The Good Whore of Coogee: Duigan's Careless Love

For twenty odd years John Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke was the best Australian film -- till Beneath Hill 60, Snowtown and Samson and Delilah overtook it, in my view. And Careless Love, his latest, is in its league. Like most of his work it has confidence, clarity, wit, the range and force of a novel, superb individuated performances and a morally troubling narrative.
It is about a university student who works as a prostitute part-time; not, as is often the case, to pay her fees and rent, for she has a scholarship, but to send money back to her father, a laid-off worker still waiting for his coastal north Queensland factory to reopen, who is now behind in his mortgage and may lose the family house, and, as a Vietnamese boat-person grown old and pathetic, will get no mercy from the smarmy white bank manager if he defaults.
Linh, the student, finds in the course of the film a boyfriend, Jack, who does not know what she is doing at night -- she claims she is in the library, studying late -- nor suspect her of any romantic duplicity, though he himself is not quite finished, it seems, with a former love he has difficulty shedding. Linh tries to keep her two different lives 'in different parts of my head'. She whores, she reads, she takes notes, she shares a bed with her mild-mannered bloke, she has sex with him, she has nightmares, he observes her nocturnal distress, she is always short of sleep, she comes late to classes, she is sometimes in physical danger, once with half a football team.
She has for a while a relationship, paid but affectionate, with a bearded American painter and art collector and winter surfer of indeterminate age who may be CIA; and she copes, narrowly, with her two lives, visiting her father and mother and brother in Queensland and lying, effectively, about her arrangements. She has the makings of a good university tutor, a moral philosopher, an actress, a novelist, an activist, a party leader. And her father, believing she is a 'fashion model', lavishly paid, continues to service the mortgage with her large mysterious earnings, not questioning her too much, not wanting to know.
Though rarely naked in the scenes we are shown, we sense that she is good at her job. She answers with wit but remains submissive, plays dumb and virginal, when this is required, with a clanking heavy accent in pidgin English. She plays smart when that is amusing to them, before she submits to their gross penetrations and impotent failures. She hears out the lofty theories of the obese, effusive dimwits whom she eventually goes down on. She plays, for an hour or so, the good wife, the mistress, the incestuous daughter, the naughty smackable schoolgirl; and then she goes back to her studies.
And this for a hundred years or so has been, I suppose, a common story of our modern age, a frequent unprinted memoir of tens of thousands of 'liberated' girls in other towns, more so since foreign students have studied here and needed, from time to time, to send money back to their families. The division of self it requires is easier of course in another country, a far-off city, a metropolitan drug-affected student coffee-house culture. Sometimes it goes no further than nude modelling. Sometimes it includes blue movies; sometimes urination; chains; whips; thongs; tattoos. But it is always, always, in whatever decade, an avid swift seizing of the brief and fleeting interim of youth and beauty and Fast Lane living to make money out of it while it lasts, money you then spend elsewhere -- on drugs or on jewellery sometimes, no doubt, but sometimes, as here, on what might be called, without scorn, 'family values'.
As befits the story, we sometimes do not know if she is lying, and we do not find out. As befits the story, we see an older, coarser Asian woman in the same trade, a version of what she may turn into, being buggered by two cops over a car boot and being unable to help her. Always a violent end is near and she, like the raucous older strumpet should get out fast. Next week, perhaps. Next Tuesday.
The many male customers are drawn in depth in varying degrees of repulsiveness, pathos, perversity and physical threat. We fear she may be killed, and know she shares that feeling. We are sometimes reassured by her pimp Dion, played by David Field, a brutish, wily, stoic, working-class, fair-go Aussie man who knows she will scarper eventually and looks out for her nonetheless, not himself having sex with her because that is not the deal; and by her CIA friend Luke, who brandishes a gruff Bogartish insouciance and will, we believe, look after her. But we always fear for her.
We realise with a shock towards the end that the shadowy, secretive sub-Kafka nightmare she is in is a legal business venture, responsibly administered by tax-paying citizens who put their girls through compulsory government health-checks; and the money she earns by, say, test-driving a new vibrator in a room full of beaming coked-up wanking students is not ill-gotten or unacceptable. It is a normal, accustomed, sanctioned, free market business pursuit in a global economy.
Which raises the question, of course, of what in fact is wrong with what she is doing? Anything? And why should she lose her future in academia or suburbia or true love if she is found out? And will she, in fact? Or is the world a little different now? A little more tolerant? Maybe. Maybe it is.
This is a wonderful film, raising as all fine drama does big questions of how a society is run, where justice truly lies and what are the lineaments of evil and good we see overlapping and intermingling in characters here before us. And who among us if used against his deserts would 'scape whipping, as Hamlet of Elsinore asks of Ophelia, the pregnant girl he carelessly whanged and cast aside.
It is, one might venture to say, John Duigan's companion-piece, thirty years on, of his earlier, grimier urban fable Winter Of Our Dreams, about a sadder, smack-smitten, lovelorn hooker played by Judy Davis and her nervy junkie roommate, played by Baz Luhrman. They should be seen soon in a double feature, as the measure of a calm and capable auteur whose work, now and then, touches the hem of greatness.
The lighting and composition of Katherine Millis is majestic, assured and revelatory. It is like seeing Sydney for the first time, with its tropical palms and unexpected night harbour vistas, its candlelit dinner parties, morning joggers and sudden thundering rainstorms. The set design by Colin Gibson is wonderful, though a fair bit of it seems to be Duigan's unaltered Coogee flat, a work of art itself which he uses deftly and modestly.
Peter O'Brien, who plays Luke, has an impact like George C. Scott and may be a future superstar. Nammi Le, who plays Linh, is one I think already. All the parts are well played, Andrew Hazzard especially as Jack who is a ringer for the young Peter Weir and will appeal as Hugo Weaving did to the next generation of doctors' wives, and Ivy Mak, as the older prostitute Mint, a coarse, unstaunchable, vulgar tower of strength.
Duigan's script is as good as anything by Ruth Prawer Jubhvala, the adaptation, it seems, of a classic novel as yet unwritten, and his direction as quiet and measured and unostentatious and lucid as that of Louis Malle or James Ivory.
That Screen Australia would not fund it, not award even five dollars to it, is a national scandal. That it was nonetheless made is a miracle.