Australian
Screen

Clip description

An unknown man in a Holden Monaro cruises through an Australian suburb looking for women. Spotting Fran (Noni Hazlehurst) in a phone box he gets out, stares at her lasciviously, blocks her exit and makes a crude, unwelcome pass. She walks away, swinging her hips and laughing at him.

Curator’s notes

This is a dark and highly unusual way to start a nominally social realist drama, something we might more readily expect to see in a genre picture – a horror film or Mad Max-style adventure. Many viewers will feel butterflies in their stomachs because it’s clear the man is on the prowl for women and behaving creepily, even before he comes across Fran. What makes this a particularly unconventional opening is that the nameless driver is in effect given star billing. We enter this world through his eyes, as if he’s going to be a major character – yet after this scene he’s written out of the story.

The scene establishes the world of the film as a sunny-looking suburbia with a dark underside – a man’s world, prowled by predators. Yet it also shows that women are not easily cowed: note the schoolgirl at the start of the scene poking her tongue out at the driver. And while Fran could easily have been scared witless by this stranger’s sexual aggression, she laughs it off and belittles him – a lovely introduction to the lead character that instantly invites audiences to like her.

This opening sets up a social context for everything that will happen to Fran. We will see she is an unfaithful wife and in some ways an irresponsible mother. The male hostility she encounters in this and other scenes doesn’t necessarily excuse this, but it does help to explain it. A detail that speaks volumes about Fran and her situation is that she is calling Telecom to get her home telephone line reconnected because her husband hasn’t paid the bill. Finally, the choice of macho rock on the soundtrack – sometimes nicknamed ‘cock rock’ – is also telling.