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Clip description
Colin (Chris Haywood) has returned home after hospital treatment. He goes to the State Library to research the effects of Agent Orange, after reading news reports of American research implicating it in cancer and birth defects. Back home, he tells Lorraine (Jennifer Cluff) what he has found out about Agent Orange and Dioxin. She gets upset when he tries to repair a faulty motor in the refrigerator. He is supposed to be resting, but he wants to get everything in the house fixed, before it’s too late.
Curator’s notes
The argument in the kitchen was largely improvised on set, according to Chris Haywood. It’s an example of techniques Bill Bennett has often used in his films, to achieve a sense of spontaneity and truthful emotion. The scene before the argument, in which Colin talks about the chemicals, is a neat solution to the problem of exposition: how to communicate complex history or ideas in a natural and accessible way, without making the dialogue sound like a lecture. Haywood excels at this kind of naturalism.
