April 17–24, 1997

movies

Emma-Kate Croghan: Politically Uncorrect

By Cindy Fuchs

Emma-Kate Croghan looks like she's been living out of hotel rooms. The 25-year-old Australian writer-director is pale in a luminous, just-flew-in, just-a-little-fatigued way. No surprise, given that she's been traveling pretty much nonstop since her first feature, Love and Other Catastrophes, caught fire at the 1996 Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals. It's a Monday morning and she's in yet another hotel room. But it hardly matters. She's friendly, funny and relaxed. She's a filmmaker who loves to talk movies.

Love and Other Catastrophes follows a single day in the lives of a group of Australian college students as they pursue romance and the perfect class schedule. Its energy, Croghan says, is part fresh-out-of-film-school enthusiasm and part get-it-done necessity. She and her producer, Stavros Andonis Efthymiou, inspired by DIY American filmmakers, decided to sidestep a lengthy development process. "We gave ourselves six weeks. We had no script, we had nothing. But we had a date.''"

Their primary aim was to make a film about young people to counter the usual fare. "The images you see of young people,'' she says, "tend to be filtered through older people looking back, or they're cynical exercises with soundtracks. We wanted to make something that was very immediate, with an immediate energy.''

Ironically, they modeled this "immediate energy'' after what might seem like ancient history, screwball comedies. "It made sense,'' she says, "because what we were trying to do was to make a film real fast... While we had been frustrated by trying to raise money, which is difficult, we didn't resent that process. The way you make a film can influence its energy. This was confirmed by my readings about screwball comedies: in the studio system there was a fast turnaround and a lot of the directors would actually create chaos on set... I think when you watch our film, that kind of pace is there. If we had spent more time on it, it wouldn't have that same sensibility.''"

As it happened, the speedy-cheap production (a 17-day shoot and $37,000 budget) made for ingenuity on set and in the editing room. The intertitles — which quote from diverse sources, including Alice in Wonderland and Giovanni — were added because Croghan and her crew felt their footage was a bit, well, claustrophobic. "It's set very much in the university world. So we put in the intertitles to give insight into where the students were, in a broad cultural context. It's very much part of being at a university, you're aware of Doris Day and Nietzsche, each has validity in that life.''"

The characters developed out of the production process as well. "You know how it works,'' she says. "You put stuff in, actors bring stuff, the environment in which you're working brings stuff.

"The hardest thing is the comedy. We had to make sure that everyone was in the same comedy. It's at a higher pitch than a naturalistic kind of thing, but by the same token, it isn't broad and campy. A lot of comedies coming out of Australia recently do that really well, Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla, very big performances. [We wanted] the level below that.''"

I ask about other influences and she cites Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, George Miller. All cool boys. "Yeah,'' she says. "They're the films I'm attracted to. I was doing this interview in a video shop, and they wanted me to walk around and pick up films that I liked. So I walked around and then I looked at the films I had picked, and they were all these Oedipus struggles! Lady From Shanghai, The Killers, Mad Max. I thought, 'Oh no! I've made a very sweet comedy and these are the films I'm recommending?' My film is not violent or dark or any of that, but I love these movies.''

Nowadays she's repeatedly being asked to represent. "I was on this panel in Seattle,'' she says, "about women filmmakers. And someone asks, 'Do you think there are films that only women should make?' People are worried that women shouldn't make films with women wearing little shorts and bras. But I said, actually, no, I like the bra look. If I had a woman character in an action movie, she'd be wearing the bra and boots and nail polish. It's about what you want — on one end films like Female Perversions and on the other end, films like Strange Days.'' (We bond for a moment over Kathryn Bigelow.)

Croghan continues: "You can have a female make a film that's totally cool and politically uncorrect and you shouldn't feel like you have to bear that burden of representation. People are asking me, what is it that you want to bring to your films? Part of it is reflecting back on what it is to be a human being. Human beings are messy. Someone in Seattle attacked me, saying, 'I find your representation of lesbians inaccurate, because a lesbian would not give a man a hand job.' I mean, I don't even know if Mia (Frances O'Connor) did that, she might have just been teasing [her roommate] Alice (Alice Garner), but really, it's not like she cares. Then someone asked me why Mia was interested in her male professor, as if you can't have a relationship that's erotic with a man, a teacher. You don't necessarily want to sleep with him. Or maybe she does want to sleep with him. Sexuality can be fluid. In Australia that was fine. It wasn't until we got to the States that it came up. I was like, 'Oh, there must be a guidebook [on lesbian representation]. Maybe you can send it to me and then I can get it right.'"

"I made a documentary called Come As You Are, which is about a lesbian community," she continues, "and the girl in the film is talking about a contest for Miss Wicked. She was saying that for a long time, being a lesbian was limited to a political choice, and what she loved about being Miss Wicked was that it was about the sex: you're a lesbian because you want to sleep with girls. Mia is a bit of a representation of this new generation, there's not quite as much angst for them.''"

This new generation might even be influencing marketing. Croghan says happily that "the film hasn't been ghettoized at all. We've had really straight, older couples saying this film is so lovely, it reminds us of when we were in college. That's because there's no tension about [queerness] in the film. It's a love story, so anyone can relate to that. I know that young people think that being in love is a unique experience, but it's not.''"

Love & Other Catastrophes is now playing at the Ritz Five. See Cindy Fuchs' review in Movie Shorts.