CUTTING THE STRINGS
‘Judy & Punch’ ditches puppets for people in classic fable
udy & Punch” is inspired by the 17th century English puppet show Punch & Judy — only from Judy’s perspective.
“This is essentially a fictionalized origin story of the classic puppet show. I was encouraged to be as bold as I wanted to be and take it wherever I wanted it to go,” explained writer-director Mirrah Foulkes from quarantine in Sydney, Australia.
Down Under Foulkes is a well-known actress. For this, her directorial debut, she created, “a strange fictionalized fable world” set in a town called Seaside, which is nowhere near a sea.
The movie is as violent as the battling puppets were, with Judy (Mia Wasikowska) an abused spouse, battered by the drunken egomaniacal Punch.
To cover up one murder, he kills her — only she doesn’t quite die. Her body is discovered in the woods by a troupe of outsiders who nurse her back to health and, ultimately, revenge.
“I didn’t want to feel this was in any particular time or place,” Foulkes said, “although it’s mid-17th century, an interesting political time in Europe and relevant to the world of our movie, with the witch-hunting stuff a parallel to the world we know now.”
Foulkes followed Joseph Campbell’s classic hero journey structure. “That,” she said, “was intentional: leaning on that hero structure and subverting it. Like showing our relationship to violence as entertainment — that’s why there are moments that are really dark and then slapstick. It’s taking an audience on a journey.”
For any filmmaker, but especially a first-timer, the first day of filming is crucial. Her first day was, she said, “One of the worst days of my life. One of those classic, ‘Anything that could go wrong went wrong.’
“But it was set up to be a disaster really. The only way we could schedule our first day was to have the scene with the baby and dog together, which went pretty bad.
“The short version is that the baby just completely freaked out. There were twins actually; both of them freaked out. There was no point swapping them out, they both experienced exactly the same emotions at the same time.
“And this dog we’d been training for months got spooked. He got onto set, looked around at the cameras, grips and gaffers and just licked out. The one thing it had to do on that day was eat a sausage — and he was terrified of the sausage.
“But then everything got better from there. It never got worse.”