The first shot of Hail is a painting. A very, very slow dissolve reveals a grand canvas in a classical style of figures in a clouded, heavenly sky-space; it appears to depict a battle – a fantasy portrait set in medieval times? There are naked nymphs that are being stolen or rescued. There is a warrior on horseback, in horned helmet, sword raised.
It is aggressively, punishingly, poetic, and avoids neatness, closure and plot
Just what the significance of this painting is to the following narrative is never quite resolved in any direct one-to-one kind of way. Yet, its vignettes of struggle and hurt I think haunt what follows.
A moment later we meet Danny (Daniel P. Jones). He has a lined face with skin the texture of beaten leather and eyes that know ghosts and dark places. Danny is in prison and this is the day he is released; when he walks to freedom, he steps into a white light. Was that painting a memory for Danny? Or a vision?
The charm and power of Melbourne-based filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s truly remarkable first feature film is that from the very start we are compelled to accept that what we see and hear on screen seems to leap, uncensored, from the troubled mind of Danny.
Soon Danny is home, in a tiny housing commission style flat with his missus Leanne (Leanne Letch). You can almost smell the stale smoke and old booze. Like Danny, she wears a hard life on her face. She is tender. They talk of a better life.
Danny looks for work. He knows cars. People are kind. Danny is wary. There is a dignity to Danny that is sweet but the demons are circling; we can hear it on a soundtrack that pops and rants with noisy guitars. There are quiet times for Danny and Leanne but these are like tiny furloughs between the norm; long, sullen silences, dark talk and violent outrage. Much of the film is handheld and in extreme close-up. The effect is claustrophobic. We feel the rage, even if we don’t understand the source. But over time the gentle rejections from 'straights’ and small irritations of life assume a nuclear capability for Danny; his senses have been so deprived that all of it is all too much, all of the time.
Courtin-Wilson gives Danny the agony of the self-knowing subject. At one point he declares: "If I told you what was in my head, you'd run a thousand miles." When a drug connection, Anthony (Dario Ettia), emerges from Leanne’s past, Danny is forced to make a choice about his limited options and this leads to tragedy.
In cold print, Hail appears as a socially conscious movie of people who live tough and on the margins of straight society. Perhaps Courtin-Wilson’s background as documentary maker – he did the excellent Bastardy – invites this. Still, Hail is emphatically not in the tradition of the cinema of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Which is to say, it’s not about delivering psychological realism or a deconstruction of those institutions that form a power structure that fails to enable or improve the so-called 'underclass’.
Courtin-Wilson’s project is really quite different, wilder, and more alive to something arguably deeper and richer. It is an experiment in filmmaking process and form that owes something of a debt to John Cassavetes, but I wouldn’t over state that.
Dan P. Jones and Leanne Leach are playing a version of themselves (she is Jones’ real-life partner) and the film 're-enacts’ episodes from what was apparently a tumultuous relationship. Courtin-Wilson contrived the script after recording Jones’ memories of his life in and out of prison.
Hail, though, is never at risk of being misunderstood as a 'realist’ movie despite its doco-like surface and its feeling that what we are watching appears as lived experience. It is aggressively, punishingly, poetic, and avoids neatness, closure and plot. It is full of irony and playfulness and it is bizarre in ways that are hard to explain in a short review.
And its final stanza – an extraordinarily attenuated stream of consciousness where Danny’s past, present and future seems to collide on the screen – is a blast of cinema that’s almost overwhelming in its emotional impact. There’s one image here – of a horse falling through space – that I’ve found impossible to erase since I first saw the film at the Sydney Film Festival last year. It’s stark, unpleasant and beautiful at once. I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like Hail.
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