Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Highs and Lows: Underneath the Surface of One Perfect Day
Originally published in Metro Magazine 140, 2004.
In many ways, One Perfect Day (Paul Currie, 2004) has pulled off the impossible. A visually spectacular, techno-operatic extravaganza put together in a funding environment growing increasingly more dire. In an industry that frequently churns out uninspiring Aussie-battler fare like Take Away (Marc Gracie, 2003) or the umpteeth variation on a well-worn joke (The Wog Boy (Aleksi Vellis, 2000)), there is definitely something inspiring about a film unafraid to aim high. Dazzlingly high, in fact.
One Perfect Day has been hyped as the most ambitious Australian project since Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), and though there may be debate around the ‘Australian-ness’ of Luhrmann’s epic, the assessment is far from hyperbole. One Perfect Day is a huge film. Set in the urban club world, an environment not known for its restraint when it comes to spectacle, One Perfect Day creates some of the most exhilarating club sequences ever seen in an Australian film. Quite an effort. It is not all smooth sailing, though. Beneath the admirably slick packaging there are a few worrying cracks in the foundations, and the moral messages they reveal are concerning.
But first, a brief synopsis. Based loosely on the Greek myth of Orpheus and the Underworld (as, too, was Moulin Rouge), One Perfect Day tells the story of Tommy Matisse’s descent into the ‘underworld’ of the club scene to rescue Alysse, the love of his life. Tommy, let’s not beat around the bush, is that great cinematic cliché, a misunderstood genius. He hears beautiful music in the seemingly mundane sounds of every day life, yet his gift goes sadly unrecognized by the crusty Head of Composition at the prestigious Royal College of Music, London.
When Tommy’s younger sister Emma dies of a drug overdose after a night clubbing, Tommy returns home to find that his sister had become a very different girl to the one Tommy knew, and he goes in search of her true spirit. He soon finds himself being drawn into Emma’s world, the world of party drugs and trance music. Complicating matters is the fact that Alysse, Tommy’s girlfriend, emotionally shaken by her role in Emma’s overdose, is seeking solace and, with the help of club owner and drug dealer Hector, is on a fast track to oblivion. As she descends, Tommy searches for anything about the sister he didn’t know, and becomes obsessed with the music he finds. His DJing draws Alysse back to him, but it is all too late, as Hector’s vengeance takes her from Tommy forever.
This euphoria of a thumping rave is what One Perfect Day does best. The club scenes are sensational, coming as close as a film ever has to capturing the ecstatic moment created when a DJ works a crowd at the top of their set. This is not an easy thing to replicate. Go (Doug Liman, 1999) does the peripheral activity of the club scene better and more realistically than One Perfect Day, yet falls short when it comes to the actual club environment.
Shortcomings like this are often due to budgetary constraints– it costs an awful lot of money to make a rave look real – but the producers of One Perfect Day overcame this by throwing a couple of massive parties and filming them. The gigs were promoted as any other major club event, except they were free, and world-class Djs like Paul van Dyk (who also contributes a song to the soundtrack) were shipped in to play. And it shows. There is a real sense of a community congregating to celebrate (even if the script does overdo the tribal/religious similies), the clubbers look realistically high, and the music is, put simply, unreal.
It is a bold move by any type of film to attempt a realistic cinematic representation of the dance party scene. Staggering as it may seem for a ‘subculture’ which regularly stages events involving up to 20,000 people (that’s at least fifteen James Taylor concerts), the youth club scene has long struggled for legitimacy as a cultural movement. It has had to withstand marginalization and demonization in the popular press because of the perceived scourge of ‘party drugs’, despite the fact that most of these enormous events go off with little or no violence or injury.
So there is a ready-made market for One Perfect Day made up of young clubbers grateful that finally, someone has managed to put their world on the screen. Though the representation of drug usage is problematic (and I will address this), Currie and his team should be commended for at least trying to reach into a marginalized youth culture and tell one of its stories. The atmospherics they get mostly right, and the film contains a number of wonderful moments; but the story, well, that’s another story.
Unfortunately the wonderful moments in One Perfect Day are often just that: moments. They come from nowhere and lead us nowhere. Perhaps that is a little blunt. They do not come from nowhere, but too often Currie relies on cinematic signifiers of an emotional highpoint – escalating music, an ecstatic crowd, the sun rising over the dust – rather than creating the emotional buildup which allows a character, and the audience, to reach a genuine turning point.
He almost pulls it off, in fact some could argue that he does, so wonderfully shot and scored (though scored is not really the word) are these sequences. Take away the lights and music, however, and it all seems just a little hollow. We never completely understand Tommy’s motivations: is he trying to find out what happened to his sister? Or to understand her world? Or is he trying to win back his girlfriend? Or to become a great DJ? Or to create a modern opera? Or all of them? It is never really made clear, thus the film’s climax is a confusing one, particularly as Tommy triumphantly shares it with Trig, the guy who gave Emma the drugs that killed her. While a desire to subvert audience expectations and avoid a traditional tie-up-all-strings ending is admirable, it cannot come at the expense of logical human behaviour.
There is a likely explanation for One Perfect Day’s curious story choices, and that is that its screenwriters were too closely adherent to the Orpheus myth on which the film is based, rather using it as a jumping-off point for the story. One Perfect Day seems intent on fitting its characters to the confines of the myth when it should be concentrating on their stories. For example, in the myth, Hades punishes Orpheus for his lack of faith by reclaiming his wife to the underworld forever. Horrible stuff. But he is, after all, the devil, thus unspeakable evil is in many ways his stock in trade.
However, Hector, Hades’ equivalent in the film, is not evil incarnate. In fact, we are encouraged to see him in an amusing light in a comic (and frankly, rather ridiculous) pube-shaving scene. So his motivations for murdering Alysse must be something other than pure evil. But apart from one confusingly violent outburst, One Perfect Day never affords us the opportunity to see how Hector really feels about Alysse. We know that he thinks she has a nice voice, and that he might be in love with her, but murder? Hector is certainly a bad guy, and a jealous one, but cold-blooded killing seems just a little out of his league, and thus illogical. Except, of course, that it fits the myth of Orpheus.
One Perfect Day should have taken its lead from adaptations like O Brother, Where Art Thou (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2000), or even Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995); films which, though based on myths or classic stories, are not bound by literal interpretations of them. Because at times, it seems that One Perfect Day has its hands tied by Orpheus.
In the end, though, Alysse gets what she deserves. That might seem a trifle harsh, but a closer look at the film’s treatment of its female characters suggests that it does not think that they are worth much anyway. They are things to be fought over, or lusted after, but they have little real agency of their own. And One Perfect Day’s treatment of drugs appears balanced, but despite the film’s depiction of many extras quite clearly as high as kites, when it comes to the main cast a fairly clear moral and ideological message is revealed.
Drug use is consistently associated with weakness, a peculiar choice for a film purportedly celebrating a culture where drugs are a legitimate form of release and celebration. Similarly, drugs can be blamed for most, if not all of the film’s tragedies. Emma, a troubled teen with too much on her mind, turns to drugs for solace and, young and helpless, overdoses when Trig slips her something far more pure than she expected.
Alysse’s downward spiral is even crueller. Quite obviously too weak to resist the evils of party drugs, or even to use them in a quasi-balanced way like Trig seems to, she performs an astonishing array of atrocities; first dumping Emma at Emergency and doing a runner, then passing out at work (she’s a nurse, no less) after taking a pill before she came in. Eventually she is punished; murdered by Hector. Hector, though, gets away scot free. And Trig, despite taking just as many drugs as Alysse, not only escapes facing up to his crime, but gets to share in the euphoric finale.
It is not entirely surprising, however, that being female is aligned with being weak, and that ‘party’ drugs are portrayed as a crutch, when a quick glance down the list of names making up the creative team doesn’t turn up a single female until, wait for it, Costume Designer, and the three on parade at ACMI’s Popcorn Taxi Q&A were all over forty. It appears that a generation gap has appeared, and that One Perfect Day’s attitude to women is still stuck in the Greek era.
It would be easy to ignore this, however, to let the dazzling photography and music wash over, so stunning an experience is One Perfect Day. Because the emotional highs and lows are there, and beautifully handled by a very talented cast. There is barely a weak link, with Dan Spielman as Tommy and Kerry Armstrong as his mother the absolute highlights. But a film cannot stand on its highs and lows along. Like the drugs that are part of its world, One Perfect Day provides a euphoric ride, but the comedown is, sadly, unfulfilling.