Oyster Farmer
Oyster Farmer is precisely the kind of film I’d have passionately hated as a teenager. It’s slow-paced, very Australian, and the kind of film that would be assigned as a school report within seconds of a teacher having seen it.
I loved it. I don’t think I have anything original or insightful to say about it, but I wanted to enthuse a little while it’s still completely fresh in my mind. I loved the pacing. Days pass between scenes, and there are no ostentatious “time passing” cues - it’s all a part of the rhythm of the film. After the first half hour you become completely at home with its loose relationship with time, the following of themes rather than actions to progress the story. And the story doesn’t exactly progress in a linear fashion, either.
Relationships ebb and flow, and are rarely predictable or dramatic. The Irish grandfather character is witty but not particularly wise. Characters have lived with each other for decades but still don’t understand each other. The new character comes in with a dark history and an obsession, and it becomes less and less important as the story progresses, and it becomes more and more about the people rather than the plot mechanics that keep the audience interested. The characters are not incredibly witty or insightful: there are no huge revelations, and it comes across as so real and natural that I felt as though I was spying.
Hence, this is not a proper Film Forensics. I couldn’t improve on the film: I couldn’t begin to imagine how I’d have drawn such vivid characters. I am always up for a few minor modifications, though: this is the first film I’ve seen where the continuity has been the biggest flaw. I refer to the face of the main character. I suspect there are some missing or out-of-order scenes - he sometimes has cuts and red marks on his face, and sometimes he doesn’t. They appear before his big fight, and then they’re gone, and then they’re back again. It’s odd and distracting: at first, I thought it was an entirely different character (the lighting was a little dim in the first scene we see with the cuts on his face.) A more minor flaw is the robbery itself. If the story had been more focussed on it, this would have been a major flaw - mailing the stolen money to himself really doesn’t seem like a good idea, given that if the police had thought to look in the post box, they would not only have found the money, but the main character’s name and address. And the police and general suspicions seemed rather unusually fixed on the oyster farmers. Given that the robbery happened in the Sydney fish markets, I was very surprised the oyster farmers even came under suspicion.
But these are really minor flaws, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve read other reviews complaining that the robbery is dumb, and that the characters are paper-thin, and that the comedy isn’t funny enough. I think they’re missing the point. It’s not a comedy or a heist film. It’s a character study, and the traditional character arcs and revelations (apart from the main character growing to love the Oyster farmer lifestyle) need not apply. The main character isn’t even really the robber. It’s the river.
This is the kind of film that “The Shipping News” should have been.