At the moment I think the British are World Champion in the category "Best Domestic Drama". There is no shortage of truly excellent films out of the UK showing normal people trying to cope with everyday life and the screwballs it throws them once in a while. However, that does not mean other countries do not make them, or make them any less good. Case in point: the Australian coping-with-life drama "Boxing Day", a real-time faux-single-take view at eighty minutes out of someone's hard life. Which happens to be a lot better than it sounds like due to some brilliant performances.
Confession time: here at ScreenAnarchy we were sent this film a looooooong time ago. But we get sent a lot of stuff and if you do so unsolicited, it's of course at your own risk that we will not be looking at it. There are only 24 hours in a day after all.
Now you may have noticed that I've written a lot of reviews for Siren Visual releases this year, and that is because they published several adult-oriented anime series not available elsewhere. I wanted to see those, I bought some of them myself, got sent some by Siren Visual (which, I won't lie here, is always nice) and reviewed all of them. Except for that ultra low-budget domestic drama they also sent me, which I had never asked for.
During my communications with Siren Visual they kept on asking if I liked "Boxing Day", to the point that I promised that yes, I would watch their crummy movie already (jeez!).
So imagine my surprise when said crummy movie turned out to be quite special indeed and easily good enough to recommend it.
Why did I like it? Read on!
The Story:
Chris is preparing an after-Christmas lunch for a few family members about to visit. An ex-convict ex-addict under electronic house-arrest, Chris does the utmost to tidy up his place but he is a cracked shell of a man, and keeping focused on staying clean and making it a happy day for everyone is obviously hard for him.
Unfortunately his first visitor is not family but Owen, an old mate from jail who needs Chris' expertise on a batch of drugs. Chris wants nothing to do with it though and Owen stomps off angrily when the family arrives. But as he leaves he tells Chris something so terrible, so devastating about the new visitors, that Chris feels compelled to dig up the gun he keeps buried in his backyard...
If I had to name only one single reason to watch this film it would be Richard Green, the lead actor and co-writer. An ex-convict ex-addict himself, Richard is absolutely believable as Chris and his tired, scarred, emaciated face is hard to look away from. He is simply a mesmerizing presence and it is a good thing "Boxing Day" completely revolves around him. The other actors are good enough and each of them gets a moment or two in the sun (even newcomer Misty Sparrow), but this is about Chris, and about Richard Green portraying Chris.
"Boxing Day" was made with a grant from the Adelaide Film Festival and the basic idea of director Kriv Stenders was simply that pointing a camera at Richard Green for 80 minutes would automatically get you some interesting cinema. Kriv had done a film project featuring prison inmates where he met Richard (who was still incarcerated at the time) and had been very impressed by him. Now out of jail and having become a fairly successful theater playwright and poet, Richard Green warmed to the idea of working with Kriv again. Together they wrote the script for "Boxing Day", incorporating many of Richard's experiences with rehabilitation.
The end result looks, not surprisingly, uncomfortably authentic. Richard Green is not just believable as Chris, he often seems to BE Chris. Every pathetic look, every moan and every breakdown feels wholly earned and without knowing what Chris was in jail for you cannot help but start to feel sorry for him because he is trying so hard to be as normal as he can be, despite being sorely tested by the people around him.
But when the steel comes out there is no question about how dangerous Chris can be, and one shot in particular shows him sitting still, paralyzing someone with his gaze, and you can imagine how scary a career criminal this man must have been. It is also the moment where you will wonder what choice of action he'll take towards the end.
And that is basically all there is to tell, especially if I want to steer clear of spoiler territory. The story is quite simple and is just a set-up for the actors to show their mettle, almost as if it is all purely based on improvisation. "Boxing Day" is a very minimalist film with only six actors in it, shot in real time on one location, and this could easily have been a stage play. Don't expect anything spectacular bar the acting. "Boxing Day" looks as if it was made using one single giant take, but that is an illusion. To do that for real would have been too cumbersome, taking a big toll on either the quality of the performances or on the expense of shooting the film. In fact "Boxing Day" consists of twelve shots and a couple of jumps are clearly visible (to its credit though, most are not). It gives the film a look that adds to the authenticity but it also looks a bit like the holiday film from hell, with someone forgetting to stop the camera during a particularly embarrassing 80 minutes. With its use of natural lighting and nothing else, "Boxing Day" could have gone for a Dogme 95 certificate I guess. It would maybe even be fairly unremarkable if not for the ability of the actors, who sure are magnificent here. I enjoyed this film a lot because of them.
Conclusion:
While not without its faults "Boxing Day" is easily kept afloat on its actors' shoulders, first and foremost those of Richard Green who is simply phenomenal here.
It is a simple story told in a semi-experimental style which never really takes off, but neither does it detract from the performances in it and on that strength this film is very impressive indeed. Strongly recommended.
On to the DVD:
Siren Visual has released "Boxing Day" as a two-disc regionfree edition. It's stacked with extras, all of them valid and worth watching, but it lacks one big asset: subtitles. Technically speaking this is an English-language film and should be easy to cope with, but the low-budget fly-on-the-wall approach combined with a VERY strong Aussie dialect makes it very hard to make out what's being said. This is especially true for the conversations between Owen and Chris early in the movie, with both actors swallowing many of their consonants while grunting, rasping and mewling their vowels. On top of that they employ jail-ish jargon, or so I assume, in truth it's pretty hard to hear. Thankfully the topics aren't hard to pick out and everything gets repeated by the other actors later on (whose conversation is a good deal more discernible) so it's not a showstopper, but the first 30 minutes were hard work indeed.
Video-wise the disc is good. Bearing in mind that "Boxing Day" was shot using rather tiny handheld digital cameras, this will probably never be a title which needs a BluRay release and this DVD easily suffices.
Now for the extras, of which there are plenty.
For starters the movie disc has a commentary track with director Kriv Stenders and producer Kristian Moliere, and this is everything a good commentary should be. Kriv is in the lead and obviously has prepared himself, managing to tell the whole story of the film's creation, the actors' backgrounds, funding, sets, while also pointing out things in the film while it runs. Both Kriv and Kristian are not shy about mentioning on-screen errors, pointing out the jumps between the twelve takes or things they shamelessly stole from other films. They also mention other single-take films (like "Time Code" or the king in that genre, "Russian Ark") and plenty of other directors get hailed. Kriv even does a Werner Herzog impression! How dare he... But it's a very good track and well worth a listen.
The other extras are on the second disc, and the first thing you get is an alternative version of the full movie. The twelve takes were rehearsed and what you see here are cuts of those rehearsals, basically a "dry-run" for the movie itself. Continuity is not adhered to and people wear different clothes between takes, but the acting is no less intense and it's interesting to see an alternate cut of a favorite scene. Definitely a cool addition, and funnily enough it's six minutes longer than the movie despite having no credits.
Next up there is a 45 minute Making-of documentary, which is interesting because it shows all the things Kriv and Kristian discussed in the commentary. To be honest all the extras have some overlap with the commentary, but that's what you get with a good commentary.
There are some smaller items concerning casting, showing some of the audition footage, actors Misty Sparrow and Syd Brisbane acting like total assholes towards each other (hopefully faked), Richard Green spouting poetry and the film's trailer. There is also a special item on how the focus of the production was on three items: cast (who, like the crew, were paid wages instead of any form of deferred payment), sound (natural but clear), and visuals (the single-take approach)
Apart from the discs there is a twelve page production booklet which is very good even though it again repeats a lot of what is already said and shown in the extras.
All in all this is a pretty stellar release for a fine drama.
You can order this film at Siren Visual: Link to their site.