The Book of Revelation

Rating: R21
Consumer Advice: Sexual Scenes and Disturbing Content
Genre: Controversial Erotic Thriller
Language: English with Chinese subtitles
Director: Ana KokkinosCast: Tom Long, Greta Scacchi, Colin Friels
Runtime: 120 mins

here's the trailer

The Book of Revelation - Trailer


Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/a-violent-change-of-direction/2006/08/24/1156012662195.html?page=fullpage

A male dancer is abducted and sexually abused for 12 days by three masked women. A crime boss murders his rivals, cavorts with semi-naked schoolgirls and dabbles in drugs as his power grows. High school students deal with incest, bulimia and other traumas before one commits suicide.

If you think Australian films have felt a bit safe lately - often dark, yes, but nothing like the art house films made overseas - it might be time to think again.

Director Ana Kokkinos, who told a confronting story about a gay Greek-Australian youth in Head On eight years ago, has reversed the sexual assault stereotypes in The Book of Revelation, with Tom Long from SeaChange and The Dish as a dancer chained in a room.

Even before its premiere, the movie was controversial; a Melbourne newspaper described it as a "$4.5 million rape film" and questioned whether it should have received Government funding.
The Book of Revelation was well received at the Melbourne International Film Festival and is headed for the much bigger Toronto event next month. But it has been slapped with an R18+ rating - the sexual violence and the sight of a shadowy penis and a woman masturbating was too much for MA15+.

Geoffrey Wright, who directed the kick-in-the-face that was Romper Stomper, starring Russell Crowe as a neo-Nazi, is back with a bruising version of Macbeth that uses Melbourne's gang wars (which have resulted in 29 deaths since 1998) as a backdrop.

Sam Worthington plays Macbeth, a crime boss with rock-star looks and a taste for illegal substances who violently seizes power at the urging of Lady Macbeth, played by Victoria Hill. One scene, the murder of Lady Macduff and her son, caused walkouts during a test screening, but it is the portrayal of Shakespeare's witches as sexy schoolgirls who seduce Macbeth and the drug use that could make the film classifiers think hard about the rating.

The film first attracted attention in 2004, when Worthington told the Herald the filmmakers had pitched it to him as "the most violent movie Australia has ever made". That was before Wolf Creek, last year's horror film about murder in the outback, which raised the bar too far for most directors. Some of the scenes in that film - if you saw it, you'll remember "head on a stick" - were just chilling.

Already in cinemas is 22-year-old director Murali Thalluri's controversial drama about teenage suicide, 2:37, which earned an R18+ rating for its troubling themes and graphic suicide.

Looked at together, the three prove that something fascinating is happening in Australian film. True, many filmmakers still want to entertain, inspire, make us laugh or tell a meaningful story. But others have decided bold is best and are disregarding happy endings and commercial niceties to take on the holy trinity of controversy: sex, violence and social taboos. The stream of confronting films that runs from Mad Max through to Romper Stomper, Head On, Chopper, The Proposition, Wolf Creek and Candy is widening.

Whether consciously or not, filmmakers are recognising that sweet little films, such as this year's Caterpillar Wish and Footy Legends, don't seem to attract audiences to art house cinemas any more. Outside multiplexes, viewers want distinctive, new experiences from filmmakers who take risks.

From the filmmakers' perspective, some people will hate the results. But others might just love them.

"If you want to have a diverse industry, you're going to have to encourage some directors to go for it, to be bold and challenge an audience," says Brian Rosen, the chief executive of the Federal Government's Film Finance Corporation. "There's no doubt that The Book of Revelation is going to very much divide an audience. The same goes for 2:37."

Macbeth is Shakespeare in a modern setting, but Rosen recognises that some aficionados will consider linking it to the Melbourne gang wars "an abomination".
Ana Kokkinos believes artists should expose raw nerves in society. It's fair to say a lot more than raw nerves are exposed as Tom Long's character, Daniel, is repeatedly sexually abused then abandoned.

"Why me?" he asks.

"Because you're beautiful," says one of his abductors.

In a film framed as a psychological mystery, Daniel tries to track down the women from their only identifying signs: tattoos and birthmarks. That means seducing a long list of suspects. Kokkinos sees her work being in the tradition of such European films as Last Tango in Paris and Belle de Jour and she wants to shake audiences out of what she calls "a certain kind of complacency".

The Book of Revelation is based on a novel, set in Amsterdam, by British author Rupert Thomson. Kokkinos loved the way it had man as victim and woman as perpetrator, which forced her to think about sexual assault from a new perspective. "It almost shocks you into thinking about the trauma he experiences in a way that profoundly takes you into another place in terms of the darker elements that exist within us all."

Kokkinos concedes The Book of Revelation is provocative and uncomfortable at times, but says audiences have also found it beautiful, evocative, erotic and dream-like.

"Cinema at the moment tends to be a bit bland," she says. "For audiences wanting to go and lose themselves in an experience, it's a film that offers you the possibility to do that."

For Kokkinos, a pivotal question was how explicit to be; how much nudity and sex to show. "I think I've walked a very fine line between explicitness, because it's necessary and part of the storytelling, while doing it in such a way that the audience can actually be involved and not have to look away," she says. "The explicitness is not gratuitous; it's not exploitative."

The French, especially, have turned sexuality on-screen into an artform and have pushed it to extremes with films such as Romance, Irreversible and Baise-moi, but Kokkinos believes it remains one of the biggest phobias for Australian filmmakers.

"It seems to be a no-go zone, an area we don't want to explore or examine. But I actually think sexuality is one of the most fascinating areas of what it means to be a human being. We're all engaged with it on some level and therefore it becomes a very potent place to find out who we are, what makes us tick."

Violence, and how it leads to further acts of violence, is more Geoffrey Wright's interest in Macbeth. The passionately intense director has had a chequered career since Romper Stomper. First, the angry youth drama Metal Skin flopped, then he moved to the United States and was sacked from one film and had to survive the firing of his producing partner on the horror flick Cherry Falls.

Back in Australia, he hit on the idea of an Australian Macbeth after watching Kurosawa's Japanese adaptation Throne of Blood and decided to set the action in the Melbourne underworld. "The nearest structure socially to a medieval structure is the criminal hierarchy," he says.
The text has been trimmed to focus on the action: Macbeth's murderous rise to power.
"Of all [Shakespeare's] plays, it's the most in-your-face," Wright says. "There are no subplots. It's very linear. In certain ways, it's very simple."

The scene that prompted four people to leave a test screening was necessary, he says, because it shows how far Macbeth is prepared to go and demonstrates the extent of his depravity. "If I had four people out of 100 walk out of that scene because I've gone over into the dark side to prove a point, that's all right.

If I had 20 people walk out, I'd probably go to the producers and say, 'Excuse me, I think we should reshoot this.' But 4 per cent losses are OK."

Romper Stomper and Metal Skin were both rated R, but Wright is hoping Macbeth will be MA15+. He does not see himself as a filmmaker who pushes the limits. "I see it that I'm a guy the censors like to step up to. It's not that [there is] more violence in what I do than other products. It's just that there's a psychological feel to them. If you see Macbeth on stage, it'll have the same number of murders in it."

Turning the witches into sexy schoolgirls was logical, he says. "Once you say that Sam Worthington is playing a gangster, you ask yourself who is he going to be seduced and conned by? Not by three crones but by three extrovert teenage girls. That's the easiest way to distract a gangster if he's straight."

Macbeth is also heading to the Toronto International Film Festival, where viewers might wonder how much of it parallels real-life underworld killings. Wright says the film avoids obvious references to incidents in the gang wars, but the themes of revenge and greed ring true.

He still believes the controversy over Romper Stomper was an overreaction. "To take a crackpot subculture and create something dynamic and graphic around it, you were seen as some kind of cultural traitor. But it was too easy to be controversial in Australia in those days. Australian films were expected to be tame and timid.

"We've always had a tendency to have a vision of ourselves as somehow innocent but if you look at the history of this country, we're not at all. If there's a war going on anywhere in the world, we want to get in there and get involved. We like to see ourselves as a fun-loving and suntanned, sports-crazy kind of innocent people, but that's all bullshit. We're a very complicated piece of machinery."

Wright doesn't think he should be considered provocative. "I'm not a provocateur, not in any calculated way. What you see is a genuine distillation of my own impulses. There are filmmakers in this country who calculate very carefully the impact they can create by doing a certain kind of movie. I'm actually kind of gauche and naive that way ... I do what I like and hope that someone out there is entertained by it."

When 2:37 opened last week, Murali Thalluri had to defend claims circulated via email around the film industry that he had invented a story about the suicide of a close friend and his own attempt at age 19 after being inspired by the con man in the novel and movie Catch Me If You Can.

He called the claims "offensive ... rude ... ridiculous" but admitted inventing qualifications to teach an acting class to find the young cast. He also approached Adelaide's 20 richest people to raise the film's budget.

"We schemed our way to get this film made," Thalluri said. "But no one was ever hurt by it."
Some critics were uneasy about how much 2:37 draws on the Gus Van Sant high school drama Elephant. Even so, it's an unflinching treatment of teenage suicide.

Having written it for a teenage audience, Thalluri was upset by the R18+ rating. He believes the particularly graphic suicide scene had to be confronting.

"I had to show everything for the pure reason that if I did it as a cut and a gasp and it's over, it would have been irresponsible. That would imply that suicide is easy.

"I wanted to show the gore, I wanted to show the brutality, I wanted to show the suffering, but the main thing I wanted to show was the regret. As [the character] is dying, she's mouthing the words, 'Help me, help me.' If anything, I see that suicide scene as a massive deterrent to anyone who's thinking of doing it."