Praise (John Curran, 1998)

Gordon (Peter Fenton) and Cynthia (Sarah Horler) share a bath in Praise

As much as I’d like to celebrate my favorite Australian novelist, Christina Stead (check out The Man Who Loved Children), or my favorite Australian band, Falling Joys—to my mind the greatest artists the country has produced—I’ll go ahead and praise Praise, a 1998 film by John Curran, an American-born director who began his career in Australia, later moving to the U.S. to direct the Naomi Watts vehicles We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil. I think Praise is a step above Curran’s later work: it’s not only my favorite Australian film, but is perhaps more expressive of the tendencies noted in Liz Ferrier’s “Vulnerable Bodies” to give disadvantaged characters creative expression than Proof, Romper Stomper, or Muriel’s Wedding.

The list of disadvantages is borderline-encyclopedic. Cynthia (Sarah Horler) resembles two characters from those films: like Romper Stomper’s Gabe, she’s an on-and-off heroin addict, and like Muriel, she’s overweight and insecure. She also suffers from the skin condition eczema, and throughout the course of the film, contracts genital warts and an unwanted pregnancy. Whether wryly dismissing her problems or crying out in agony, Cynthia needs too much sympathy for her own good. Gordon (Peter Fenton), although handsome, is soft-spoken, emotionally detached, and asthmatic. These characters, both deficient in radically different ways, somehow undergo a plausible relationship: he’s passive enough to tell her what she wants to hear, and she’s excitable enough to ignore his lack of enthusiasm.

The mode of creative expression? Sex. Cynthia is a nymphomaniac, and although initially apprehensive as to whether Gordon is interested, makes her move in subtle, non-commital ways. Even while assuming a platonic air around him, she’ll take a dry, vulgar crack at referencing her past like “I love penises.” The first morning after they wake up together, fully clothed, she bluntly tells him “I get horny in the mornings,” while gently ushering him away. Whether she’s reeling him in or dismissing him, she doesn’t seem to know herself. The way Muriel foolishly gawks at the swimmer in Muriel’s Wedding seems all the more absurd alongside Cynthia, whose tactlessness in courtship has its own nuanced sense of mystery.

When Cynthia finally gets what she wants from Gordon, it occurs frequently and aggressively. And yet Curran somehow manages to de-eroticize sex by emphasizing the non-sexual pleasures that Gordon receives from the experience: the “mathematical” mindset he adopts when fingering her to a particularly evocative rhythm, for example, or counting the number of thrusts before coming. The irony is that he performs these experiments to optimize Cynthia’s sexual pleasure, and detracts from it in the process: although demanding, perhaps Cynthia would be better off with a lover as animalistic and uninhibited as herself. Drugs bear a complex relationship to the couple’s sex life as well: Gordon finds that heroin makes kissing better, more vivid, but a sexual follow-through is virtually impossible. The depiction of the drug in Romper Stomper as a straightforwardly enticing social problem seems crass in comparison.

Cynthia and Gordon are too incompatible to carry on a healthy relationship at any point, and bliss is inextricably bound up with dissatisfaction. Things don’t turn out too well for the couple, but Curran’s quiet, poetic ending gives us hope that perhaps merely witnessing romantic harmony offers a more satisfying experience than trying to live it.

- Sky Hirschkron