Anna exists in a high-functioning haze, aware enough to see and feel the grim reality of Milla’s circumstances, and sharp enough to make sport of them. “This is the worst possible parenting I can imagine,” Anna opines, one of the many acerbic punchlines given to her by Rita Kalnejais’ screenplay, each delivered with wide-eyed, deadpanned resignation. The feelings that each has for the other are so baldly recognizable that Anna and Henry reluctantly allow the courtship to progress. He’s chaos incarnate with a rat tail and a face tattoo, but he clearly digs her, so she digs him back. She, in gratitude, takes him to her home for a marvelously uncomfortable dinner with her parents, who for obvious reasons object to a 23-year-old flirting with their 16-year-old daughter, especially given Moses’s determined lack of life direction and his own family status: He’s been “evicted” from (read: kicked out of) his house by his mother, who clearly can’t abide his volatility and bad decision-making.īabyteeth orbits the danger baked into Milla’s infatuation with Moses, which of course blooms into genuine fancy between them. She stays, intrigued by, in awe of and at least a tad bewildered at Moses’s reckless streak combined with his immediate show of compassion thereafter: Her nose bleeds, and where most would offer her a tissue, Moses quite literally gives her the shirt off his back. The film’s elastic plot is shaped by Moses’s first encounter with Milla, which unfolds in the opening scene as he runs headlong toward a train for kicks and perhaps for the attention of all young ladies watching. Add into that dynamic the arrival of Moses (Toby Wallace), who parts the Finlay’s woes with all the grace of a caroming meteor. Babyteeth files under the “sick teenager” romantic dramedy sub-genre, being the story of Milla Finlay (Eliza Scanlen), a high school student struggling through youth with cancer while living with her overmedicated basket case mom, Anna (Essie Davis), and her emotionally remote psychiatrist dad, Henry (Ben Mendelsohn). Like many other Asian Australians, I am thankful we have Asian Australian creatives such as Law, Chen and Tony Ayres to provide greater diversity to the stories we see on Australian screens, but also for the leadership they are providing in navigating both sides of the debate.If Josh Boone’s The Fault in Our Stars had several drug addictions, plus an overwhelming need for family therapy, it’d read like distant kin to Babyteeth, Australian filmmaker Shannon Murphy’s feature debut. I applaud Law and director Corrie Chen for speaking up, and for their unqualified apologies when subsequently called out for a blackface scene in their 2013 short film, Bloomers. There is a long history of excluding representations of Asians on Australian screens, with Asians more often spoken for than allowed to speak. Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with How can we move from this division to a more productive dialogue about who is being excluded, and why there might be a need to speak up? Author Michael Mohammed Ahmad called it a “distraction which derail our attempts to hold white people and white institutions accountable for their role in systemic and structural racism”. In turn, this letter has been harshly criticised by some of those it seeks to champion. The letter (which came the day after the infamous Harper’s Magazine open letter for “justice and open debate”) expresses the view that those speaking out online are bullies, interested in “public shaming and ‘burning down’ the industry”. The letter also looks outwards to the rest of the industry, noting an Indigenous woman, Sally Riley, is head of scripted production at the ABC, and Que Minh Luu has been appointed head of Australian programming at Netflix. It points out Moodley is a South African person of colour who has “long championed the works of filmmakers from Africa and Asia”. The letter defends the festival’s director, Nashen Moodley, against claims that the festival is “part of a white supremacist system”. Warwick Thornton’s latest project was a documentary series, The Beach.
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