Australian
Screen

Clip description

Jane (Vera Plevnik) has joined her glam-rock friends in their band van. They toss gay drug-dealer Adam (Lou Brown) out the door as friends Karli (Tracy Mann), Jackie (Julie Barry) and Ellen (Moira MacLaine-Cross) come looking for Jane. The four girlfriends head off to another party but Karli takes a wrong turn onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge, just as Ellen asks Jane if she stole Karli’s money. Karli executes an unexpected U-turn to head back into the city.

Curator’s notes

There is a strong sense of larrikin humour in Going Down. The film is irreverent, self-consciously immodest and deliberately gross at times, but it has a strong sense of the excitement of being young and at large in a city full of wicked pleasures. There’s a touch of glamorous decadence that’s informed by the musical aesthetics of the time. This was the punk era, but there were very few punk films.

Going Down is also heavily influenced by the gay culture of the inner city, which was then in its first flowering. This was one of the first Australian features to show drag queens and gay nightclubs and queer street culture, about 12 years before The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). The wild turn on the Harbour Bridge was both a physical and metaphorical joke. These kids would rather die than be seen on the north side of the bridge, where Sydney’s richer middle classes choose to reside. Haydn Keenan was able to convince the authorities to close the Harbour Bridge for 40 minutes late at night for the shot to be done.