Bob Ellis isn't exactly the first person you think of when you hear the words "film director" but his enthusiasm for the medium, combined with his successful script for Newsfront enabled him to direct this low budget effort that he wrote. Response was enough for him to then get a big budget for Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train and later he directed The Nostradamus Kid which is kind of remarkable.
Anyway this is probably as pure an Ellis experience as you could hope (?) for. He was the sole writer as well as director, it's a clearly autobiographical tale about a tubby, eloquent columnist with kids (only it adds here he's divorced and the ex and kids are back in ); there are scenes at Palm Beach and also a flat in the city, which I understand was Ellis'; there's home movie footage of kids and a wife, who are Ellis' kids and wife; Ellis has a small role as Clayton's flatmate; the plot feels like Ellis... John Clayton runs into his ex, Michelle Fawdon, who is with Norman Kaye (briefly seen) but can't have a kid and asks Clayton to impregnate her.
Fawdon is very good, believable - she flashes her boobs in one scene. Clayton seems less comfortable - a bit awkward with how he moves.
Ellis' direction seems to mostly consist of long shots of two handers. Andrew Lesnie was the DOP so some of those shots are quite nice.
The film is mysteriously hard to see. I mean, look, it's unadulterated Bob Ellis, completely with eloquence and really unerotic sex scenes of tubby Clayton thrusting away with Fawdon, but at least it's a romance with different leads. Ellis said the film wouldn't have worked the same way with John Hargreaves and Wendy hughes - it would've been a lot more fun to watch them have sex but it is a point of difference.
There's not a lot of story, which again is very Ellis. The set up is dealt with admirably quickly but then there's not much else happening. They have sex and talk and have sex and talk. They didn't have a great love, I mean it was six weeks, he's not that good a father because the kids are in the US, she sticks to her position. The piece really needed a third character to come in - Norman Kaye is away but maybe an old friend or her ex wife. But then that maybe wouldn't work, either.
The device of John Clayton talking in a Donald Duck voice is overused.
I wonder if Ellis did this up as a play?
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