Swinging Safari is a cringefest of epic proportions

AUSTRALIAN movies usually get a bad rap. This star-studded film with Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Julian McMahon is not going to help.

IF YOU were born before 1972, you might have a whale of a time in Swinging Safari.

The Australian movie starring Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Julian McMahon is a nostalgia punch so strong, you’ll still be grasping for breath.

Replete with wacky beachside rituals of the 1970s, the movie tries to capture the manic spirit of the times and those old enough to remember them will chuckle at every sighting of plastic-covered carpet, chiko rolls and glistening suntan oil (skin cancer be damned).

If you were born after 1972, Swinging Safari is a massive cringefest — your face will be stuck in the “ye gods” position for 90 per cent of the movie and you’ll thank some divine force that you weren’t conceived earlier.

Without the nostalgia factor to hook them, younger members of the audience will be left wondering what is the point of this messy, shallow movie?

Swinging Safari is written and directed by Stephan Elliott, the man behind Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. A semi-autobiographical tribute to his own childhood growing up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, the movie is centred on three neighbouring families — the Halls, the Joneses and the Marshes.

“Hey, kids! Alcoholism is fun!”

You don’t really need to remember who’s who and which of the seemingly dozens of kids belong to which parents because almost every character is indistinguishable from the other.

The three sets of adults regularly get together (with fondue sets, the height of sophistication), leaving their ratbag kids to cause havoc. On one of these nights, the adults decide to engage in a little kinky swinging and the group dynamics are irrevocably changed.

The real focal point of the movie is Elliott’s stand-in, Jeff Marsh, an aspiring teen filmmaker forever roping his mates into his schlock creations. He has a special connection with Melly, a perpetually sad girl who’s ignored by her parents and everyone around her. The teens’ romance could’ve served as an interesting anchor but their story is confusingly written and anticlimactic.

In fact, the whole movie kind of goes nowhere. That’s not to say that it doesn’t end on an elaborate and vomit-inducing sequence, because it does. Swinging Safari manages to squander any thematic potential by ending it on an entirely bizarre note that says nothing about and adds nothing to the 90 minutes that came before it.

At least the cast looked like they had a lot of fun.

Priscilla was, by far, Elliott’s most celebrated work and some people are already calling Swinging Safari an “instant Aussie favourite” alongside The Castle, Priscilla and Muriel’s Wedding, though it certainly doesn’t have the emotional resonance or narrative coherence of those movies.

Maybe the comparison comes from the fact Swinging Safari actually feels like it was made in the early 1990s and not 2017 — everything about it feels like a throwback, and not in a good way.

The concept of cultural cringe is hardly new when it comes to depictions of Australia on our screens. How our culture is represented will be subjective of course, but what Swinging Safari is putting out there is more than a little embarrassing.

It’s not just that the parenting skills on display are so shockingly bad the kids end up literally on fire and no one notices, or that there are several instances of (accidental) animal violence played for laughs. The entire package is the kind of stomach-churning, head-in-your-hands experience you would never dare show your overseas relatives in case they think there are still remnants of this in modern Australia.

If it was meant to be all caricature, that would almost be better. But Elliott clearly has a fondness for this time that goes beyond, “oh, isn’t that quaint, all that drinking and driving”.

The portrait of Australia presented here might appeal to some demographics — the ones who go on about the “good old days” — but surely the rest of us deserve better.

High point: The costumes.

Points in its favour are that the costumes and the art direction are fantastic — each frame is so visually vivid. The performances are all fine and the actors (which also includes Radha Mitchell, Jeremy Sims, Asher Keddie and Jack Thompson) genuinely seem like they had a great time making this, and that kind of energy can be infectious.

It’s just such a shame it’s so shambolic and nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is.

If you’re looking to support Australian cinema, wait until next week and go see Warwick Thornton’s mesmerising Sweet Country instead, that film looks at Australian identity with a much more thoughtful and insightful lens.

Rating: 2.5/5

Swinging Safari is cinemas from today.

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Originally published as Swinging Safari is a cringefest of epic proportions