THE BOOK OF REVELATION
Director: Ana Kokkinos Stars: Tom Long, Greta Scacchi, Colin Friels, Deborah Mailman, Anna Torv
Reviewed by GREG KING
In the more sexually liberated ‘60’s there was a film called Three In The Attic, in which three college students kidnapped the college stud and locked him in their attic and seduced him to teach him a lesson. There are a few thematic similarities between that rather frank (for its time), but unfunny sex comedy and Ana Kokkinos’ unpleasant and unsatisfactory sexually charged mystery drama The Book Of Revelation. However, that film got across its ideas without the gratuitous, full frontal nudity and full on sex scenes.
With this film Kokkinos (whose previous films include Only The Brave and the confronting Head On) is staking her claim to be the Australian equivalent of Catherine Breilleaut, the controversial feminist French director who has deliberately blurred that fine line between art and pornography with films like Romance, etc.
In this film, adapted from Rupert Thompson’s novel, three anonymous, masked women abduct Daniel, a handsome ballet dancer (played by a game Tom Long, from The Dish, etc), and sexually abuse him for twelve days and before releasing him. While he is missing, his terminally ill mentor Isabel (Greta Scacchi) hires her husband (Colin Friels), a detective, to try and find him. Meanwhile Daniel’s girl friend Bridget (Anna Torv) is disturbed by his absence and fears it has something to do with her. Daniel is left emotionally scarred by the experience, and finds it hard to relate to women or even ease his way back into his former life. Only when he meets Julie (Deborah Mailman), an aboriginal student, does he find himself able to trust women again.
But he still finds himself obsessed with finding his mysterious persecutors, a search that has terrible consequences.
An examination of male sexuality, The Book Of Revelation is one of those pretentious films in which long silences are meant to speak volumes and one look is meant to convey more than whole pages of dialogue. And the motivation of the kidnappers remains a mystery. There are many elements of this film that fail to ring true. Visually the film is quite dull and bland, and cinematographer Tristan Milani fails to make much of the Melbourne locations.
Even the performances are understated and generally unconvincing. While Long is brave in a revealing performance, in more ways than one, he struggles to bring much energy or passion to his role. Friels (who is more dynamic in the recent Solo) sleepwalks his way through a cliched role as a sympathetic cop, and it seems like he has just wandered in off the set of his Blackjack series of telemovies.
The Book Of Revelation is a confronting and sexually explicit film that is likely to offend more than it pleases. This is one of those films that will polarise audiences, and you can count me amongst those numbers who hate it!
*
Reviewed by WENDY RAWADY
In The Book of Revelation, Ana Kokkinos’ long-awaited feature, once again, we see the light-weight character of the Australian physical being standing in the way of a genuinely moving artistic experience. Only Colin Friels comes across as 100% true to character, the rest of the cast, even the wonderful Greta Scacchi, seeming pretentious and cliché ridden. Particularly irksome is Tom Long’s Aussie accented question to his torturers (why are you doing this?) which is the bit in the trailer and promos, and when it cropped up in the film, I nearly laughed out loud.
Now, I used to think that when accompanied by French subtitles, for instance, the shallowness of the dialogue and acting would be covered up to an overseas audience, but I don’t believe that is so. There are too many holes in this production. There is a temptation here to add that "revelation" of pink bits is what the title means, but that would be adding to the wheelbarrow of corn that abounds already in the film.
This is sad, because the material shot (rather than the story and script) is carefully crafted by a talented and experienced bunch of people and supported by the leading lights of cinema, Palace and so on. It is not to say, by the way, that films such as this shouldn’t be made or seen. We desperately need MORE to be made so that we can work out the bumps in the narrative, dialogue and premise. Bring back 10BA in its full glory, scale down the classroom based teaching and get people out there learning on the job, going to movies themselves, seeing how to do what they have just seen, reading books and listening to music, watching architecture and art unfolding etc, to inform their work.
This aspect seems to be missing in The Book Of Revelation which tells a somewhat unmotivated tale of kidnapping (“Because you are so beautiful”) re-making the bones of The Collector (1965, Terence Stamp, William Wyler) but without a hint of the intelligence. This is further confused by the use of the same actress in two roles, and it becomes a gruelling ride for an audience waiting (nay, praying!) for something really worthy to happen or be explained. There were so few bruises and marks on the victim’s body and many continuity problems with his disarray that this became a distraction.
Apart from some carefully posed nakedness and some interesting Meryl Tankard choreography looking more like clunky Chunky Moves than her usual graceful style, the plot is not a grabber. The torture scenes are like an X-rated version of a Dr. Who episode and just don’t cut it. The scene where Tom Long’s character makes a police report on behalf of ‘a mate’ MAY have seemed like a good idea at the time. Flipping what often happens to female victims who are brave enough to tell of rape, but somehow, it all seems very amateurish.
But that’s just my view. I would recommend that aspiring film-makers go along and see this with an analytical eye, make notes, but remember that full-frontal nudity performed by an actor is not necessarily a “brave choice” or “brilliant performance”. It seems to be something Ana Kokkinos uses as a calling card and it just didn’t ring true for me.