A worthy short which, in its focusing on a psychopath, evokes memories of other Australian films on the same subject, most notably CLEAN, SHAVEN and BAD BOY BUBBY. Unlike those films, however, this protagonist's madness is not revealed on a narrative level until the short's horrific denouement. When we first see him he is sweating, it is true, and boasts a five o' clock shadow as he speeds down the road, but he has an expensive car and wears a white shirt: he could be a businessmen late for a meeting. Nothing wrong with this.
SWERVE plays with our conventional expectations of films like this, seemingly ceding to them before pulling the rug from under us. We are used to seeing urban middle-class men cracking apart, the form and looks of the film gradually distorting and fragmenting to visualise the character's decline. So when, after some BLAIR WITCHesque shots of a strange forest, the man's car falls apart, his contact with modernity, masculinity, civilisation and progress fail, he is lost in this wilderness, we assume that we are trodding a well-worn path. The film's title, suggesting a detour from everyday norms, adds to this.
He goes to fix his car, but is attacked by unseen strangers and later wakes up in the wood. The sound becomes dislocated. He wanders like a man who's fallen from another planet. Upturned, rusted cars give his journey an apocalyptic feel (a nod to WEEK END, perhaps?) like we're back in MAD MAX territory. He goes to a cafe, having noticed his car in the car park, no ambient noise on the soundtrack, just a seemingly hostile clientele. He looks around to spot the thieves: two young men race out and drive off. He rings the police, but his call is filmed in a highly disturbed style - excessive circlings, haunting sounds that garble his speech into meaninglessness.
The ending is such a reverse that I won't spoil it for you. Suffice to say that in a film with no dialogue, the closing cry is a despairing, Absurdist wail, reminiscent of the last laugh in Sartre's 'Le Mur'. We thought that we were fixing observers, watching, unbeknownst to him, the breakdown of a madman, like, for example, Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER. All the time, he was controlling us, concealing, misleading, the director figure who shapes all meaning. That his meaning is the ultimate destroying of meaning only hints at the unexpected power of this film.
SWERVE plays with our conventional expectations of films like this, seemingly ceding to them before pulling the rug from under us. We are used to seeing urban middle-class men cracking apart, the form and looks of the film gradually distorting and fragmenting to visualise the character's decline. So when, after some BLAIR WITCHesque shots of a strange forest, the man's car falls apart, his contact with modernity, masculinity, civilisation and progress fail, he is lost in this wilderness, we assume that we are trodding a well-worn path. The film's title, suggesting a detour from everyday norms, adds to this.
He goes to fix his car, but is attacked by unseen strangers and later wakes up in the wood. The sound becomes dislocated. He wanders like a man who's fallen from another planet. Upturned, rusted cars give his journey an apocalyptic feel (a nod to WEEK END, perhaps?) like we're back in MAD MAX territory. He goes to a cafe, having noticed his car in the car park, no ambient noise on the soundtrack, just a seemingly hostile clientele. He looks around to spot the thieves: two young men race out and drive off. He rings the police, but his call is filmed in a highly disturbed style - excessive circlings, haunting sounds that garble his speech into meaninglessness.
The ending is such a reverse that I won't spoil it for you. Suffice to say that in a film with no dialogue, the closing cry is a despairing, Absurdist wail, reminiscent of the last laugh in Sartre's 'Le Mur'. We thought that we were fixing observers, watching, unbeknownst to him, the breakdown of a madman, like, for example, Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER. All the time, he was controlling us, concealing, misleading, the director figure who shapes all meaning. That his meaning is the ultimate destroying of meaning only hints at the unexpected power of this film.
