Here Out West review – western Sydney anthology is tender, but modest
Here Out West begins with the grandmother of a newborn baby nicking off with the bub – kidnapping the child from hospital after authorities deemed her daughter unfit to care for it. In an ordinary film, this dramatic event would be a MacGuffin that kickstarts the plot and sets the subsequent storyline in motion, sparking obvious questions such as “what was she thinking?” and “what happens next?”
However in this anthology (the opening night film of this year’s Sydney film festival) directed by Fadia Abboud, Lucy Gaffy, Julie Kalceff, Ana Kokkinos and Leah Purcell, working from scripts by eight Australian writers, it is not so much the start of a narrative but a loose connective tissue binding short and disparate vignettes. The film-makers ignore the aforementioned questions and instead introduce us to people living in western Sydney, moving between them in a ‘day in the life of’ style, where we encounter these characters in generally dramatic circumstances but soon say goodbye to them also, rarely to return.
The “west” in the title refers to the geographical context and in being so set, Here Out West is more diverse than most films, capturing people from various backgrounds and featuring not one, two, three but nine languages: English: Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Kurdish,
Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese and Spanish.
The first time the film pivots away from the aforementioned nan (Genevieve Lemon) and her companion – an eight-year-old Lebanese neighbour named Amirah (Mia-Lore Bayeh) – it switches to the hospital security guard, Jorge (Christian Ravello), in a section called Everything Changes that captures snapshots of his life, including his fondness for poetry. This transition suggests the film’s structure of interconnected lives will hinge on the hospital, rather than other anthologies hooked to a type of situation (like the TV show It’s a Date), a common theme (the kinky feature comedy The Little Death) or different sides of a large and multi-faceted event (the ABC TV series Fires).
As the film progresses, however, the stories tend to have less relevance to the hospital, and only rarely return to that quasi-MacGuffin involving the grandma. The various characters, all of whom are crafted thoughtfully and brought to life with strong performances, include mixed-race woman Ashmita (Leah Vandenberg), who is attending her father’s deathbed; Kurdish refugees Keko (De Lovan Zandy) and Xoxe (Befrin Axtjärn Jackson), who hope to one day start a music school; the Audi-driving and Hugo Boss-wearing 22-year-old Tuan (Khoi Trinh), who wants to become a big player in corporate Sydney; and hardworking Filipino nurse Roxanne (Christine Milo).
Here Out West was conceived in part as a way of fostering new talent: an incubator to nurture emerging writers. Each of these writers (Nisrine Amine, Bina Bhattacharya, Matias Bolla, Claire Cao, Arka Das, Dee Dogan, Vonne Patiag and Tien Tran) shows promise, but are limited by the format.
The production of an anthology is tough to master due to its fragmented structure. Anthological works often have a stop/start rhythm, returning the experience to a clean or clean-ish narrative slate at the culmination of every episode, rather than creating a cumulative effect. This is especially evident in anthology feature films, which have much tighter running times per individual tale than TV. In Here Out West for instance there is no ability to ground viewers for 30 or 40 minutes in the lives of various people, like in Fires, before moving us on.
This film has eight chapters to cover in 101 minutes, which inevitably cuts stories short and clips performances. Sometimes this limited space creates a desire to be short, sharp and snappy, but pace-wise Here Out West goes the other way – rarely rushing anything. There is an admirable tenderness in the way the various directors and screenwriters find the humanity in their characters quickly, probing them for attitudes, emotions and worldviews. It is no surprise that the stories based in and around the hospital work particularly well, given hospitals are obviously associated with drama: the place where most of us are born, many of us die, and where we are drawn to in times of sickness.
The 2013 adaptation of Tim Winton’s The Turning is an example of an anthology picture that does achieve an impressive cumulative effect – its various vignettes dancing between styles and stories but taking on an expanding quality, as if the film itself were alive: shifting, changing, evolving. The joins between the stories in Here Out West are sometimes elegantly executed – when for instance Ashmita bumps into Robi (Arka Das), a character from a previous vignette, and asks him to translate her father’s dying words.
But the film comes across more as a number of parts rather than the sum of them. This is a drama of modest qualities, more adept at painting pockets of time in the characters’ lives rather than self-contained (or thematically related) narratives.