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Clip description
Club owner Yanni (Nicholas Papademetriou) takes Carl (Sam Neill) to the kitchen in the club basement to explain his new job. The cool room is full of cockroaches and rotting food. The kitchen hand Mustafa (Nico Lathouris) arrives late and refuses Carl’s request to clean the benches.
Curator’s notes
No-one would accuse Death in Brunswick of being politically correct, but nor is it mean-spirited. Carl lives in a hovel, so the filthy kitchen isn’t that much of a change. Yanni is a Greek cliché with his open shirt and swaggering manner and his disparaging comments about Turks, but he’s also less than serious about it. Nicholas Papademetriou makes Yanni instantly likeable, partly by showing that he’s proud of his kitchen. He doesn’t really know it’s a health hazard; it has ‘everything you need, no probs’.
The scene is partly about the meeting of three cultures in one room – a version of the ‘new Australia’ that a place like Brunswick then represented. Much of the film’s comedy is built on their inability to get along. Mustafa makes Carl say his name, because he expects it to be mispronounced. Carl has had to do the same thing with Yanni, who insists on calling him ‘cookie’. At stake in this scene is a place in the pecking order, and Carl discovers he’s at the bottom, even in ‘my kitchen’.
