See how they run

I predict that much will be said, written and gnashed about Matthew Newton’s film Three Blind Mice. It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival tonight.

The good things that you might hear tomorrow are that it was shot on a shoestring (a real shoestring, not one of those five million dollar shoestrings that sound like that could do more than keep you shod); that the energy and goodwill which propelled the production was palpable onscreen; that it is a collaboration between some of the city’s most prominent working young actors, that the Sydney Film School played a stellar role in the production; that it’s telling the kind of story that doesn’t get told often enough in Australian cinema.

I wonder whether there will be some response from the Navy about the film’s representation of bullying at sea. Some muckraking about Matt Newton, perhaps. A wry comment or two on the ubiquity gangland scene featuring the ever-effervescent Alex Dimitriades in Australian film. Perhaps some lashback pondering as to whether the ascendance of this same group of boys across screens and stages is in fact a good thing. I’ll leave all of that to the real pundits.

For my money, it’s not a bad film. There should be more films made like this, films which tell local stories, which explore relationships and place and fear. If fifty Three Blind Mice-style productions were shot in Sydney each year, we’d look at our city differently. It’s an unusual, captivating account of the city at night. The film is shot completely in the dark so we don’t see the Harbour Bridge arching over a stretch of glistening water speckled with white sails. The Opera House is invisible and no-one skives off for a swim at Bondi. Instead, daggy old Darling Harbour is the film’s main backdrop. We travel up William St to Jujus and get ratarsed on sake and sing karaoke. We pass out on College St by Cook and Phillip Pool. The details of the night are picked out in neon. This is the city I live in and I like seeing it on screen. Alright, I don’t lurk in pizza bars which serve as fronts for illegal poker games and I cross the road to avoid fights in the Cross. But the gym I frequent churns illegal revenue, I’m sure, and I see sailors on leave walk up Macleay St from Garden Island and wonder what the hell their lives are all about.

The premiere was suitably Sydney too. The wonderful shabby grotesquerie of the State Theatre decked out in lights with the red carpet unfurled. The stars working that derelict, dishevelled look for the paparazzi. The group sitting in front of us shimmying out of the screening every half hour or so for drinks. Officious bouncers waxing sanctimonious about footpath space.

After the premiere, we walked out over the red carpet and sunk into the city again. Down George St, all blue and red lights slick in the rain, turned into another light field on Goulburn St and climbed the stairs at BBQ King for tofu and eggplant and capsicum stuffed with fish and drenched with ginger and black-bean sauce and piles of greasy, gingery noodles. I’m convinced it’s not the best Chinese in Chinatown and yet I can’t help but return. A restaurant whose most noteworthy decorative feature is large format photographs of hundreds of hanging BBQ duck carcasses is hard to forgo.

Life has been moving fast and I had to forgo the party. I’m lost in a space opera and slightly out of sync with the Night. I was wearing a white cardigan so I didn’t jump into a cab and head over to Gurlesque. No, I followed the lights home and traced the image of the city back through the Cross. Past a Haircare Australia party in the club where Dancers used to be, women shivering in little dresses on the street. Past all the fallout from whatever that festival was in Moore Park – jumpy kids in tight jeans and puffy jackets and gray shoes. Past tottering couples and chilly buskers and raucous, bellowing wanderers. Down the hill. Home.