANDRA HALL
FRAN, the character who won Noni Hazlehurst the Australian Film Institute’s Best Actress Award this year, is warm, sexy, funny and dangerous to know.
Manipulative as a friend, unreliable as a mother and suicidally accommodating to men, she loves everybody and nobody. Her children comfort her but the only thing which keeps her flickering self-esteem alight is constantly renewed proof of her sexual attraction. So she skates along on charm, always on the lookout for good times.
She is infuriating and touching, defiant and doomed and Hazlehurst has caught it all — the jaunty walk, the upward inflection at the end of her sentences, the archness with men, the glamor she holds for her children and for her best friend. Marge. When she’s in a good mood, no one is better company. When she’s down, she disappears or she boozes.
Fran is essentially a film about boredom and everybody knows the potential dangers of that theme. But Glenda Hambly, who directed and wrote the script, underpins the details of Hazlehurst’s performance with plenty of soundlv-based insiehts of her own.
The framework may be documentary realism but the vitality of the characterisations brings to the story the drama and dignity of tragedy.
The film was shot in Western Australia for around $700,000 and, until its enthusiastic reception at the AFI awards (it took out three prizes — Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay and the Best Supporting Actress award for Annie Byron’s performance as Marge), it seemed as if it might go straight to television. But the decision to find a place for it in the cinema seems to me entirely justified for reasons unrelated to scale and the more conventional ways of measuring the value of what’s up on the screen.
Locations and art direction may have something to do with the film’s effectiveness — but only in a perverse sense. For Hambly has made no attempt to make the ordinary seem extraordinary. She has tried instead to distil its essence and in that she has been thoroughly and vividly successful. In her long shots of flat, sunny streets and boxy houses as empty of secrets as they are of dark corners in which to hide, you can divine for yourself the source of Fran’s frustrations.
Having grown up in institutions as a ward of the state, she is desperate to have a life of her own - a private life - yet in this bland and drowsy street of observable routines, she is as far from that as she’ll ever be and the knowledge brings her near to exploding.
She has three children — Cynthia, Tom and Lisa (Narelle Simpson) who, at 10, already has the grave, intent look of a child too often left in charge — and there is an absentee husband, working on construction sites in the north-west.
Played with dark bluster by Danny Adcock, he make onlv one appearance, returning home at midnight to beat up Fran for her latest infidelity before leaving for good.
Her only confidante is Marge, as dependable as Fran is irresponsible. Marge, too, has been deserted by her husband but, convinced of her own plainness, has taught herself to do without men. Byron’s delicate, complex performance gives her an openheartedness shaded with a troubled intelligence. Fran bluffs her and uses her and she replies with sympathy until at last, Fran’s treatment of her children provokes her sense of moral outrage.
Fran is never long without a man and, when her husband goes, she goes hunting, coming back after three days away from home with Jeff (Alan Fletcher), a good-looking barman who likes a good time as much as she does. He also has all the faults of her husband. He is irritable with the kids, impatient with her desire for sexual assurance at all hours and happiest in the company of other men.
It’s not long before he, too, has decided to go to work in the north-west but Fran manages to talk him into taking her with him - ostensibly for a few days. The children are left with her reluctant foster sister and, four months later, somebody from the department for Community Welfare catches up with Fran in a caravan park to tell her that they are in the department’s care.
Hambly and Hazlehurst have drawn their characters with enough vigour and compassion to leave the audience in no doubt that she will fight for her children - and fight hard. Her ability to win is another matter and that’s where the tragedy lies.
There are obvious pitfalls in trying to make comprehensible the motivations of someone as self-destructive as Fran. Audiences grow quickly impatient with fickleness and tend to squirm in their seats, frustrated in knowing better and not being able to do anything about it. But tl\ere’s a painful sense of inevitability at work here which leaves no questions unanswered. Fran does what no sensible person would do, yet she is always logical in her response to her own history.
At 30, she sees herself not as somebody’s mother or wife or even as a woman doing a job. As far as she’s concerned, she is still a ward of the state, a child of the Department of Good Intentions, as she calls Community Welfare. And the only time she can forget it is when she’s in bed with her latest man. It’s not the most intriguing dilemma but Hambly and Hazlehurst make it hauntingly understandable.
Fran: in Sydney at State II. In Melbourne at the Russell. Soon for other states.
‘FRAN' (M) at the Civic Twin.
CINEMA by DOUGAL MACDONALD
Glenda hambly’s film Fran defies a number of popular Australian orthodoxies to arrive at its portrait of a woman in conflict with herself and the surrounding world and her inability to comprehend either.
It is a portrait both entertaining and alarming. The entertainment derives chiefly from Hambly’s intelligent script and Noni Hazlehurst’s marvellous interpretation and delivery of the character in the Best Actress performance at the 1985 AFI Awards. The alarm comes ringing loud and clear through the issues that Hambly has assembled in her script.
Indeed ‘Fran’ takes on meaning more through its issues than its showcasing of a great actress’s performance. It drives directly to the heart of the basic social unit and explodes many of the comfortable myths that women’s magazines, TV and other films have gone to great length’s to foster. Fran’s family is a second generation of social fragility.
Her attitudes to her family — a husband away working in the north of Western Australia and not over-zealous in sending money for her support, a 10-year-old daughter by a first husband, an eight-year-old son from a de facto marriage, and a five-year-old daughter from the second marriage — are conditioned by the experiences of her own childhood. Fran has grown to womanhood as a ward of the State, without the spontaneous interaction of a proper family environment. As a result, the period of her life dealt with in the film is a time of crisis with no solid background of experience to sustain her.
We first see Fran as a bubbly, brig it young woman dealing with an unpaid phone bill and a hoon in a Holden. We meet her only real friend, another lone parent We meet her children. This normalcy, this expression of likeability, is a necessary preparation of the film-goer for the exposure of the film’s issues. What distinguishes Fran from her friend Margie (Annie Byron) is Fran’s need for a man in her life. Failed marriage has given Margie strength and independence. Fran cannot cope with loneliness. Her husband (Danny Adcock) arrives home unexpectedly and accuses her of sleeping around. The drama really begins at this point Glenda Hambly leads Fran down a path of inevitable disaster. In reaction to the beating, both emotional and physical, from her husband, Fran goes on the town and picks up a barman. We begin to discover the inherent weaknesses of her character. What was to be an evening out turns into a three-day absence during which Lisa, the eldest daughter, tries to be a parent and has to turn to Margie for aid. Fran brings Jeff the barman (Alan Fletcher) home and embarks on a pathetic attempt to achieve romance and love. Jeff will not make a commitment. He is too fond of Lisa for comfort Logically, inexorably, the film follows those three dramatic components to a sad, inevitable conclusion that leaves Fran alone and her children about to face the uncertainty of being fostered out When the issues in the film
boil down to basics it becomes apparent that their focus is on Fran’s emotional and intellectual unfitness to take responsibility for the care and development of her children. She is not wicked, she is not negligent by her own standards. Her defect is that she has not built up a sufficient store of love and caring in her own life to be able to pass it meaningfully to the children. And, because she cannot recognise her own deficiency, she cannot understand the events around her. So she lurches from one crisis to the next disaster, believing that she is doing the right thing.
From the safety of our cinema seats we can see that Fran is totally out of her depth. Indeed, she might well have had a better life if she had been sterilised as a teenager. But that proposition raises the question: who among us has the right to make a decision of that kind affecting another human being? Forty-five years ago the world was in the middle of a ferocious war that ultimately was about that same question, of social engineering by bureaucratic fiat. In the end, what ‘Fran’ tells us is that we must be allowed to experience our own destinies, make our own mistakes; we must strive as we are able to make our lives satisfying; and, if we are inherently unable to succeed in that striving we must accept that outcome. For the alternative, of having somebody else make for us the decisions that will shape our future lives, is not acceptable.
Tough, uncompromising stuff, this, but delivered in a format that is very admirable. Noni Hazlehurst is simply wonderful as Fran, carrying the film to the emotional and dramatic heights that it deserves. Glenda Hambly’s script and direction are both first rate.
VARIETY
15 May 1985 pages 18 & 24
Fran
(AUSTRALIAN-COLOR)
Cannes, May 10,
A Barron Films prcscnlalion. Produced by David Rapscy. Directed by Glenda Hambly. Stars Noni Haziehurst. Exec producer, Paul Barron; screenplay, Hambly; camera (color), Jan Kenny; additional photography, Yuri Sokol; art director, Theo Mathews, composer, Greg Schultz; sound, Kim Lord; editor. Tai Tang Thicn. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Market). May 10, (985. Running time; 94 MINS.
- Fran...................Noni Haziehurst
Marge ..................... Annie Byron
Jeff.......................Alan Fletcher
Lisa ...................Narellc Simpson
Tom..............................Travis Ward
Cynthia...........................Rosie Logie
Ray........................Danny Adcock
Carol .................Rosemary Harrison
Graham............................Colin McEwan
First feature from writer-helmer Glenda Hambly, “Fran” is a gritty, emotion-charged drama with a strong feminist streak.
Though many women are likely to empathize with the title character as the men in her life (nearly to a man, a callous, uncaring and violent bunch of low-lifes) combine with her own shortcomings and faults to bring her much grief and misery, the downbeat mood prevailing throughout and cheerless ending will probably restrict the pic to specialized art house audiences in many territories. Elsewhere, item will play better — and quite acceptably — on television.
-Its primary strength is a virtuoso performance from Noni Haziehurst as Fran, a young mother of three children whose construction worker husband splits after discovering she was having an affair with one of his workmates.
Fran started out in life behind the eight-ball. She never knew her father, her mother was an alcoholic and she was made a ward of the state at age five.
Life takes a happier turn — temporarily — when she links up with Jeff (Alan Fletcher) a moody, taciturn bartender who, she hopes, will rescue her from loneliness and insecurity. Of course it does not pan out that way: the children are placed in a welfare home after she and Jeff take an extended vacation in the outback; then she is told he’d sexually abused Lisa (Narella Simpson), her eldest daughter.
At the finale, the kids are adopted out, Jeff has hightailed it, Fran has had a blazing row with her neighbor and longtime ally Marge (Annie Byron) and she is left with nothing and, presumably, a grim future.
While the characters and.events are totally credible (if not exactly original, save for that ugly childmolesting twist), the shrieking, tears and underlying pessimism (leavened slightly by the odd flash of wit and humor) will likely make “Fran” a downer for those who want cinema to yield entertainment.
Hambly’s script is lucid, her direction is tight, and Haziehurst is a standout. In a poignant portrait, she consistently enlists sympathy and understanding despite her character’s glaring inadequacies as a wife, mother and all-round human being.
Lending solid support are Annie Byron, Narella Simpson and Alan Fletcher. Camerawork is by Jan Kenny, and she does a fine job in what exec producer Paul Barron says marks the first Australian feature lensed by a woman cinematographer. — Dogo.
Below are selected reviews of Fran and Waiting at the Royal.
FRAN REVIEWS
The Age, Neil Jillet, "The year's best Australian film has come to town and I don't mean "Bliss", "Burke and Wills" or "Mad Max 3". They all have big patches of cinematic splendour and delight, but patchiness is the problem. As a film that is all of a piece "Fran" is way ahead of them. It appeals to the heart and the intelligence as well as to the eye. It is a beautifully shaped entity, a work of entertainment and politics guided by a firm sense of purpose.
Weekend Australian, Evan Williams, Truth shines out of Fran like a holy light: it is the fullest and most convincing portrayal of a certain kind of emotionally deprived modern woman I have ever seen in an Australian film. Glenda Hambly who wrote and directed Fran has constructed a film of great subtlety and strength, a slice of social realism which is also unfailingly enjoyable and emotionally satisfying. It is a good and loving film, funny and tender by turns, sad and unforgettable.
The Financial Review, Anna Maria Dell'Oso, Fran explores the deeper, more forgotten layers of why people are the way they are. (It)shows what is possible with a truly excellent script, both artistically and technically. Fran is a large through provoking film both harrowing and humorous. It is an Australian film that explores a contemporary world with unflinching courage, honesty and emotional depth.
Sun Herald, Keith Connolly, "... no more worthy, or worthwhile, Australian film was released this year." "Fran" rings true - in characters, events outlook and non-glamorous Perth settings - provoking thought as well as compassion, indignation, and a few tears.
Sunday, Sun Herald, Susie Eisenhuth, "Fran" is a gritty slice of social realism that absolutely refuses either to pull its punches or powder its nose. "this is a brave and impressive little movie, briskly directed by West Australian Glenda Hambly, from a script with rare insight and a real feel for the Australian landscape."
Canberra Times, Dougal MacDonald, Glenda Hambly's film Fran defies a number of popular Australian orthodoxies to arrive at its portrait of a woman in conflict with herself and the surrounding world and her inability to comprehend either. It is a portrait both entertaining and alarming. Noni Hazlehurst is simply wonderful as Fran, carrying the film to the emotional and dramatic heights that it deserves. Glenda Hambly's script and direction are both first rate.
cinema 2
FILM AND TELEVISION INSTITUTE (WA) INC 92 ADELAIDE STREET FREMANTLE.
335 1055
WINNER OF 3 AFI AWARDS
Including
BEST ACTRESS
Noni
Hazlehurst
Written and Directed by GLENDA HAMBLY
starts june 9th
MON—FRI. 11.30am 6pm 7.45 &9.30pm.
SAT. 2.30 4.15 6pm 7.45 &9.30 NO EVE. SCREEN 1 1th 16th 17th 18th JUNE 23rd—28th 11.30am 3pm &6pm.
"One of the best Australian contemporary dramas I have seen" — Melbourne Sunday Observer
“The best Australian film of the year"
— Melbourne Age
“A film of great subtlety and strength, a slice of social realism which is also unfailingly enjoyable and emotionally satisfvinp"— The Weeltenri AiKtnliin
"H ambly’s script is lucid, her direction is tight, and Hazelhurst is a standout”
— Variety
"The framework may be documentary realism, but the vitality of the characterisations brings to the story the drama and dignity of tragedy" — Bulletin
"Annie Byron's low-key performance is beautifully judged and pitched at a level that allows Miss Hazlehurst’s fireworks to stand out in bright contrast"
— Daily Telegraph
“Fran is a large, thought-provoking film, both harrowing and humourous. It is an Australian film that explores a contemporary world (for a change) with unflinching courage, honesty and emotional depth.”—Financial Review
lop Ann.c Byron left as Marge and Bottom Roue Logic, left.
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PRINCIPAL CAST
Fran
Marge
Jeff
Lisa
Tom
Cynthia
Ray
Michael Butlin
PRINCIPAL CREW
Producer
Director
Executive Producer Scriptwriter Director of Photog;
Art Director Composer Sound Recordist Editor
First Asst Director Continuity
Noni Hazlehurst Annie Byron Alan Fletcher Narelle Simpson Travis Ward Rosie Logie Danny Adcock Steve Jodrell
David Rapsey Glenda Hambly Paul Barron Glenda Hambly
aphy
Jan Kenny Theo Mathews Greg Schultz Kim Lord Tai Tang Thien Steve Jodrell Fiona cochrane
FRAN is a contemporary drama of a mother whose need for a man's attention strongly conflicts with her need to love and care for her young children.
Her unorthodox lifestyle, her emotional insecurity and her apparent promiscuity brings her into direct confrontation with the Department for Community Welfare. A ward of the state as a child, Fran hates and fears the Welfare Department's involvement in her own family She begins a pitched battle with the Department to keep her independence
FRAN is essentially hard-hitting drama, a modern tragedy. However, the portrayal of the inevitable deterioration of Fran's family life is interspersed with moments of bright comic wit and playful humour: Fran herself emerges as a warm, likeable, if flawed, character
A MUM'S FIGHT FOR (IER KIDS
ACTRESS Of The Year, Noni Hazlehurst, might never have won her Australian Film Institute Award for her superb role in the movie, Fran, if she hadn't answered a young director's plea for help.
Noni, who left Australia last year because of the lack of “good" scripts fpr women, was reading a script sent to her by Glenda Hambly, who desperately wanted the vivacious actress to star in her movie.
Fran is the moving story based on real cases of women with broken marriages and children by different fathers, who battle with authorities to keep them out of institutions.
Noni, impressed with the story, accepted immediately and asked Hambly what else she could do to help.
“Get some support was my answer," said Glenda, who also picked up an AFI award for best original screenplay, “At that stage ‘Fran’ didn’t have a backer and I wasn’t having any luck getting people behind it because I’m not that well known."
All that changed very quickly and what was originally a telemovie is now due for movie release later this month.
Noni as Fran, is a loving mother of three children by three different fathers.
However, she seeks some, affection of her own and this strongly conflicts with her need to care for her children.
Essentially, Fran just wants to be normal — to go out with fellows and have a good time.
But this is viewed by the Department of Community Welfare as unorthodox and her apparent promiscuity leads to a confrontation.
Glenda had the idea for the story while researching a series of documentaries for the West Australian Government — they were formulating a new policy on foster children.
“The stories I came across were too unbelievable to be true," said Glenda. > 7'
“1 came across what f originally thought were hopeless women messing around with men while still trying to love and care for their children," she recalled.
“It wasn’t until I actually realised that these women desperately needed love and affection themselves that they
• Noni Hazlehurst and her screen daughter Use (Narelle Simpson) in a scene from Fran.
An Interview By AHTHOWY BATSOW
were doing this, but at the same time jeopardising their chances of keeping their children.” - "" L'-
Glenda said she deliberately wrote the character of Fran around Nani when she saw her in Monkey Grip.
“I just hoped that she’d be interested.in it, considering she wanted a break from Australia for a movie."
Also starring is Annie Byron, who picked up an AFI award for best supporting actress, as Fran’s neighbour who tries to cover for her and help keep the authorities at bay.
According to Glenda, Noni’s three screen children couldn't take their hands off her.
“When we had breaks in filming they were all over her .. .. their real mothers couldn’t believe the relationship!"
THE SUN
Iran
by Catherine Gorman
I've just read two reviews of Fran. One appeared last year in the Sunday Telegraph and the other in Melbourne’s Fringe magazine. I've also spoken to numerous women about the film in the past few months since I saw it. I’m so confused I hardly know what to think of Fran any more.
At first I was overjoyed at the realism of Fran’s situation. I liked the fact that she was selfish enough to say "fuck the kids” and go looking for sex and affection. But I disliked the way Fran was punished for it — particularly because her next door neighbour was the Ideal single*mother — she doesn’t neglect her kids, doesn't fuck around, doesn't even go out (except to do the grocery shopping!). Yep, you guessed, the next door neighbour gets to keep her kids. It’s disappointing that the two women are so opposite. We never get to see a woman coping as a single mother and having a life of her own, apart from her children. I think this could have been achieved without falling into the “supermum" syndrome.
Fran’s boyfriend even turns out to be a cretin — surely she needn’t be punished this much! Can't she. be allowed to win just once? She loves her kids and has a great time with them. Her kids are also her best friends and they have the potential to grow up independent and strong. They may be neglected financially and are not provided with the luxuries of a middleclass lifestyle, but they receive more love than usual in our society, even if mum is pretty wayward. There is an incident in the film where the oldest daughter is sexually threatened by Fran's boyfriend. This is again blamed on irresponsible Fran, totally forgetting the fact that incest runs rife in “average” families, even ones with “good mothers".
Fran's situation is explained too simplistically, perhaps overly so. She is unstable because of her childhood (as a ward of the state), and this explains her hostility towards the welfare bureaucracies. The message in Fran is ambiguous, but I think the moral of the story goes something like this — Don’t fuck around if you are a single mother. Don't try to be an individual. Above all, don't try and enjoy yourself. God no — whoever said mothers were allowed to have fun, except when bouncing babies or talking babytalk. A mother's role is to be all giving, the teacher and nurturer, totally altruistic and dedicated to her children. Didn't you know that? □
Portrait of a loser is a deserved winner
Noni Hazlehurst as Fran ... despite past disasters, still an inveterate man chaser
Fran <PG)
THERE is no obvious reason why anyone should admire Fran Carter, the heroine of Glenda Hambly’s excellent Fraa
In the course of the film, and in no particular order, she humiliates her best friend, sponges on her relatives, insults everyone who tries to help her, gets on the booze, chases after worthless men, knocks off a supermarket trolley and, just as casually, abandons her children. But somehow we can’t help liking her. In fact, we can’t help lov-in'g her, and I wonder why this should be so.
The fact that Fran is a woman who both needs and likes men - a seemingly rare quality in movie heroines these days — may have influenced my judgment a little, and the fact that she's played by the admirable Noni Hazlehurst undoubtedly Upped the scales a little further in her favour.
This is the role that won the best actress award for Ms Hazlehurst at this year’s Australian film awards, and it is easy to see why. I hadn’t seen I Fran when the awards were ■ being handed out - I was i rather hoping, at the time,
| that BJiss would win everything — and my one glimpse of
EVAN WILLIAMS
the film, on a large and very fuzzy video screen at the award presentation — was a brief clip of Noni shouting incoherently at her neighbours. I wasn't greatly enthused, but seeing the film as a whole was a revelation. With wonderful skill and keen intelligence, Noni Hazlehurst has transformed her foolish, irresponsible and pathetically incompetent heroine into a character of radiant humanity and rich emotional depth. Truth shines out of Fran like a holy light: it is the fullest and most convincing portrayal of a certain kind of emotionally deprived modern woman I have seen in an Australian film Fran has come up the hard way Pretty, 30-ish. hungry for companionship, she has lived through a grim miasma of institutional care and broken homes ("I was fostered out a lot as a kid”). She is also tough, knowing and wilful. But, the script doesn't allow her the romantic reserves of inner strength, that calm fortitude and basic good sense with which more comfortable works of fiction have endowed
their leadmg ladies. Helen Morse’s dumped wife in Caddie or Judy Davis's forlorn prostitute in Winter of Our Dreams, seem almost privileged by comparison. Fran is a loser from the start — not so much a victim of society as a victim of herself. Her courage and cheerfulness are real enough, but so are her selfishness, her stupidity, her sheer bad luck. Noni Hazlehurst has done nothing better - not even in Monkey Grip, for which she won her last best actress award in 1982.
But it would be wrong to suggest that the film owes everything to Noni Hazlehurst alone. Glenda Hambly, who wrote and directed Fran, has constructed a film of great subtlety and strength, a slice of social realism which is also unfailingly enjoyable and emotionally satisfying.
Women who chase men. once stigmatised by feminine moralists, are now despised equally by moral feminists. Either way. Fran’s behaviour is unlikely to find favour, and certainly her choice of male companions is unfortunate. She lives in a dowdy Perth suburb with her three children, each the product of a different marriage or liaison, and the men in her life are unbelievably awful. Her current husband, Ray (Danny
Adcock), has apparently left her, returning in an early scene to administer a bashing. Depressed at the failure of another marriage, she picks up a sulky and self-centred barman. Jeff (Alan Fletcher), and embarks on another affair. When Jeff takes fright and heads for a job in the remote north-west, Fran tries to follow him, and we are taken through a series of increasingly dispiriting encounters with welfare officers,
debt collectors, social workers and various institutional bu-sybodies.
It sounds depressing enough, and in a way it is; but the situations are infallibly believable, and Noni Hazlehurst brings such life and warmth to her part that my interest never faltered. I often had the feeling we were eavesdropping on real people; that camera crews had been living for weeks in Fran's house, expertly concealed and
tirelessly filming real events and conversations. Fran’s children, especially the eldest, Lisa (Narelle Simpson), give extraordinarily unselfconscious and winning performances.
For Glenda Hambly, a TV director and maker of short films, whose first major feature this is, Fran was clearly a labour of love. She knew exactly what she was doing. She has explored a vast, half-forgotten stratum of society
that lies somewhere between persistent wretchedness and mild discontent. The Frans of the world are not helpless enough to be classed as handicapped or disadvantaged, but never lucky or shrewd enough to break out of their rut. j Their lives have none of the romantic mystique of the true outcast or the numbing helplessness of the totally deprived. Too dull to succeed, too weak to rebel, their fate is simply to struggle on. Glenda Hambly has brilliantly succeeded in uncovering this bleak and unfashionable class and subtly reminding us that there are thousands of Frans on the edges of an affluent world. It is a good and loving film, funny and tender by turns, sad and unforgettable. And it deserves all its prizes — especially Annie Byron’s award for best supporting actress as Marge, the loyal friend.
If Bliss hadn’t captured the best film award with its wayward and eccentric brilliance. Fran might have won this trophy as well. I’m by no means sure that it didn’t deserve it anyway. But. that’s another story.
(Fran is at the State n Cinema in Sydney and the Russell Centre in Melbourne; later, m other States.)
I Marietta fa on holiday |
HIE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN Magazine page 1A 16-17 November 1985
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
7 November 1985
Life down on the
NO wonder Noni Hazlehurst won the AFI Award for Best Actress for her work in Fran, for it is a performance of outstanding strength and truth.
Appropriately, the Best Supporting Actress award went to Annie Byron, whose low-key performance is beautifully judged and pitched at a level that allows Miss Hazlehurst’s fireworks to stand out in bright contrast.
The film completed a trio of AFI 1 awards by winning in the category of ; Best Original Screenplay (Glenda Hambly). ,
Fran Is an exasperating character, though an immensely likable one as played here.
She is one of life’s drifters, without for a moment being aware of it. She has three children, one by her present husband, one from a former marriage and one from a casual affair.
Her own background is not one calculated to lead to much in the way of stability of character or wisdom of action.
She never knew her father; her mother, Ian alcoholic, was placed permanently in an institution when Fran was five; and her own upbringing in institutions and foster homes has left her with a deep mistrust of the welfare authorities.
Early in the film, Fran is abandoned by her husband.'rRay, a construction worker who spends most of his time on projects in the distant north and has finally had enough.
His decision is understandable, because Fran, bo ret} by loneliness and the tedium of suburban living, spends much of her time pursuing her favorite hobby, sex.
Slip thinks nothing of going out at all hours of the night to pick up a man in some sleazy, bar and she is quite capable of spending a few days with one of her pick-ups, leaving the children alone and without any food.
Such absences do not need to worry
welfan
FILMS with WALTER SULLIVAN
Fran because she knows that her next-door neighbor and friend, Marge, will look after the children.
Predictably, Fran's reaction to Ray’s angry departure is to head straight for the neatest bar, pick up the barman ' and spend the night with him.
The barman, Jeff, soon moves with Fran but is not keen on the idea of a permanent relationship and takes the precaution of keeping on his flat. “■
Neither is he in a position to contribute much to JPran’s living expenses, which brings her face to face with the welfare people. '
She cannot receive a pension if her de facto is living with her, she can’t pay her bills because she has no income and she flatly refuses to be separated from Jeff.
When Jeff makes tentative advances to Fran’s ten-year-old daughter, Fran attributes the story to malicious gossip and the little girl denies the assault to keep her mother happy.
Such are the little touches that give the film its ring of authenticity; the viewer might feel impatience with people who are so prone to delude and be deluded but you never doubt that such things can and do happen.
No attempt is made to provide a happy ending to a problem that can only end in disaster.
It would be a pity if all this gives the impression that Fran is a sort of dramatised _ dossier from the Department of Welfare.
Rather is it a down-to-earth, believable drama about the sort of people who could easily live not far from any of us and it is distinguished by those two glowing performances in the leading parts.
• Fran comes to State 2 on November 15 and to the Astra, Parramatta on November 21.
Noni Hazlehurst is Fran . . . out at a bar (top) and with her children (above)
MOVIES
MARY COLBERT talks to Perth’s Glenda Hambly, the winner of this year’s Australian Institute Film Award for the best original screenplay for the movie Fran.
FRAN, the WA-made feature film which scored three AFI awards at this month’s ceremonies, is so poignantly convincing you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a true story.
Written and directed by newcomer Glenda Hambly, Fran is a moving story of a single mother who is unable to reconcile her love and responsibility for her children with her personal needs.
The responsibility for the film lies with the WA Department of Welfare which cancelled its involvement in a documentary being made by Hambly about welfare mothers.
When it was scrapped Hambly felt she had too much valuable, interesting material to waste. She set about trying to make a feature film on the subject.
Despite extensive experience in documentaries, she had never attempted drama before. “I wasn’t too sure how I’d get on,” she says. “I really thought I was too pragmatic, but I figured I had nothing to lose.”
She sought advice from producer David Rapsey and writer Alex Glasgow and workshopped the script with members of her own family.
It took 18 months and now the finished film, made in WA with a small budget of $700,000, has won three AFI awards — best original screenplay (Hambly), best actress (Noni Hazlehurst) and best supporting actress (Annie Byron).
The story centres on the title character, Fran, whom most readers found unsympathetic from the start. When Hambly sent her script to the funding bodies she was told that the character lacked credibility — no-one could behave like that to her children.
“You could say Fran is locked in a fantasy world. She had such an horrendous background of institutions that she’s never matured enough to make conscious choices for herself and accept the consequences. And she desperately needs the attention of the opposite sex,” explains Hambly.
The choice of an actress who could portray this character
with the required warmth was one of the easiest she had to make. While she was still writing the screenplay, Hambly had seen Monkey Grip and felt Noni Hazlehurst would be ideal for the part. She sent a copy of the script to London where Hazlehurst was working on Robyn Archer’s Cut and Thrust Cabaret.
The actress said yes, wrote letters of support to the Australian Film Commission to help get script funding, and has now taken off the AFI’s best actress award for the role.
Hambly acknowledges that Hazlehurst has made the possibly unsympathetic character work. “She’s got that lovely warmth and the film needed an actress who could keep the audience on side — make them understand the character and her motivations without becoming too critical.
“The three youngsters who played her children formed such a close relationship with her that one day when their mothers were watching a scene being shot, one could detect, well, some jealousy.”
Casting Marge, Fran’s close friend and confidante, proved more difficult. Also a deserted mother, she acts as her foil: less attractive, more responsible and rational.
Hambly finally chose Annie Byron, who took off the best supporting actress award. Also nominated was Narelle Simpson who plays one of Fran’s three children.
Hambly cast two girls for the role Simpson eventually played, but the children’s parents withdrew them from the project because of objections to a scene of sexual abuse in the film.
“The part really calls for a 10-year-old, going on 30,” she says. “When Fran takes off, Lisa acts as a surrogate mother to the younger ones, practical and responsible, a direct antithesis to Fran.”
Hambly didn’t expect people to respond so personally to Fran. “It must strike chords,” she observes. “So many women, and men, from a variety of back- ;
grounds have reacted in similar ways to her.”
Audiences keen to see the film must wait: it’s been presold to Channel 7 in Sydney, though there is still a chance for cinema release following its success at the AFI awards. □
TOP: Fran’s award-winning writer and director, Glenda Hambly. LEFT: The making of the movie, starring Noni Hazlehurst who also picked up an AFI award for her role.
WINNER OF 3 AFI AWARDS
including
.a4ss?“«
I Hazlehurst
Slarni Written a by Dam,
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Fran proves ‘low budget’ doesn’t mean cheap
t NONI HAZLE-HURST, this year's , actress of the year, admits she was in limbo for three I years after her haunting role in the movie. Monkey Grip.
Currently starring in the rhovie Fran, Noni says each script she got after Monkey Grip failed to make the grade.
“I was getting about three scripts a week after Monkey Grip,” Noni told me recently.
“After about page five of each of them, I gave up. They weren’t up to scratch and it was pointless for me to do them because they were a backward step in career terms.
“I had my integrity at stake as an actress,” she
• Noni Haziehurst as Fran with her naw lover Jeff, played by Alan Fletcher.
explained.
All that changed when she read the script of Fran, written by Glenda Ham-bly, a young film maker from Western Australia.
Noni accepted the part immediately, and two months ago Fran won three Australian Film Institute awards: actress of the year for Noni, best
supporting actress for Annie Byron and best screenplay for Hambly.
Fran is the story of a young mother of three children by three different fathers who fights with the authorities to keep them.
“It was an emotionaj part to play,” says Noni softly. “But after shooting ‘heavy’ scenes I couldn’t go back to my dressing room and unwind.
“I had to be bubbly and smiling because of the three young actors who were my screen children.”
Noni/Says the relationship between the children (Narrelle Simpson, Rosie Logie and Travis Ward), was excellent, mainly because they had seen her on the ABC program Play School.
Noni says she has become “fed up” with people who keep referring to Fran as a low-budget movie.
“Despite the fact it was made for only $750,000 people automatically
Movie Talk
think it’s a cheap movie,” she said.
Noni has just completed a starring role in a new movie, Australian Dream.
“it’s a comedy about housewives’ fantasies,” said Noni.
“Most men probably
think a housewife’s fantasy would be the soft-porn Cleo centrefold type of thing.
“But it’s not... the real1 fantasy is just wanting; some peace and quiet! away from everything!” j
Fran opens at the State II cinema tomorrow. |
J
THE SUN page 56 13 November 1985
Stunning display overshadows all
THE Judges at the recent AFI awards can't have had to think twice before crowning Noni Hazlehurst as Best Actress.
It is an astonishing performance, utterly real and convincing. The actress submerges her own personality (a very strong one) in the persona of Fran, the TUd-derless, self-indulgent drifter. ;
In fact, the performance is better than the movie can stand.
Noni Hazlehurst
makes us believe so totally in this feckless, irresponsible woman, that we feel exactly the same exasperation and irrita-
tion with her that we would in real life.
This is a tribute to the actress, but it makes the film a dispiriting experience.
Fran is a sort of Caddie without the guts and backbone.
Like Caddie, she's a deserted wife with small children, but unlike her. she isn’t a battler and hasn’t a notion how to look after herself or them, beyond a vague optimism that something will turn up.
She loves her children, but she also loves having a good time, and is always ready to take off for pubs and unsuitable men, leaving the kids in the charge of any mug who will take them on.
What with her periodical neglect of her children and her habit of running up debts, she soon has trouble with the Child Welfare Department to add to her problems.
Glenda Hambly, who
with BevTivey
FRAN <M) Directed by Glenda Hambly. With Noni Hazlehurst, Alan Fletcher and Annie Byron. State II.
wrote the script as well as directing, is a shrewd and accurate observer. Her record of the talk and behavior of her characters is a fine piece of reportage.
But. it comes across rather coldly, as a piece
Noni Hazlehurst, as Fran, and Narelle Simpson, as her eldest child, Lisa.
of dispassionate, clinical r observation.
Glenda Hambly
refrains so carefully from editorial comment, explicit or implied, that the viewer sits back and , watches a case history' instead of being involved > in a woman’s life.
At the pessimistic end- ■ ing, Fran has been des-j erted by yet another | transient lover, her kids j are in care and she, herself, is in floods of tears.
: The viewer is con-
j scious. mainly, of a feel-{ ing of relief at getting { out of her depressing § company.
r- But Noni Hazlehurst’s i performance is truly = memorable, and she’s : backed by strong and i believable supporting ! players.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH page 66 15 November 1985
Fran a fine
Fran (M)
Sydney: State Cinema II & Parramatta Melbourne: Russell Cinema Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth: to open soon
ITS midday. A car prowls down the deserted streets of a working-class suburban housing estate. The grass nature-strips are dry, the kids are in school. Outside a milk-bar, which squats out of nowhere, a spunky chick in tight jeans is calling customer service over hassles with the Telecom bill.
This is Days of Our Lives territory. Breakfast dishes, K-mart covers on the kids’ bed-bunks and buying sausages and cat-litter down at the arcade. The tight-jeans chick watches bemused as the bloke in the car stops, requests a phone book, then squeezes into the booth with her.
She slaps him off, mentions an angry husband, then lets slip that he’s up north. We’re not sure if things are going to get ugly.
The chick isn’t entirely aware of this. She’s flattered, giggly, mock-scandalised. At last something is happening and the buzz of rough flirting is one of the trophies collected by street-smart 15-year-olds.
Only we soon realise that Fran (Noni Hazlehurst) is not 15 but 30, with three children, from 5 to 12 years old, one from each of her marriages and de-factos.
As she lays out cups and the newly-bought packet of chocolate biscuits for afternoon tea with her homely neighbour Marge (Annie Byron) we can feel the heat, the strange hiatus of houses waiting in the dead noon-time before the kids come home from school.
The film unnervingly captures the feeling of suppressed dread out in the suburbs. Already we sense Fran’s panic, her need to gasp for air. It's a relief when the kids burst in. Fran comes alive, recounting the day's big story of how a man tried to feel her up in a phone booth.
Fran, written and directed by West Australian Glenda Hambly, is a compelling film about cycles. The cycle of poverty and deprivation, both emotional and physical. The difficulty of change. The time-bombs that are laid so well into the past that when they explode it seems a person has been mysteriously taken over by fate.
Fran does not indulge in the luxury of finding a scapegoat, someone to blame. Its protagonist is no heroine Madonna. We watch in pain at how she brings about her own , destruction. We see how the well-meaning can’t help and how its no-one's “faulL” ,, mtm Instead of delivering answers that assuage our desire for moral justice, Fran explores the-deeper, more forgotten layers of why people are the way they are. It shows how, in struggles for change and in emotional growth, the most difficult thing is perhaps to ask the right
film spun of sadness and some fun
Noni Hazlehurst (Fran) and Alan Fletcher (Jeff)
1 Films
ANNA-MARIA DELTOSO
questions at the right time.jWe do not leave the cinema with our realities affirmed. Fran is a challenge, with a depth that has generally been missing from Australian films for some time.
Oddly enough, Fran is also very funny, with an aching sadness behind the jokery and bravado. It succeeds in portraying an Austra-lian-Irish bluster, which so often hides the pain of hurt children behind matey drinking and carousing.
Fran s characters are alone in the pub, alone living together, and ultimately even the women, united in their downtrodden battler lives, are emotionally estranged from each other. Fran weaves a fine web from external circumstances and internal damage.
In addition to Fran’s stories about herself and the forces of the narrative, there is a third, silent story: the past. It arises subtly, by implication, so that only we can know why Fran’s pain will be passed down to her kids, and on and on like a family curse. And this is tragedy.
Fran is a young house-bound working-class woman, a former ward of the State, who can't reconcile motherhood with her emotions, which are those of a teenager, raw and immature. She is compulsive over men, desperately craving their attention and approval. If she were at high school instead of raising kids, she'd be called boy-crazy.
Although Fran needs love and security, she doesn’t feel worthy of such intimacy. Instead, for her, the way to hook a man is through sex, a
kind of bargaining in the only currency where she can feel her worth. Yet this never gives her the loving relationships she needs.
Fran never knew her father. Her alcoholic mother was put away when Fran was five years old. It is soon casually revealed that Fran has probably been molested by various foster fathers. But nothing is morally simple. Fran's seductions are all about finding a father. Without being aware of it, Fran searches for this connection in every man she meets.
Relationships break down into violence, as the equally immature and emotionally frozen men she attracts cannot take the pressure of her demands. When men leave her, after bashing her up, it re-enacts the abandonment of her childhood. She falls into deep depressions, attempts suicide. She must be horribie, repulsive, for men to walk out, she must have done something unspeakably wrong.
On the outside, Fran is a bouncy, tough-talking, smart and experienced woman. She wants to lead her own life, away from what she sees as the interference of social welfare. The Department of Social Security has become a vindictive ogre, a terror of such proportions, that we can’t trust Fran’s view of reality.
Her children and a family life is her crusade against the inexplicably hostile world that has denied her, a “Them" symbolised by the Department of Social Security.
She does not realise the hostile world is also still inside her. Fran is stuck in the emotional world of a hurt and needy five year old girl. Her magical rapport with her children comes from being a child herself. Fran can play and rough-house with the kids like one of the gang but she cannot mother them. Her oldest daughter, Lisa (Narelle Simpson), is forced to play mother to the family, a role with too many responsibilities for a 12-year-old girl.
After the father of her youngest child, Cynthia (Rosie Logie), walks out on her, Fran dresses up, heads for the local pub and picks up the barman, Jeff (Alan Fletcher). Fran is “all over him like a rash", abandoning her kids for four days. Soon, taking the line of least resistance, Jeff drifts permanently into the household, enjoying Fran’s hungry sexuality but annoyed by the children, who can't help secretly playing up against him.
Jeff is another of Fran’s uncaring, reticent men who are always threatening to head off | “up north”. Fran can't read the “leave me alone" signs, which contributes to the violence | she receives. She follows Jeff to the north-west, this time abandoning the kids for four weeks, pie dreaded social welfare takes them over.
^ When social workers learn that Jeff has sexually interfered with Lisa, Fran is confronted with either changing or falling apart Unrecognised forces in the past, however, have already wreaked damage in the future.
Noni Hazlehurst is stunning as Fran, throwing herself into the role with a deep passion, empathy and courage. Hazlehurst always gives 110 per cent in any endeavour, yet it is always a fresh surprise to realise how very fine an actress she is. Hazlehurst opens out all of Fran’s childlike vulnerability: the scene where Fran staggers home drunk, clinging to a ! half-disinterested Jeff and trying to excite him ! like a desperate junkie prostitute, is utterly devastating, it teeters on the wobbly line between comedy and tragedy.
In bed after her third de-facto has left her, and comforted by Marge, Fran is similarly vulnerable, the stuffy bed-clothes and the tear-stained terrified face exuding such despair that we truly fear for her life, we feel the noose around her neck.
The mediating role of Marge, the conscientious best friend and plain single mum who compensates for her fear of men by avoiding all social contact outside mothering, is superbly played by Annie Byron. The complicity and sisterhood of women is powerful in Fran and Marge, opposites who need each other. The ensemble acting between Noni Hazlehurst, Annie Byron and their “children" is very strong, an unusual rapport.
More than anything else, Fran shows what is possible with a truly excellent script, both artistically and technically. Glenda Hambly's insight stems from a deep personal commitment to her subject Though Fran was made as a telemovie, its effect is far from lightweight. |
Fran is a large, thought-provoking film, both harrowing and humorous. It is an Australian film that explores a contemporary world (for a change) with unflinching courage, honesty and emotional depth.
^FINANCIAL REVIEW PAGE 56 22 November 1985
WEST AUSTRALIAN
DECEMBER 2, 1986
page 60
Is this a celebratory drink, or what? Actress Norii Jlazle-hurst in the title role of “Fran" looks like she’s just heard the news: Another award (which makes it seven from four different institutions.) This one is from the International Film and Television Festival of New York where “Fran" won a silver medal in the TV/drama section.
THE DAILY MIRROR
page 24
7 November 1985
I
MATT WHITE talks to Noni Hazlehurst
ALTHOUGH Noni Hazlehurst has won
two Australian Film 4 vMmTA JUJo
Institute Best Actress
Awards {Monkey Grip, so Fran was i memora- " , Non! herself has a 1982 and Fran, ble experience for me." ; great love of children,^
1985), she has made - In the film, Noni plays b and is a veteran hostess relatively few feature ' *n unorthodox mother R of the popular ABC chil-fllmc " of four young children •. dren’s program, Piay-
' , . ... who Is emotionally Inca- school. ;
was an oversloht — or pable of coming to “Children are a dls- V
' ®r- * terms with the way gov- earning and honest audi
ernment authorities ex- ence," she said. “If they
XHIT r'lTltMP
I films.
At first I believed this I was an oversight — or, : sheer Ignorance —,.„on
1Sf • mother to behave;
i ^^ Promiscuous, fun-lov- ^
I w*f calling the shots. |ng and outspoken, she
s “I've had plenty of film b constantly doing = scripts sent to me, par- battle with the Depart-I tJc“l*r,y *«*:' £ad ment of Community .
s AFI Awards, she said ? Welfare, whom she fears | l**t ***•'• ‘But I didn t - because she feels they = like lots of them so why are US|ng her children to | do something you’re not take away her indepen-i Interested in? . dence.
I “If the story or the .
Tragedy
In spite of it all, this flawed character emerges from a modern tragedy as a warm and likeable creature who does more harm to herself than those around her.
“Fran was a real person with real feelings who could not control them,” said Noni. “A lot of us are like that."
dren’s program. Play school. ' W&i • ■
| "Children are a dis-cerning and honest aiidl-ence," she said. “If they don’t like you they walk away.’’. ■ v
v Next January she flies ' to New York to do two half-hour childrens’ show pilots for an American producer-writer.
“If It becomes a regular series, then I will ' spend a few weeks each .- year taping the shows,’’ she said.
Following her brush with cancer in the last few years, which she is confident is cured, Noni has Just finished her first telemovie, Australian Dreams with Graeme Blundell, written and directed by Jackie McK-immie.
• Fran opens at the State 2 Cinema on November 14.
I characters don’t appeal : to me, I don’t see any • point in doing them.
| “/Van was one of those. : exceptions. I loved the I character of Fran, which : I played, and I liked the I people working on the | picture because they : were dedicated, ener-I getic, and kind.
| “On top of all that = there was the bonus of a | beautifully-written script
NONI: Fran was ‘memorable’
1 ANNIE BYRON LEARNS MORE THAN LINES IN ACTING
FOUR days of work on the Sydney movie Silver City taught actress Annie Byron one thing: mollycoddling players — feeding them, dressing them and holding umbrellas for them — is all warranted.
"The actors are carrying around so many other people’s work. I hadn’t appreciated that before,” she said backstage at Penrith’s Q Theatre, where she has just opened in Perth playwright Dorothy Hewett’s The Man From Mukinupin.
"It’s hard to take all that pampering but I learned they’re not treating you like a fairy princess for the sake of it.
“I also learned how to get around a film set, which can be pretty daunting, and got to know who does what and so forth.”
If not enamoured of the pampering, Byron certainly developed a love for film work. She went on to be dubbed AFI Best Supporting Actress for her second movie role, in the acclaimed Fran, which CBS-Fox is releasing on video soon, along with Silver City.
Fran is a low-budget telemovie, made in Perth. It stars Play School host Noni Hazlehurst as the battling single mother of the title who fights to feed herself and her three children, fights to hold her life together and fights even to keep her family together when the Government wants to take away her children.
Annie Byron ... ‘people are all the same’
No muckinup in the movies
By IAN HORNER
Although made for television, the movie enjoyed some success at cinemas.
Originally, it was funded as a departmental research program, but had an abrupt change of direction when the money ran out and somebody discovered the dramatic possibilities.
Byron played Fran’s best friend, often mouthing the audience's dismay at Fran’s lifestyle but quick to support her friend.
"Noni is such a generous performer and she’s also a very funny person to work with,” Byron said.
"In Fran she captured the utter frustration of motherhood — something I hadn’t fully appreciated until I had my own baby.
‘UTTERLY
BLITZED’
”1 was utterly blitzed out by the experience of having a child, but I did come to understand why people used the word ‘despair’ in relation to children.”
Byron, her husband and their son, now three, live in Hazelbrook in the upper Blue Mountains.
Fran was also about the isolation or suburban mothers, emotionally and socially, a similar scene to that of Silver City, about
Polish migrants arriving in Sydney in 1949.
Byron’s subsequent screen role, in the ABC-TV’s Displaced Persons, was also about migrants.
"That really had an impact on me personally and made me more open to people from other cultures. I realised people are all the same, even if - they’ve been isolated.”
Which, presumably, brings us to Mukinupin.
"Ah, yes, that was a tiny, tiny town in Western Australia in 1912.”
It was in the wheat belt, near an Aborigine settlement and sufficiently far from the big cities to tie together all of Hewett’s social preoccupations.
The Perth National Theatre commissioned the play for the West Australian Sesquicenten-nial celebrations in 1979.
"The play is a pre-Christian veneration of fertility and a celebration of the life force — but it’s not just about sex!
“It’s got a lot of things to say and it’s like a collage of images, '■ wdth no beginning, no middle and no end.
TIGHTROPE
WALKER
“Well, that’s silly to say. In fact it’s got two ends.
"It is an invigorating and uplifting play, quite black in parts.” Byron plays Miss Clemmy Hummer, an ex-tightrope walker who fell, rather unceremoniously, from the high ware.
"I like the line where Clemmy says : ’I only used to hang by my teeth from the big top in dyed pink see-through muslin’.”
• The Man from Mukinupin ends at the Q on May 11. Bookings: (047) 215 735 or (047) 321 649.
THE WEST AUSTRALIAN
page 14
28 June 1985
•» «
I
Fran, a woman of her time
GIVEN the enormous strides made by the women’s movement in the past 20 years, it is sometimes easy to forget the bind still faced by some Australian women.
Brought up to believe that a man is the key to emotional security, they drown their “selves” in an ocean of clinging dependence.
Such a woman is Fran, title character in a new drama made in WA by Barron Films.
Starring the excellent Noni Hazlehurst, who extends the role she played in “Monkey Grip," the film examines how Fran’s welfare upbringing has left her without the emotional resources to be herself. She staggers from re-! lationship to relationship with uncaring men and her three children suffer as a result.
Not that they are un-1 loved - Fran is their friend as well as their mother - it’s just that her dream-like view of life gets in the way. Fran trades on the fact that she has always been attractive to men and can never understand it when the magic palls. Her neighbour Marge (Annie Byron) urges her to be more independent but is accused of “sour grapes” because she is plain in Fran’s eyes. Nevertheless, Marge is always on hand in an emergency, and so is used by her flighty friend.
Directed and written by Glenda Hambly,
FILM
Ken Turnbull
“Fran” was shot . Hamilton Hill and oth parts of Perth by a larg ly West Australian emits low-budget loc gives it authenticity ai the screenplay is high believable.
Though Hazlehur; steals the limelight wi what the magazii “Variety” calls a “v. tuoso performance Narelle Simpson, as tl : oldest child Lisa, is j close second.
The film had its fir showing at a launchii in Perth on Wednesda Cinema distribution currently under negoti tion and televisic rights have been sold the Seven network.
‘Official
Story’ wins Gold Hugo
CHICAGO FILM FESTIVAL
By Lloyd Sachs
he Official Story,” the Argentine film about a woman who discovers
-------that her adopted daughter
1 was stolen from a “missing” person, has been awarded the Chicago ! Film Festival’s top prize, the ’ Gold Hugo. The fest also honored j the film’s leading actors, Norma | Aleandro and Hector Alterio.
The Silver Hugo went to France’s “Tea in the Harem of Ar-chimede,” with the Swiss/West German effort, “Alpine Inferno,” sharing the Bronze Hugo with 1 the Venezuelan/French co-production, “Oriana.”
A special Silver Hugo for “most promising new director” was won by Hungary’s Peter Gardos for “The Philadelphia Attraction,” a film that also won a gold plaque for Kamill Feleki and Karo-1 ly Eperjes for best male perfor- • mances. A gold plaque for best female performances was won by | the cast of Italy’s “Secrets, Secrets,” and by the innovative comedy by Canada’s “90 Days.”
, Chunchuna Villafane won a silver plaque for best supporting performance for “The Official Story.” Silver plaques also went to 1 Zev Mahler for his screenplay for “Forget Mozart” and Kwang-i Suk Chung for his cinematogra-I phy for “The Blazing Sun.”
Today’s film festival lineup includes films from Australia, the Philippines and the Soviet Union. The schedule is as follows: “Fran” (9:15 p.m., Music Box, 3733 N. Southport), reviewed by Roger Ebert: Glenda Hambly’s film tells the story of Fran, who bears scars from an unhappy childhood. Now a mother herself, she has turned into a promiscuous alcoholic who thinks nothing of leaving her children with a neighbor, or dropping them off with relatives while she follows her latest hunk into the Australian Outback. The movie is well-acted and often sensitive, especially when seen through the eyes of the children, but it never knows what to make of Fran. Is she a victim of the welfare system, which is doing to her children what it did to her? Or is she a self-indul- . gent, willful, thoughtless drunk who is unfit to be a parent? The movie leans toward the first view. I subscribe to the second.
“Our Father” (6 p.m.,
McClurg Court, 330 E. Ohio): The Spanish film stars the great Fernando Rey as a terminally ill cardinal who returns to his hometown for the first time in 30 years to i make peace with his illegitimate daughter and granddaughter.
“Next Summer” (8 p.m., McClurg Court): A trio of interrelated sex comedies by French director Nadine Trintignant. Philippe Noiret, Claudia Cardinale, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Fanny Ardant star.
“Private Show” (10 p.m., McClurg Court): Sixto Kayko’s film depicts “a showgirl in a sex club looking for a commitment.”
“The Descendant of the Snow Leopard” (7 p.m., Music Box): A Russian epic by Tolo-' mush Okeyev about a hunter who loses his virtue and disgraces his | tribe.
! '/
(
Noni a ‘victim’ of her acting talents
TALKING TO Noni HazJehurst is a delectable experience. She is everything one anticipates, and more. Open and alert, with her mobile, expressive face and ready wit, Noni is someone obviously in firm control of her destiny, guiding it with rigorous discipline and intelligence.
Noni Hazlehurst this year won her second Australian Film Institute best actress award, this time for the title role in ‘Fran’.
She plays a deserted mother, whose wretchedness is compounded by her own irresponsibility, as she tries to keep a grip on her uncaring de facto, and keep Social Welfare away from her children. The film is remarkably honest. It does not take sides but throws a light on the sort of situation to which most of us are blind.
“Fran is, in fact, a slag. But she’s a likeable slag, always able to bounce up when she’s been knocked down," says Noni. “She is, in most respects, more unlike me than any other character I’ve played. But that actually made her easier to tackle. I could be objective about the role in a way that I couldn’t with Nora in ‘Monkey Grip’. Nora had aspects I really could understand; feel in myself.”
‘Fran’, the first feature made by director/scriptwriter Glenda Hambly, who won the AFI award for best original screenplay, starts in Melbourne in a few days. Originally intended for television and bought by the Seven network, its cinema release came only after its success in the AFI awards. “It should be on television,” Noni says. “That’s what Glenda had in mind all along. It’s the medium which will let it reach the market it’s most meant for; the people it might help.
“To play Fran,” Noni says, “I had to meet people in her sort of circumstances. And some of those people made Fran’s life seem a piece of cake. Some of the stories I heard, the women I met. . . what impressed me most was that they’re still coping, still surviving, with well turned out children and well kept homes. They’ve got ex-husbands, excreeps who bother them all the time, but they just keep bouncing back.
“And it’s the same with Fran. She’s a slag, but she’s not a depressive slag. Not like Lill, the character I played in ‘The Sullivans’. If that character had been combined with Fran’s story, you’d have been slashing your wrists after 10 minutes.”
NONI IS USED to playing victims. Her first roles after leaving Adelaide University nearly a decade ago were, she says, “Crawford rape victims”. Her first
By Anthony Clarke
best actress award, in 1982, was for Nora in ‘Monkey Grip’, a woman with an obsessive commitment to a drug addict.
“I’ve thought about this a lot Some people tell me I make these parts work because I've got a vulnerable appearance which lifts what seem unsympathetic roles on paper. But if you look at the roles available for women, there’s very little else. What’s the alternative? To be a Pat the Rat style arch-bitch or a' super-cool ruthless businesswoman? They’ve got even less basis in reality than some of the victims.
"And in a sense, we’re all victims. If we choose to live in this society, we’re victims of our own greed or whatever else keeps us going.”
It’s a reflection on the Australian film industry that Noni Hazlehurst finds herself playing such victims of society. There are few meaty, intelligent roles for women in our film industry. For every Caddie, there are 10 Mad Max’s; and certainly no Mad Maxines. But though the role choices are few, Noni is stretching herself to map out a career which keeps integrity and development its touchstones. She won’t be typecast, refusing to become an easily-cast commodity for other people’s benefit.
“Even if there are some things my characters share, I’ve been careful to choose roles that differ in essential respects from each other. It’s the only way in this business to keep learning — especially since, after you’ve picked up a couple of awards as I have, people stop giving you advice. They become afraid to; afraid you won’t listen any more. All the advice has to come from yourself.
“I just don’t think I can waste the talents I’ve been given. I always say acting beats working for a living. We’re incredibly lucky to be doing something so creative and fulfilling. And that makes it essential for me to tackle things with a fair degree of responsibility.”
Noni used to decry the lack of decent parts for women in Australian film and television. Though I think her earlier criticisms still stand, she has changed her mind about that — or at least modified her view, since playing the awardwinning roles of Fran and Nora.
“I’ve come to think that if there are few good parts for women, then there must be just as few good parts for men. If the women around the men are unconvincing, then the men are going to be unconvincing cardboard cutouts, too.
“There are good roles for men and women in a few films a year, but you have to keep grips on the fact that there are so very few good films a year. There never have been more than two or three a year, no matter how many films are being churned out; no matter how many people are working in the industry. Why should we expect any more? „
“If people want to keep churning out an endless stream of B-grade films, fine. But let’s not delude ourselves and call it the Australian film industry renaissance. I don’t think there’s ever been such a ^tiling.”
WHAT KEEPS the output of quality films down to only two or three a year is, Noni thinks, the lack of understanding between business and arts, and the obtuseness of some official funding bodies. “To too many people or bodies, the script is almost irrelevant when considering a project. The deal’s the thing. The package, and a proven track record. It seems to me that a lot of people with the power to make funding decisions just cannot tell the difference between a good film and a bad film — otherwise, how can you account for the sort of rubbish which gets turned out?”
“Finding a producer who truly understands both ends of a project, the deal and the creativity, is about the hardest thing of all. Jill Robb is one; Bob Weiss another. There’re not many.”
She thinks that if there is an answer, it must lie in independence. That’s how Paul Cox has stayed true to his creative vision, the way Kennedy Miller made its impact.
‘That necessarily means low budgets, and that’s another sore point. We talk about low budget films as if they’re a breed apart, way down the hierarchical scale. But a film is good or bad regardless of whether is it has a big or small budget.
“We’ve got to stop talking about low-budget films in such a rigid categorising and patronising way. The only thing that makes any film work, low or big budget, is the chemistry of creativity. You’ve got to have a fantastic producer who can pull us all together so we can get the value in what we do up on the bloody screen, not in someone else’s pocket.
For Noni, the main challenge right now is to keep her career developing by striking out in new directions, while blending in the old. “I’ve just finished shooting ‘Australian Dream’ and I start shooting another film in six or seven months. That’s incredible. I mean, I’ve never had that sort of continuity before.
Noni Hazlehurstj “Some people
“But I want to branch out. Think seriously about directing, and about working on a script of my own. I want to use my singing more; concentrate for a time on a record for children I’m doing with the composer Jim Cotter.” I
SHE IS HESITANT about stage work. “That depends so much on the production. Film work is much harder and, for that reason, I enjoy it more.
“Stage work, even in a long run, shouldn’t be monotonous. You’re different every night; so is the audience. There are the off nights when you just phone your part through, but you get past those.
“But if the whole production is crummy, you feel dreadful. I remember being
tell me I make these parts work because I've got a vulnerable appearance ...” Picture by Simon Corden.
in one Shakespeare production; it was so awful that I just howled every night out of shame for being in it. Mortified! As soon as the season started I had my list of numbers on the wall. Sixty-nine performances. Sixty-eight. Striking them off like a prisoner counting down his jail sentence.”
Despite the success of her film roles, Noni still takes great pride (and unmitigated pleasure) in her work in children’s television, as one of the presenters of Australia’s outstanding pre-school series, ‘Playschool’. “I wish everything I worked in had a team as committed as that. It’s a tough role. Children are discriminating. If you’re not telling them the truth, they’ll let you know. Adults
don’t do that. They’ll buy anything if they’ve paid for it. ‘Beaut Shakespeare that was. Jees, she puts over a good part. Where'll we go for coffee, love?’
In January Noni flies to America to make pilot episodes of a pre-school series which she’ll host with Neil Innes, an Englishman who does a children's show for Thames Television.
“We’ve made a couple of pilots already. It’s the idea of an American who realised that America lacks a children’s show like this, and who then went around the world to find not just what was being done, but who was doing it well.”
If the project is picked up by an American network, it will mean a schedule of close to 70 shows a year, for four
years. “But,” says Noni, “I think we can do it to a tight time schedule so that I need spend as little time over there each year as possible. I don’t want to move to America. I want to stay working here. I learnt in England that an artist works best in her own environment. And I don’t want to get too absorbed in the children’s television work. I love the work I do in that area, but children’s television should never account tor more than 20 or 30 per cent of my work.
“But I love the children’s television work. I’ve got a great audience out there watching ‘Playschool’. I can work on them for years, and, when they turn 18, get them to vote me Prime Minister. How could I give that up?”
A bleak repetition of failure
FRAN
Directed by Glenda llambly Rated M Stale 2 Cinema
By PAUL BYRNES
ONE would have to say that Fran is a gutsy movie, as well as an unremittingly bleak one.
While many Australian directors seem to be preoccupied with movies in which horses and landscape are the stars, Glenda Hambly's Fran is modern, personal and tragic.
Fran is shot in drab, determinedly suburban locations. It is social realism, which is a difficult sort of film to get made at any time but particularly now when the tide of anti-realism, as personified by the hits from Hollywood, rides so high in the public taste.
Fran is also gutsy because Glenda Hambly's script gives us a central character who invites condemnation. This is the story of a “bad girl", a deserted mother who loves her three children but is hopelessly irresponsible with them.
Her duty to her children constantly
clashes with her need for a man's approval. In conventional terms, she is a failure. She adores her children but she lets them down terribly. The movie never excuses her behaviour but it challenges us to understand why she does it, without becoming an apology.
Tor example, when the father of her third child arrives home from working “up north", he accuses her of infidelity then beats her up and leaves for good. Such is her need for a man that even then, she begs him not to go.
In the ensuing bout of alcoholic despair, she goes to a bar where her brassy style of dress is out of character, picks up a young barman named Jeff (Alan Fletcher) and spends the next three days with him.
While she is re-establishing her self-esteem, the kids have to fend for themselves. Inevitably, they are taken in by Marge (Annie Byron), Fran’s neighbour and friend, who is just as poor but without Fran's looks. Marge is also on her own but she is more hard-headed about men and frustrated by Fran’s failings.
The mdvie was originally made for television by Barron Films, a West
Australian production company. Its limited cinema release follows this year's AFI awards where Noni Hazel-iiurst won the best actress award and Glenda llambly won an award for the best original screenplay.
Both awards were well-deserved.
Hnzelhurst gives a horribly realistic performance as Fran, a woman who never had much of a chance.
Glenda Hambly’s script is well-structured and tight; add seems to capture a particularly Australian speech pattern,
a sort of hard-edged, wise-cracking, j > , . *
bravado that acts as a defence mecha- Shakespeare s tragedies, we saw th njsm highs and lows of the human spirit, b\
allfEssential element was that, in. th)
“Mum was an alcy by the time i was order was restored,
five," says Fran to Marg^' always had ijjjfUebeth. destroyed by his tW|
older than her years but not yet awaif? qjj^her attractiveness. 1 :
. What makes the film so upsettipg m tlifil it clearly shows how the p4(terfc cqn be repeated. The children wif become part of the welfare statS despite Fran's determination that the? won't. Lisa, the loveliest of children. £ introduced to adulthood by being sexually abused by her mother's nep boyfriend, which fits the statistic^ mr.
wloth the strength and the problefi wTUt the film is its precise realism. f$
plenty of uncles but
The form is tragic, because the path is inexorable. Fran was fostered out as a child, spent time in several institutions, but found that men were always attracted to her. “They been followin’ me since I was in primary school," she siys.
Her eldest child, Lisa (Narelle Smpson), is pretty, like her Mum,
■ Weakness and the treachery of other! dl<£ in the end; so does Lear. It is an a< Of atonement, a purging of evil, whic ii' much more comfortable for l\\ audience.
fir an. however, gives no such comforts The bleakness is heightened at the end, not reduced.
It is like life, certainly, but it is as terrifying as the clang of a prison door,
Noni Hazlehurst — the champion of jhe victim n
DAVID GRAY talks to Noni Hazlehurst who plays the title role in Fran.
“I’ve known award-winning actresses from this country who have gone to America with all their films under their arm and had to sit around — and nothing's happened. I'm not prepared to do that.
“FRAN certainly was not made with audience manipulation in mind," says Noni Hazlehurst, who believes this tale of suburban sorrow steers clear of sentiment.
“From the first time 1 read the script, it was clearly something the writer was burning to tell. I’m always a sucker for that type of project, and it generally turns out to be a low budget film.”
Hazlehurst agrees that Fran is irresponsible. “But she’s got no other frame of reference, she has no other way of making decisions," Hazlehurst says. “1 understand how a woman's anger and bitterness can be so all-encompassing that it can actually make her make all the wrong decisions quite deliberately.
“One of the reasons I liked this character was that she was a bouncy person; she wasn't someone who felt the enormity of the horrible mess of her life.
"It's a bit related to my theory of comedy, that nothing is funny unless it's also sad. I think one of the reasons why we find it hard to make good comedies in this country, and probably any country, is that people think if you lake a situation and impose jokes on it, then it will be funny."
Hazlehurst's role is not unlike her first AFI award-winning part — for Monkey Grip two years ago — a single mother adrift, child suffers, and so on.
“Someone once said to me, ‘you al" ays play victims’," Hazlehurst says. She acknowledges that this may be true but says there aren’t many other roles written for women: "Most women’s roles seem to be drawn from either victims or arch bitches, the two extremes."
Ever since Monkey Grip, Hazlehurst has enjoyed a highly-respected profile but this reputation, she explains, doesn’t count for much in attracting starring roles. Of all the critically acclaimed Australian actors and actresses, only Mel Gibson and Judy Davis have really broken through, she points out.
"I feci I do my best work here. I come from here. 1 here are things 1 can say here that I couldn’t say anywhere else."
It’s not surprising to learn she is choosey about roles. She recently turned down the female lead in Nic Roeg's next film, Castaway, partly because of the director’s attitude to women.
A hunch that she might be keen to
work with Paul Cox turns out to be correct. She admires “his complexity" and the fact that he is so determined to make what he wants.
Hazlehurst's career is beginning to resemble that of her erstwhile colleague Robyn Archer. Apart from a forthcom-
ing movie, Australian Dream, about “a well-off housewife living in the suburbs", she is recording a children's record and is planning a television variety series featuring singing and comedy with political undertones.
These moves arc all part of Hazle-
hurst's wish to diversify her talents:! now know thal I'm not happy just to I actof. 1 really don't know wo ection 1 want to move in but wha . ifttore important to me now is to be! vttllkadjusted as I can be as 1 • individual." ' •
.■Thi'--:. . /. j
A scene from Fran .., MI liked this character... she wAs a bouncy person .
NONI Hazelhurst and Narelle Simpson
but found that men were always attracted to her. “They been followin’ me since I was in primary school,” she says.
Her eldest child, Lisa (Narelle Simpson), is pretty like her Mum, older than her years but not yet aware of her attractiveness.
What makes the film so upsetting is that it clearly shows how the pattern can be repeated. The children will become part of the welfare state, despite Fran’s determination that they won’t. Lisa, the loveliest of children, is introduced to adulthood by being sexually abused by her mother’s new boyfriend, a development which fits the statistical pattern.
Both the strength and the problem
with the film is its precise realism. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we saw the highs and lows of the human spirit, but an essential element was that, in the end, order was restored.
Fran however, gives no such comfort. The bleakness is heightened at the end, not reduced. It is like life, certainly, but it is as terrifying as the clang of a prison door.
The movie was originally made for television by Barron Films, a West Australian production company. At last year’s AFI awards Noni Hazelhurst won the best actress award and Glenda Hambly won an award for the best original screenplay.
Both awards were well-deserved. — Paul Byrnes.
MOVES
Fran
Windsor, M (Feb 17-23)
NE would have to say that Fran is a gutsy movie, if unremittingly bleak.
While many Australian directors seem preoccupied with movies in which horses and landscape are the stars, Glenda Hambly’s Fran is modem, personal and tragic.
Fran is shot in drab, determinedly suburban locations.
It is social realism, a difficult style to make at any time, but particularly now Hollywood anti-realism is riding so high.
Fran is gutsy because Glenda Hambly’s script give us a central character who invites condemnation. This is the story of a “bad girl”, a deserted mother who loves her three children but is hopelessly irresponsible with them.
Her duty to her children clashes constantly with her need for a man’s approval. In conventional terms, she is a failure. She adores her children but lets them down terribly. The movie never excuses her behaviour but it challenges us to understand why she does it, without becoming an apology.
For example, when the father of her third child arrives home from working “up north”, he accuses her of infidelity, beats her up and leaves for good. Such is her need for a man that even then, she begs him not to go.
In the ensuing bout of alcoholic despair, she goes to a bar where her brassy style of dress is out of character. She picks up a young barman named Jeff
Bleak tale of love and ruin
(Alan Fletcher) and spends the next three days with him.
While she is re-establishing her self-esteem, the kids have to fend for themselves. Inevitably, they are taken in by Marge (Annie Byron), Fran’s neighbour and friend, who is just as poor but without Fran’s looks. Marge is also on her own but she is more hard-headed about men and frustrated by Fran’s failings.
Glenda Hambly’s script is well-structured and tight, and seems to capture a particularly Australian speech pattern, a sort of hard-edged, wisecracking bravado that acts as a defence mechanism.
“Mum was an alkie by the time I was five,” says Fran to Marge, “always had plenty of uncles but...”
The form is tragic because the path is inexorable. Fran was fostered out as a child, spent time in several institutions.
The film everyone
Glenda Hambly (right) with Noni Hazelhurst . . . tenacity.
By MARGARET ROBERTS
Glenda hambly,
the Perth-based writer/director of Fran, the Film that won her the AFI Award for Best Original Screenplay this year, has proved that a little heartfelt commitment and tenacity in film-making go a long jvay.
Over the two years she spent developing the film, Hambly managed to surmount just about every possible obstacle that an aspiring, first-time film-maker could be confronted with.
Money, of course, was always a problem, but the main difficulty was the treatment for the film itself which, after 12 months work, was uniformly dismissed as rubbish by the Federal and State funding bodies — the AFC and the WA Film Counci.
"Everybody, absolutely everybody, hated it,” says Hambly, with an air of gracious resignation.
Made on a budget of less than $700,000 and pre-sold to the Seven Network, Fran is a hard-hitting portrayal of a young mother on welfare whose unorthodox lifestyle, emotional insecurity and apparent promiscuity brihg her into direct confrontation with the Department of Community Welfare.
Noni Hazelhurst, appearing in her first feature drama since Monkey Grip in 1982, once again proved her lucid acting talents and won the award for Best Actress for her performance as Fran. Annie Byron
also won Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Fran’s next-door neighbour. Marge.
Fran is Glenda Hambly’s first-ever attempt at drama, either as writer or director. Since graduating from a film and TV course at the WA Institute of Technology in 1977, Hambly has devoted her energies to documentaries on which she has worked variously as editor, writer, researcher, producer or director.
Her previous credits include director/writer of The Distant Lens, a 50-minute documentary on the social history of WA made in 1980, and producer of Discovery, a children's documentary series made for Channel 9 in Perth.
“I had always seen myself making documentaries that were of some social relevance, and I put a lot of time and energy into trying to break into that scene in Sydney, but never with any success,” she says.
“The West Australian film scene is very small, mainly devoted to commercials and industrial documentaries, so 1
was always trying new territory,” she says.
The idea for Fran grew out of research Hambly was doing on behalf of the WA Department of Community Welfare, which was planning a documentary to support the implementation of a new scheme for welfare children. The scheme. Permanency Planning, was' aimed at giving welfare children a permanent home rather than subjecting them to endless foster homes. Ultimately the scheme proved too controversial and was scrapped, along with plans for the documentary.
Producer David Rapsey suggested that Hambly should develop the material she had gathered and try to dramatise it.
With continuing negative feedback from everybody concerned except Rapsey, Hambly approached Noni Hazelhurst to play the lead role. Hazelhurst was enthusiastic about the script and wrote a letter to the AFC urging them to change their minds about the film.
“It was because of Noni’s intercession that the film got made at all,” says Hambly.
hated
“Without her 1 don't think we would ever have got the backing of the AFC or the pre-sale to Channel 7, which made funding possible,” she says.
While Fran's story and the characters in the film are entirely fictional, Hambly says welfare officers who have seen the film have told her that people like Fran “are fixtures in their offices”.
Nevertheless, she stresses that the film was not designed to be a “message film”, or a microscope on a particular social group. “I was always careful to make it a drama, first and foremost,” she says.
“I’ve been surprised at how many people can see themselves in Fran. It’s not just single mothers, but also women from all levels of society who seek men desperately in their lives. So many women's self-esteem is tied up in being attractive to men. Fran is not alone there,” she says.
Reactions to the likable but negligent Fran herself have been either of extreme antagonism or an immediate empathy, says Hambly. “Many people would say she’s just rubbish, irresponsible, and doesn’t deserve her kids. But what I hope comes across in the film is that it’s just not fair to judge people in a black-and-white fashion. Not only is it not fair, it’s not accurate.”
Hambly’s next project will be a tele-feature about the Italian artist Dattilo-Rubbo, one of a three-part series titled The Finest People, which Paul Barron (executive producer on Fran) is producing for the SBS network.
In the role of high-flyer
STORY Anthony Clarke, in Melbourne
Actress Noni Hazelhurst is on the upward spiral. She's won her second AFI best actress award and is striking out in new directions.
TALKING to Noni Hazelhurst is a delectable experience. She is everything one anticipates, and more. Open and alert, with her mobile, expressive face and ready wit, Noni is someone obviously in firm control of her destiny, guiding it with rigorous discipline and intelligence.
Noni Hazlehurst this year won her second Australian Film Institute best actress award, this time for the title role in Fran. She plays a deserted mother, whose wretchedness is compounded by her own irresponsibility, as she tries to keep a grip j on her uncaring de facto, and keep Social Welfare away from her children. The film is | remarkably honest. It does not take sides but throws a light on the sort of situation to which most of us are blind.
"Fran is, in fact, a slag. But she's a | likeable slag, always able to bounce up , when she's been knocked down," says Noni. "She is, in most respects, more unlike me than any other character I've played.
| But that actually made her easier to tackle.
I could be objective about the role in a way I that I couldn't with Nora in Monkey Grip.
Nora had aspects I really could understand;
| feel in myself."
Fran was the first feature made by director/scriptwriter Glenda Hambly, who won the AFI award for best original screenplay. Originally intended for television and bought by the Seven network, its cinema release came only after its success in the AFI awards. "It should be on television," Noni says. "That's what Glenda had in mind all along. It's the medium which will let it reach the market it's most meant for; the people it might help.
"To play Fran," Noni says, "I had to meet people in her sort of circumstances. And some of those people made Fran's life seem a piece of cake. Some of the stories I heard, the women I met ... what impressed me most was that they're still coping, still surviving, with well turned out children and well kept homes. They've got ex-husbands, ex-creeps who bother them all the time, but they just keep bouncing back.
"And it's the same with Fran. She's a slag, but she's not a depressive slag. Not like Lil, the character I played in The Sullivans. If that character had been combined with Fran's story, you'd have been slashing your wrists after 10 minutes.
Noni is used to playing victims. Her first roles after leaving Adelaide University nearly a decade ago were, she says, "Crawford rape victims." Her first best actresss award, in 1982, was for Nora in Monkey Grip, a woman with an obsessive commitment to a drug addict.
"I've thought about this a lot. Some people tell me I make these parts work because I've got a vulnerable appearance which lifts what seem unsympathetic roles on paper. But if you look at the roles
available for women, there's very little else. What's the alternative? to be a Pat the Rat style arch-bitch or a super-cool ruthless businesswoman? They've got even less basis in reality than some of the victims.
"And in a sense, we're all victims. If we choose to live in this society, we're victims of our own greed or whatever else keeps us going."
It's a reflection on the Australian film industry that Noni Hazelhurst finds herself playing such victims of society. There are few meaty, intelligent roles for women in our film industry. For every Caddie, there are 10 Mad Max's; and certainly no Mad Maxines. But though the role choices are few, Noni is stretching herself to map out a career which keeps integrity and development as its touchstones. She won't be typecast, refusing to become an easily-cast commodity for other people's benefit.
"Even if there are some things my characters share, I've been careful to choose roles that differ in essential respects from each other. It's the only way in this business to keep learning — especially since, after you've picked up a couple of awards as I have, people stop giving you advice. They become afraid to; afraid you won't listen any more. All the advice has to come from yourself."
Noni used to decry the lock of decent parts for women in Australian film and television. Though I think her earlier criticisms still stand, she has changed her mind about that — or at least modified her view, since playing the award-winning roles of Fran and Nora.
"I've come to think that if there are few good parts for women, then there must be just as few good parts for men. If the women around the men are unconvincing, then the men are going to be unconvincing cardboard cutouts, too.
"There are good roles for men and women in a few films a year, but you have to keep grips on the fact that there are so very few good films a year. There never have been more than two or three a year, no matter how many film are being churned out; no matter how many people are working in the industry. Why should we expect any more?
"If people want to keep churning out an endles stream of B-grade films, fine. But let's not delude ourselves and call it the Australia film industry reinaissance. I don't think there's ever been such a thing."
What keeps the output of quality films down to only two or three a year is, Noni thinks, the lack of understanding between business and arts, and the obtuseness of some official funding bodies. 'To too many people or bodies, the script is almost irrelevant when considering a project. The deal's the thing. The package, and a proven track record. It seems to me that a lot of people with the power to make
Noni Hazelhurst and Mel Gibson in an ABC radio play
Noni Hazelhurst
funding decisions just cannot tell the difference between a good film and a bad film — otherwise, how can you account for the sort of rubbish which gets turned out?"
"Finding a producer who truly understands both ends of a project, the deal and the creativity, is about the hardest thing of all. Jill Robb is one; Bob Weiss another. There're not many."
She thinks that if there is an answer, it must lie in independence. That's how Paul Cox has stayed true to his creative vision, the way Kennedy Miller made its impoct.
"That necessarily means low budgets, and that's another sore point. We talk about low-budget films as if they're a breed apart, way down the hierarchical scale. But a film is good or bad regardless of whether it has a big or small budget."
For Noni, the main challenge right now is to keep her career developing by striking out in new directons, while blending in the old. "I've just finished shooting Australian Dream and I start shooting another film in six or seven months. That's incredible. I mean. I've never had that sort of continuity before.
"But I want to branch out. Think seriously about directing, and about working on a script of my own. I want to use my singing more; concentrate for a time on a record for children I'm doing with the composer Jim Cotter."
DESPITE the success of her film ^ ^ roles, Noni still takes great pride (and unmitigated pleasure) in her work in children's television, as one of the presenters of Australia's outstanding pre-school series, Playschool. "I wish everything I worked in had a team as committed as that. It's a tough role. Children are discriminating. If you're not telling them the truth, they'll let you know. Adults don't do that. They'll buy anything if they've paid for it. 'Beaut Shakespeare that was. Jees, she puts over a good part. Where'll we go for coffee, love?'
In January, Noni flies to the US to make pilot episodes of a pre-school series which she'll host with Neil Innes, an Englishman who does a children's show for Thames Television.
"We've made a couple of pilots already. It's the idea of an American who realised that America lacks a children's show like this, and who then went around the world to find not just what was being done, but who was doing it well."
If the project is picked up by an American network, it will mean a schedule of close to 70 shows a year, for four years. "But," says Noni, "I think we can do it to a tight time schedule so that I need spend as little time over there each year as possible. I don't want to move to America. I want to stay working here. I leamt in England that an artist works best in her own environment."
A
‘Finding a producer who truly understands both ends of the project, deal and creativity, is about the hardest thing’
NONITHE VICTIM STAYS IN CONTROL
IN TOUCH
From ANTHONY CLARKE in Melbourne
Talking to Noni Hazlehurst is a delectable experience. She is everything one expects, and more.
Open and alert, with her mobile, expressive face and ready wit, Noni is someone obviously in firm control of her destiny, guiding it with rigorous discipline .and . intelligence.
Noni Hazlehurst this year won her second Australian Film Institute best actress award, this time for the title role in "Fran''.
She plays a deserted mother, whose wretchedness is compounded by her own irresponsibility, as she tries to keep a grip on her uncaring de facto, and keep Social Welfare away from her children. The film is remarkably honest. It does not take sides but throws a light on the sort of situation to which most of us are blind.
“Fran is, in fact, a slag. But she’s a likeable slag, always able to bounce up when she’s been knocked down,” says Noni. “She is, in most respects, more unlike me than any other character I’ve played. But that actually made her easier to tackle. I . could be objective about
the role in a way that I couldn’t with Nora in ‘Monkey Grip.’ Nora had aspects I really could understand; feel in myself.”
“Fran", the first feature made by director/ scriptwriter Glenda Hambly, who won the AFI award for best original screenplay, starts in Melbourne in a few days’ time and will be in Perth at the Windsor Theatre on February 17 as part of of the Festival of Perth.
It was originally intended for television and was bought by the Seven network. Its cinema release came only after its success in the AFI awards.
"It should be on television,” Noni says. “That’s what Glenda had in mind all along. It's the medium which will let it reach the market it’s most meant for; the people it might help.
“To play Fran I had to meet people in her sort of circumstances. And some of those people made Fran’s life seem a piece of cake. Some of the stories I heard, the women I met — what impressed me most was that they’re still coping, still surviving, with well
turned-out children and well-kept homes. They’ve got ex-hus-bands, ex-creeps who bother them all the time, but they just keep bouncing back.
"And it’s the same with Fran. She’s a slag, but she’s not a depressive slag. Not like Lill, the character I played in ‘The Sullivans.’ If that character had been combined with Fran’s story, you’d have been slashing your wrists after 10 minutes."
Noni is used to playing victims. Her first roles after leaving Adelaide University nearly a decade ago were, she says, • “Crawford rape victims.” Her first best actress award, in 1982, was for Nora in “Monkey Grip," a woman with an obsessive commitment to a drug addict.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. Some people tell me I make these parts work because I’ve got a vulnerable appearance which lifts what seem unsympathetic roles on paper.
“But if you look at the roles available for women, there’s very little else. What’s the alternative? To be a ‘Pat the Rat’-style arch-bitch or a super-cool ruthless businesswoman? They’ve got even less basis in reality than some of the victims. “And in a sense, we’re all victims. If we choose to live in this society, we’re victims of our own greed or whatever else keeps us going.”
It's a reflection on the Australian film industry that Noni Hazlehurst finds herself playing such victims of society. There are few meaty, intelligent roles for women in our film industry. For every Caddie, there are 10 Mad Max’s; and certainly no Mad Maxines.
But though the role choices are few, Noni is stretching herself to map out a career which keeps integrity and development its touchstones. She won’t be typecast, refusing to become an easily-cast commodity for other people’s benefit.
“Even if there are some things my characters share, I’ve been careful to choose roles that differ in essential respects from each other. It’s the only way in this business to keep learning — especially since, after you’ve picked up a couple of awards as I have, people stop giving you advice. They become afraid to; afraid you won’t listen
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Users of vehicles in any area in which the provisions of the Control of Vehicles (Off-road areas) Act, 1985 apply, are reminded that as from Sunday. December 1, 1985, new provisions -relating to seat belts and protective helmets, will come into force.
All motor vehicles, including those registered under the Road Traffic Act, 1974, will be required to have seat belts fitted and worn when used in off-road situations. All motor cyclists and pillion passengers will be required to wear protective helmets when using a motor cycle, including those registered under the Road Traffic Act, 1974, in off-road situations.
The seat belt requirements are as follows:
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(i) lap belts conforming to the standards and specifications in AS 2596-1983; and
(ii) seat belt anchorage points located so as to provide for the effective operation of the seat belt including adequate torso support and otherwise conforming to the standards and specifications in AS 2596-1983.
Protective helmets shall be of a type and standard specified in AS 1698-1960.
Modified penalties of $40 will apply for failure to wear a seat belt or protective helmet.
Further details can be obtained from the undersigned, c/- the Local Government Department, 32 St Georges Terrace. Perth (telephone 325 7088).
D.J. Forrest SECRETARY
“I just don’t think I can waste the talents I’ve been given. I always say acting beats working for a living. We’re incredibly lucky to be doing something so creative and fulfilling. And that makes it essential for me to tackle things with a fair degree of responsibility.”
Noni used to decry the lack of decent parts for women in Australian
film and television. Though I think her earlier criticisms still stand, she has changed her mind about that - or at least modified her view, since playing the awardwinning roles of Fran and Nora.
“I’ve come to think that if there are few good parts for women, then there must be just as few good parts for men. If the women around the
men are unconvincing, then the men are going to be unconvincing cardboard cutouts, too.
“There are good roles for men and women in a few films a year, but you have to keep grips on the fact that there are so very few good films a year. There never have been more than two or three a year, no matter how many films are being churned out; no
matter how many people are working in the industry. Why should we expect any more?
“If people want to keep churning out an endless stream of B-grade films, fine. But let’s not delude ourselves and call it the Australian film industry renaissance. I don’t think there’s ever been such a thing.”
More in page 176
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Worn Hazlehurst wiuth Rosie Logie and Travis Ward in a scene from Fran.
Laugh and cry
FRAN (M). Directed by Glenda Hambly. Starring Noni Hazlehurst, Annie Byron. State 2 ★ ★ ★
Sometimes i
think it’s a pity we don’t emulate the Japanese system of honouring our artists. If we did, Noni Hazlehurst would certainly be up and running for the list of Living National Treasures.
What a treat it is to see her perform and what rare conviction she brings to her roles, on stage and screen. This time round, she’s in riveting good form, effortlessly making you laugh and cry and gnash your teeth in sheer frustration as feckless Fran, the social worker's nightmare whose tale of woe is the film’s sad story.
This is the role that won her top acting honours at this year’s AFI Awards
and it’s the sort of performance that could easily scoop the pools even in a more high-powered international forum, like the Academy Awards.
Not that we’re likely to see Fran turning up in that neck of the woods, worlds away as it is from the high gloss escapist entertainment that’s currently all the go at the movies.
On the contrary, Fran is a gritty slice of social realism that absolutely refuses either to pull its punches or powder its nose. And I’m afraid its theme of suburban domestic drama and its insistence on telling the whole
truth and nothing but, is unlikely to translate into queues at the box office.
Nonetheless this is a brave and impressive little movie, briskly directed by West Australian Glenda Hambly, from a script with rare insight and a real feel for the Australian landscape — the streets of suburbia that is, not the outback that more romantic filmmakers are always telling us is ours.
Fran, the cheery, cheeky young mother of three children is basically (as everyone but she can see) a disaster. And herself the product of a childhood spent in and out of foster homes, she’s well on the way to repeating the pattern with her own family.
Not that she doesn’t love them, but she’s constantly being sidetracked from her responsibilities by man troubles, crippled as she is by the Conviction that the only measure of her worth is the approval of a man — any man.
When the husband, whose frequent absences have encouraged her to seek pleasure elsewhere,
i beats her up and leaves for
u___...__,__________
Susie Eisenhuth
with Noni
out on the tiles just as fast as she can paste some warpaint over her shiner.
Of course she picks a wrong’un again — all sex and no responsibility (except for the pretty little daughter he can't keep his hands off). And the stage is set for a depressing re-run of the classic pattern so well documented in the welfare statistics.
The worst thing is knowing there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. We never doubt that Fran will visit disaster upon herself, though as infuriating as
we find her paralysis of the will, the film makes it clear that she’s also a victim.
No happy endings here, but a moving lesson in care and understanding, plus some revelations for those lucky enough not to tread the welfare terrain, but inclined to lay down the law about those who do.
I’ve no doubt many will prefer not to hear what Fran has to say, but I must say it’s a courageous Film that takes its chances whatever the costs.
FRAN-TAST1C
FRAN (M) Russell Cinemas
AT THE screening, a few months ago of films competing for the glittering prizes at this year’s Australian Film Awards, Western Australian film maker Glenda Hambly’s FRAN shone out like a light at the end of a mainly dark tunnel.
I thought at the time that Fran was one of the best Australian contemporary dramas I had seen and a second viewing last week did nothing to alter that opinion.
Their performances in the film won Noni Hazlehurst in the title role Best Actress, and Annie Byron as Fran’s friend Marge, Best Supporting Actress Awards.
The film is set in a very ordinary Perth suburb where children play on the wide streets, the nature strips are scorched by the sun, and women whose children are at school have little to entertain them after the day’s household chores are done.
Fran is one such woman — thir-ty-ish, pretty, friendly and full of beans — and she’s not content to sit at home and read a book or the Women’s Weekly.
Fran, quite simply, is bored out of her scone with relying on her three children to ease her loneliness while her husband Ray is up North for months at a time.
Men follow her in the street as she trips along in skin-tight jeans and high-heeled shoes — “It’s because you look like a bitch in heat”, says her friend Marge only half jokingly — “They’ve been following me since primary school”, Fran retorts happily.
And some of them follow her home and into her bed, which is fine with Fran until someone dobs her in to Ray and he comes home, gives her a black eye and takes off without a backwards glance.
Loyal Marge comforts her. cries with her and tells her that she'll be better off without Ray but Fran is unconvinced — “I’m not like you”, she sobs “I've gotta have a man around”: - •' ' ’■ ' -*•
The fact that all the men she’s had (her three children all have different fathers) have treated her badly or dumped her, hasn’t changed Fran’s half-baked view that the future happiness of herself and her children can’t be guaranteed unless there is some man in their lives.
Her children love and respect her and when she’s good she’s a very good mother romping and giggling with them like a big kid herself. At times her eldest daughter Lisa seems more like the mother as she organises dinner and the washing machine.
But the three small, wriggling children that she lets sleep with her are a substitute for what Fran really wants in her bed and when her loneliness becomes too much for her to bear she sweeps her childrens’ protests aside, puts on the warpaint and sallies off to pick someone up.
She’s brimming over with happiness again when she returns — three days later — with a randy but reluctant barman Jeff (Alan Fletcher) in tow.
Even Marge, who has worried herself sick and cared for Fran’s kids during her absence can’t keep up her tight-lipped disapproval in the face of Fran’s delight.
It’s as plain as the nose on Marge’s homely but lovely face-
that Fran’s happiness is going to be short-lived. She’s a loser whose life has been one disaster after another — mainly of her own making — and she hasn’t learnt a thing from any of them.
Fran is a totally believable character and her story is a disturbingly familiar one. It’s power is in its completely unsentimental and non-judgmental telling.
You may not be able to totally approve of Fran but you certainly understand why she behaves as she does and love her in spite — or at times because — of it.
CHOOSE ME (M) Brighton Bay Twin
LIKE Fran, Eve, one of the principal characters in Alan Rudolph’s CHOOSE ME, likes men and needs a man but there the resemblance between them ends.
Eve seems to believe that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince — if indeed you ever do — while Fran thinks every frog is a prince.
Eve (Lesley Ann Warren) is a former hooker who now owns a shady-looking bar in an unglamor-ous part of Los Angeles. She’s financially independent deter-
Lesley Ann Warren and Keith Carradine
mined never to marry but still hankers after a man of her own.
At the moment she’s involved, against her better judgment, with a married man and can’t decide whether to continue or break off the relationship.
The city’s most popular radio talk show is the Love Line where an alarmingly sensible, authoritative Doctor Nancy Love calmly tells callers how to sort out the messes they’ve made of their lives.
Eve starts to call the Love Line regularly — not really seeking advice it seems but just to drone on endlessly about her problems.
Little does she know that Dr Love (Genevieve Bujold) is a total fruitcake herself and has never even been in love. Dr Love’s life, including her sessions with her analyst, is all conducted by telephone.
Meanwhile a stranger (Keith Carradine) has arrived in town, settled in comfortably at one of Eve’s barstools and is about to change both the womens’ lives for ever.
CHOOSE ME is interesting to watch but the mainly self-obsessed, self-analysing characters are hard to like and overall irritating. I wanted to bang their heads together. • • ; •
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FRAN. Modem, personal and tragic - a gutsy movie, as well as an unremittingly bleak one. This is the story ^ of a "bad girl*, a deserted mother who loves her three % children but is hopelessly irresponsible with them. The T movie never excuses her behaviour, but it challenges] us to understand why she does it, without becoming! an apology. State 2 Cinema 2642431. Daily! 15.6.30pm. Sun 2.30pm.
^_MAN: The_
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by Susan Hawkeswood
□ Fran (Nont Hazelhurst) with her neglected kids Cynthia (Rosie Logie) and Tom (Travis Ward)
Why do I hate Fran so much? Maybe because she’s so miserable. I’m tired of miserable mothers; screaming mothers; unable to cope mothers. Maybe I had unrealistic expectations of Fran. You see, I thought it would be about sex. And the problems of mothers — how to find it and how to enjoy it.
Fran reminds us that motherhood is pleasureless. You trade pleasure for “joy". The "joy of motherhood" — through children, through giving. There is no seizing for self, no pleasure in taking. Your body is never your own
— it’s occupied territory from pregnancy onwards, it’s crawled over, clung to, sat on. It’s a food dispenser, a comfort giver. It’s not for pleasure anymore — at least not your own. Desire leads to neglect, to sneaking out after the kids are in bed, like Fran does. Like an irrepsonsible adolescent, slipping out after dark for a quick fuck. But She only goes to the pub for some beer, which she brings back home with her. Her mostly absent husband has returned from up north while she’s been out and beats her up, accuses her of being a whore. We can sympathise
— after all, she only nipped down to the bottle shop for five minutes. But what if she’d managed a quick fuck
while she was there. Would we sympathise then, or would she be getting what she deserved?
Fran seeks something called a ‘‘good time”. She doesn't find pleasure, only more pain. Masochistic relationships that cause more problems than loneliness. Where she can be the clinger, not the clung-to. Sex must be the road to "love and affection", not a destination in itself.
Fran is a good mother/bad mother tale: there's a good mother (Marge) next door to show us exactly what our options are. Marge does all the right things — and she never fucks. Fran is the bad girl with a heart of gold, but this time she's got kids. Instead of disgust we are allowed to feel pity, even sympathy. All the reviews I read before seeing the film referred to Fran as an “irresponsible" mother. It's the new word for “bad”. More acceptable, more understandable. We can sympathise with "irresponsible" but never with “bad" — the wicked stepmother, the evil queen, the tyrant, the abuser, the slut. (Never mind that “irresponsible" is one of the seven deadly sins of motherhood. Serve well balanced meals on time and you can get away with almost anything.)
We are given a backdrop of excuses for Fran’s "irresponsibility". Alcoholic mother, welfare institutions, foster homes, sexual abuse victim. Her history excuses her "neglect”, justifies her putting her own emotional needs first. Do we really need that many excuses, so much victimisation to accept Fran’s search for “happiness" at the expense of her children? All of this for a four week holiday with her boyfriend, who doesn’t give a damn anyway. What's the price for pleasure then?
Fran simply holds up the bad mother and asks us to understand and sympathise with her dilemma, but it doesn't analyse, it doesn't wonder why. It excuses, but doesn't challenge. Fran has no victory at the end, no celebration, no good fuck and this saves her from total censure. She isn't really after sex at all, and just as well. At the end of the film she’s irresponsible, neglectful, a bad organiser. Ultimately she's a victim. A victim of motherhood, a victim of men, a victim of a welfare system that demands ‘‘responsibility” (read celibacy or marriage), a victim of loneliness. But she's no slut, she does it all for love.
12 SKIRT
FRAN
1985, 94 min, color Director: Glenda Hamby Producer: David Rapsey Production Company: Barron Films Ltd. Screenwriter: Glenda Hamby Cinematographer: Jan Kenny Music: Greg Schultz Principle Cast: Noni Hazelhust,
Annie Byron, Alan Fletcher,
Narelle Simpson, Travis Ward,
Rosie Logie, Danny Adcock
FRAN is a tough, lucid and emotionally-charged award-winning film, carried by the virtuoso performance of Noni Hazelhurst. Ms. Hazelhurst, awarded the 1982 Australian Film Institute’s Best Actress Award for MONKEY GRIP, won again in 1985 for her role as Fran, with awards also going to Annie Byron (Best Supporting Actress) and Glenda Hamby (Best Screenplay).
As Fran, Hazelhurst plays an attractive and friendly 30-year-old, struggling to come to grips with marriage and motherhood in a depressing Australian suburb. Abandoned by her husband upon discovery of her infidelities, she is left with three small children. An affair temporarily eases her loneliness, but leaves the Welfare Department with custody of her children. Her life still spirals downward. Finally, her anger is unleashed upon her neighbor and best friend, Marge (Annie Byron), and she is left at film’s end alone and devastated.
However, Fran is never without sympathy. The astonishingly well-realized performance by Noni Hazelhurst mixes charm and irresponsibility, love and devastation, pain and humor. FRAN is a decidedly dark film, but genuine in its depth and force.
Australian Screen (NFSA) website page for the film, curated by Lynden Barber
Garry Gillard | New: 17 April, 2013 | Now: 2 October, 2022