AUSTRALIAN FILM FESTIVAL: In More 4 Me Australian filmmaker Lincoln Fenner has made a documentary about the great, gaping chasm that lies between the First World and the Third. As the title suggests, it’s a film about the selfish, endless, almost psychopathic pursuit of satisfaction as defined by a consumer society (like ours). Fenner takes it as read that this is an important subject and he has no time for subtlety or the delicate art of persuasion; the movie dictates its points in a fashion that’s blunt and brutal. Fenner, who edited the film, will cut from the crowded towers of stone, steel and glass of, say, New York to a ground-level shot of a Kenyan shanty town where a trickle of muddy water courses between homes of rusted iron. Later, we’ll find out that that horrid trail of oily liquid will be that village’s only source of water for many of its habitants.
Fenner has two basic shooting styles that some up his sympathies. In places like New York, LA, London and Perth, he uses the confrontational style of TV news magazine vox-pops. He approaches strangers and asks them a series of bland questions (some unkind viewers might call these enquiries gnomic) along the lines of 'What can you live without?", 'How much do you spend on shoes?", and 'What can we do about poverty?" When Fenner and his tiny crew travel to Africa or Cambodia the shooting style changes; the camera work becomes observational. He still does on-site interviews, but the edits imply a reverence and respect for the aid-workers, the nurses and doctors and ordinary souls he encounters in the Third World that just isn’t accorded the folks he finds on, say, Saville Row or in LA’s upscale promenades. It’s not helped by the fact that his subjects in these places seemed a little dazed and caught-out.
I don’t think Fenner wants to be unkind or unfair but his style makes a point, perhaps unconsciously, that in this argument one must take sides, and he’s on the side of the Angels. The Third World is starving and it’s the First World’s fault because we take too much, too often, and don’t care enough about anything or anyone much. This argument has great validity and it needs qualification (and importantly, Fenner doesn’t provide much of the latter and not nearly enough real substance to substantiate the former).
All of which is to say that Fenner is on a mission, and indeed, the film ends with a how-to guide for the viewer, explaining ways we all can, in our day-to-day lives, contribute to ending world poverty by easing off on the consuming and getting stuck into the preserving and taking a modest role in aid programs.
It’s all very sensible, decent and earnest. Fenner comes off as folksy and sincere – in his onscreen bits (and he’s on screen a lot) his manner has the ease and good humour of a TV weatherman on holiday. His voice over narration is equally anodyne. Fenner sounds too often like a talk radio hack spouting conventional wisdoms in an effort to make him self sound 'ordinary’.
This can have a strange and, I reckon, unintentionally ironic effect, since the numbers on, to take one example, obesity in the US and Australia, are truly terrifying. There’s little doubt that Fenner is passionate and involved in the subject here and the personal dilemmas of responsibility they throw up; he includes shots of himself helping to hand out gift packs to starving African children. But by including action like this there’s a queasy feeling that Fenner is indulging in tabloid TV personality-cult affectations. Of course, Fenner isn’t alone in using such stylings, and nor is it especially contemptible. But it is, like the cute little animations used throughout, a distraction rather than a compliment to the grave and urgent subject matter.
More 4 Me has the kind of 'hand-made’ feel of a Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock documentary but without the laughs, the personality, the wit or, sadly, the insight of those filmmakers at their very best. Worse still, the film feels way too long. Fenner’s piety, admirable in life, just seems like a drag in the end.
