IFFR 2021 - Friends and Strangers
IFFRDissatisfaction among those near to the ruling-class is not just inevitable, but also uninteresting. Friends and Strangers pleads for sympathy as its restless leading characters find themselves with time to kill in contemporary Australia. Director James Vaughan may have a swathe of strong choreography and an understanding of the city's finer prospects, but it never becomes more than a running commentary of bland thoughts from the mouths of vaguely impressionable, snobbish brutes.
Ray (Fergus Wilson) and Alice (Emma Diaz) are observers of the ants. They look down upon the working-class, the lower layers of society ready to be picked apart by their snooty, bored attitudes. Obvious narrative threads rise from this but are never followed through with much interest. If Vaughan wants realism, he misses the mark entirely. A passionless cry, the only loss Ray can perceive is when he drops his water bottle down to an unmarked pocket of Australian land, littered with trash. These are the moments that Vaughan hopes will bring out some spectrum of emotion from his characters, although he doesn’t understand that the best connection an audience can make is through characters, not inanimate objects.
Characteristics are to be shared between Ray, Alice, and that littered water bottle, in the sense that the three are about as interesting as one another. Stifled and stuffy conversations that have no real thought or sense behind them, repetitive dialogue that attempts to showcase the distance between the two leads instead comes across as amateurish and uninterested. They mull through conversational topics of vague interest, never exactly listening to one another. Intentional, and failing to capture the sparks of isolation Vaughan wishes to represent here.
Feeling like a topical expansion on his short film, You Like It, I Love It, the work Vaughan provides throughout Friends and Strangers is elitist and has strange tones of superiority. Half filled with establishing shots, the other half a sluggish experiment in seeing how vacuous, self-centred characters attempt conversation with one another. Neither option shows any form of interest, either regarding entertainment value or artistic integrity.