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Clip description
Eddie (Ben Mendelsohn) visits Tully (Susie Porter) at the kindergarten where she works. She punches him in the mouth, as a warm welcome home. He is dismayed to find out she’s married to his brother Pete. In the police station, Jonesy (Steve Le Marquand) asks Pete (Andrew S Gilbert) about the bloke they call ‘Mullet’. Pete eventually admits that Mullet is his brother.
Curator’s notes
The women in Mullet are often more physical than the men. Indeed, their behaviour is sometimes fairly aggressively masculine, as in this scene, although they’re never portrayed as the kind of half-man, half-woman characters you find in some outback movies. These are women who are used to having to make themselves heard. They have jettisoned subtlety, because it got them nowhere in this town of footballers and fishermen. Ben Mendelsohn’s performance is interesting in this scene – there’s a touch of arrogance in the way he says ‘I shouldn’t have come here – it wasn’t fair’, as if he expects his presence to make Tully swoon.
