Australian
Screen

Clip description

Karli (Tracy Mann) visits her drag queen friend Trixie (David Argue), who has just come off stage. She gives him a hit of heroin she bought earlier in the night. She’s preoccupied with her own thoughts as Trixie quietly slips into unconsciousness behind her – an apparent overdose. At Bondi Beach, Ellen (Moira MacLaine-Cross) chats with her new friend Greg (also David Argue) under a fake palm tree. The dog appears to have been in the car that they stole to get to Bondi.

Curator’s notes

The film has an unpredictable sense of the surreal, as well as a very black sense of humour. Hugh Keays-Byrne appears in a couple of scenes as a kind of hairy Puck, reading passages from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There are several shots of the moon, both real and fake, to give a sense of fate and fantasy. David Argue’s performance in two roles, as Trixie the junkie drag queen and Greg, a clerk from the unemployment office, is one of his most freewheeling and hilarious performances.

Most of the humour was partially improvised; other jokes were elaborately set up – like the falling coconut. Not much is explained or explored. It is a pastiche movie, jumping between characters and situations with abandon – a more unruly version of the structure George Lucas used in American Graffiti (1973). Going Down could easily have been called Australian Graffiti.