Australian Screen

Monkey Grip is perhaps one of the last films of the 1970s New Wave – even if released in 1982 – and one of the first films to show where Australian cinema might be going in the ‘80s. It can be seen as one of the wild bunch of independent, low-budget, free-thinking films inspired by Pure S (1975), a very small genre that might include Going Down (1983), Mouth to Mouth (1978), and possibly Winter of Our Dreams (1981). The links went beyond the way these films saw heroin as a cultural definer. These were films made against the establishment of the film industry, as well as the wider society. They were seeking to shock both and, to an extent, they did.

Monkey Grip was related but different. It was personal and female, concerned only with relationships, rather than events or narrative. The early feminist trailblazers like My Brilliant Career (1979) were self-consciously aware of the need for role models. Nora, in Monkey Grip, is certainly a feminist, with a strong sense of connection to the women around her, but the film is concerned with the unpredictable, amoral needs of the heart, rather than any political ideals. This insistence on the personal may have been its most radical aspect. The film isn’t primarily about heroin, or the sexual liberation of young people in the 1970s, even though it touches on both these things. It’s about Nora – her feelings through a year of tumultuous love, told almost in diary form. The film describes a period of intense emotions, a roiling flood of hormones, desires and confusions, made more complicated by Nora’s insistence on self-examination, on finding the words to describe what she felt.

In a wider sense, it’s also about a generation trying to live with new freedoms. Contraception is freely available, marriage has broken down, and sexual stereotypes are under revision. These people can love whomever they choose, but they’re not sure what to do with the new freedoms. At the same time, the film is about a mother and her daughter – that is perhaps the primary relationship of the film, rather than the intense romantic love affair with Javo. Nora falls into him like he falls into heroin, but she has Gracie to steady her and bring her back. She must look after a child, and the film gives us the sense that the child also looks after the mother.

Monkey Grip is based on Helen Garner’s first novel, published in 1977. It’s highly autobiographical, and she wrote it by reworking her own diaries. The book was a major success, winning the National Book Council award in 1978. Some critics felt the book was too fragmented, but the film is held together tightly by Noni Hazlehurst’s remarkable performance. She is on screen in virtually every scene, which helps to create a sense of emotional intensity. It is her feelings we feel, her elation and abjection. Others around her criticise her inwardness, what might be called her self-obsession, but that is where the film wants us to be – within her skin.

This was unusual in two respects. First, few Australian films dared to jettison plot in favour of emotion, particularly women’s emotions. Second was that such a film should be directed by a man. Ken Cameron, like Helen Garner, was a former schoolteacher. He had made three medium-length films before Monkey Grip, developing a style of personal filmmaking that was very suited to Garner’s book. He enlisted Patricia Lovell as producer but they could not get funding in 1979 and the project lapsed. It was revived when the federal government introduced a system of generous tax incentives for film investment in 1981 (the so-called ‘10BA scheme’). Even so, David Stratton in his book The Avocado Plantation (1990, Pan Macmillan), documents how close the film came to collapsing during production, because of funding difficulties.

One of Cameron’s major achievements in the film is the frankness of the sexuality, something completely fresh at the time. The film has none of the prurience of 1970s Australian films, where sex was largely comical or non-existent. The sex in Monkey Grip is realistic and unembarrassed and a major part of why Nora feels so passionate about Javo. The film would make no sense without it, but part of the naturalness was achieved in a novel way. Cameron had the entire crew, including himself, rehearse naked with the cast. ‘Everyone was terrific, but it probably wouldn’t be possible to shoot these scenes today’, Cameron told Stratton.

Noni Hazlehurst won Best Actress at the 1982 AFI Awards. She had originally auditioned for the role of the singer Angela, who’s played in the film by Christina Amphlett, lead singer of The Divinyls (a group formed in Sydney in 1980). Nora’s daughter in the film is played by Alice Garner, the daughter of Helen Garner. Neither Hazlehurst nor Colin Friels was well-known at the time of their casting.

Monkey Grip was released in Australian cinemas in June 1982. In addition to Noni Hazlehurst’s Best Actress AFI Award in 1982, the film was also nominated for Best Picture, Supporting Actress (Alice Garner), Cinematography (David Gribble) and Editing (David Huggett) awards.