Australian films are on a roll at the moment – Looking for Grace, The Daughter, Broke, Sherpa, A Month of Sundays and PAWNO.
PAWNO is an unassuming but highly amusing observational film set in Melbourne’s inner west where life eddies and fissures around a pawn broker shop owned and operated by world weary Les Underwood.
Les has an offsider, Danny, a young bloke who initially appears aimless and lacking in the social graces, but is a good handyman and harbours the heart of a poet.Another fixture of the shop is Harry, who drops in for a cuppa and a natter, discuss the news, play cards, solve crosswords.
Writer Damian Hill, who also plays Danny, has constructed a mesmerising microcosm of a streetscape ripe with a range of fascinating characters. The diversity of ethnicity, gender, and socio economic backgrounds that populate the street or who are drawn into pawn creates a mosaic of comedy and tragedy, enigma and familiar.
As Les, John Brumpton inhabits the grounded, granite veneered vendor of securities and loans like he’s lived it. World weary and working class he is fair and above board but pragmatic in the various dealings that come his way. He’s not a man to cross and not adverse to violent retaliation in the area of self defence.
Tony Rickards’ Harry, outwardly happy harbours a secret sorrow for which he enlists Les aid in alleviating.
Ngoc Phan is wonderfully full on as Lai who runs a cafe on the block and has taken quite a shine to Les.
Malcolm Kennard and Mark Coles Smith are magic as a pair of footpath philosophers, flaneurs in flannos and wife beaters, boulevardiers of broken dreams.
Daniel Frederiksen adds texture in a poignant portrayal of a tranny trying to realign his relationship with his young kids.
Maeve Dermody shines as a local bookseller who catches Danny’s eye and sets his poetic heart a flutter.
A disparate band of customers come in the shape of Kerry Armstrong, a distraught mother trying to track down her disappeared son, John Orcsik as a family man who leaves incriminating kink on a VCR he’s flogged, and Brad McMurray as a bad arse desperate for dough and inadvisedly turning mean to get it.
Hill and director Paul Ireland channel Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s sensational streetscape slice of lifer, Smoke, and succeed in making a distinctly Melbourne film but with universal appeal, much the way Malcolm did a few years back.
A score by Tristan Dewey and Tai Jordan, augmented by Tom Waits, is pitch perfect, the addition of a young female busker as a kind of chorus adding a significant contextual layer to the narrative.
Cinematography by Shelley Farthing-Dawe is awesome both in the lighting and angles of the pawn shop and the location work. Doesn’t Footscray photograph well!
Funny, tender, truthful and imaginative with a tincture of mystery, PAWNO is not something you should watch in the privacy of your own home – go out and experience it as a community.
Paul Ireland’s PAWNO will screen from Thursday 21 April.