by Julian Wood

Year:  2024

Director:  Justin Kurzel

Rated:  M

Release:  12 June, 26 June (NSW)

Distributor: Madman

Running time: 106 minutes

Worth: $17.00
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Cast:
Warren Ellis, Femke den Haas

Intro:
... does indeed make one’s heart soar.

Warren Ellis makes a good cup of tea. We know this from a charming domestic moment in director Justin Kurzel’s doco about the eccentric musician. In the film, the mercurial Ellis is visiting his (now-deceased) dad and he goes off to make tea. (The dad, incidentally, was also a musician but he put his musical plans on hold to concentrate on his family. Something his son very decidedly did not do). So, Ellis brings both his mum and dad a cuppa and then, when his dad compliments the tea making skills, Ellis instantly thanks his dad for saying it. It is a tiny incident, but it gets something of both the film and its subject.

Ellis famously plays with the band The Dirty Three and got to know Nick Cave when on tour, and the two have collaborated musically since the ‘90s. Cave hardly appears in this film, but his lugubrious persona is felt in the background.

This film isn’t just about music, though. Kurzel persuades the contradictorily shy Ellis (now in his 60s) to revisit sites of his youth in order to add structure. This proves painful for Ellis in lots of ways but, as he says on camera, the device also facilitates a revealing bridge between his formation and his current persona. It is also ironic that he is reluctant to let the camera in, as it were, because when he does decide to expound, he is garrulous and obsessive to an almost exhibitionist extent. He also swears involuntarily in every sentence. There are lots of things that are deliberately kept off limits though – such as Ellis’ own family life in France – and that too is a revealing absence.

We do get quite a bit of him making music though, often in the aforementioned childhood locations. So, we have him sawing away on his violin in a reverie in his childhood church like a cross between Nigel Kennedy and a demented wild-haired wizard. Ellis’ music is an acquired taste, the skill is undeniable, but its repetitiveness and unmelodic approach is sometimes challenging.

The topic is an unusual choice perhaps for director Kurzel, who hasn’t dipped into documentary making before, and whose fiction films (Snowtown, Nitram) are often seen as slow, grim and hard to watch. They share with this one an interest in the unadorned domestic, but the tone could hardly be more contrasting.

This film is composed of two interlocked halves. Some time back, Ellis became involved in an animal rescue shelter in Sumatra. (now named Ellis Park). Femke den Haas, the redoubtable park director, who rescues the various monkeys, eagles and other critters, is clearly a sort of soulmate to Ellis. He describes how her tenacious (and chronically underfunded) attempts to save these animals from suffering at the hands of poachers, has literally made him a better person. We can not only glimpse this but actually sense that it is true. She does seem like a remarkable person. Animal cruelty is always hard to stomach, but in contrast, the scenes where the shelter workers (and the documentary crew) celebrate the release of rehabilitated animals does indeed make one’s heart soar.