Love Lust & Lies, as the title suggests, is a movie that taps a whole lot of emotional upheaval. As it unfolds, its characters face the kind of traumas familiar with fans of big screen melodrama: there are dark family secrets, estranged mothers and daughters, and there is, too, the heartbreaking problems that come whenever sex and sexuality enter the picture. It's tremendously moving, insightful and even, at times, very funny.
Still, Love Lust & Lies is no fiction. It's the fifth instalment of a series of documentaries Sydney based director Gillian Armstrong (Death Defying Acts) has been making for nearly thirty five years about three lively Adelaide women, Kerry Carlson, Josie Petersen and Diana Doman.
It was 1976, still a few years before her breakthrough first feature, My Brilliant Career (1979), when Armstrong, a twenty-something graduate of the country's first national film school, the Australian Film and TV School, met a trio of best friends, aged fourteen, at an Adelaide drop in centre, and selected them as the 'subjects' for a short documentary. The resulting film Smokes and Lollies is a compelling cultural snapshot of working class life in Australia, circa the mid '70s. Originally commissioned by the South Australian Film Corporation, and supported by a government scheme intended to bring attention to the 'social problems' arising from youth unemployment, Armstrong's film is warm, frank and intimate, as much a three-way character study, as it is a powerful 'social analysis'.
Captured in observational style 'mucking about' with their mates, flirting with boys and coping with the day-to-day pressures of family and school, Kerry, Josie and Diana opened up to Armstrong about their hopes and desires in a way that suggested a close bond with the filmmaker. It was moving precisely because somehow the girls recognised that the movie had afforded them a unique opportunity; they could 'open up' on screen in ways that couldn't really do in their everyday lives about subjects they felt too embarrassed or intimidated about; like sex, marriage, and motherhood.
Armstrong told SBS that over the subsequent films; 14's Good, 18's Better (1980), Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces (1988, filmed when the women were 26), Not fourteen Again (1996) and now Love, Lust & Lies, that trust, established on the first picture, has been maintained: “Kerry, Josie and Diana have seen how they've been edited, and seen how I haven't distorted things, and that's why they've been quite brave in revealing their lives.” Today, when Armstrong has to show her cut to the women, it's like, she says, “running a home movie for my relatives... [I mean] if you know someone for thirty-three years there's a bond [even if] I come and go in their lives.” That's why, Armstrong says, the resulting on-screen interviews end up being so candid. “It's like talking to a close friend... you understand their sense of humour, and so on, and after the first minutes, it seems like only yesterday, even if the last time we made a film together was fourteen years ago!”
It's a truism to suggest that documentary filmmakers pride themselves on their detachment, a position Armstrong can't quite identify with. “There are incredible moral dilemmas in doco filmmaking,” she explains. “You need to, as a journalist or a documentary filmmaker, to get people to reveal things they don't want to and I'm not tough enough to be making films about people I don't like.”
She says it comes down to a question of “personal betrayal... you, as the filmmaker, know that when the subject is saying certain things that it could impact their lives.”
Despite their shared history, Josie and Kerry told Armstrong that, at first, they didn't want to be in the film. In the end, they agreed, because, the director says, “no one [individual, or group] have been followed through their lives for this long, so they came to see themselves and the film series, as part of Australian history.”
“The story has always been about three people who did not have much and have really fought to make a better life for their kids,” Armstrong says. And while the series charts the personal histories of each of the women and their individual personal dramas; marriages, ex-husbands, adult-children, grand-children, single parenthood, financial woes, the films were like a powerful index of the cultural and social changes in Australian society. Watching Love Lust & Lies then is not only a human multi-character study, but a kind a portrait of our habits, pastimes and attitudes. Take, the cuisine... in Smokes and Lollies, women do the cooking, “and its these huge pieces of meat done in deep fat, in fryers...and now, the men are doing the cooking and the characters are eating Italian and Asian food!”
In terms of technique the new film follows the style set by Armstrong on the first film in 1976; 'you are there' observational moments, combined with to-camera interviews. But, as the director points out, the approach is subtly stylised in order to under-score the story of each character. “I had them in the bedroom and in front of mirrors when they talking about intimate things and I shot meals to show the family dynamic.” Armstrong also shoots beautiful 'portraits' – where her camera glides down the street and each of the families are gathered as for a group photo. None of the films have narration. “It was rare to have young people talking so frankly and honestly to camera,” she says of the first film. “At the time the style was to have a voice-over summarising the action.” Armstrong says that even today documentary filmmakers still have to face investors who believe in a sort of 1950s attitude, where “everything has to be spelled out.”
One important addition to the style of the series, in the last two pictures, Armstrong says, has been her on-screen presence: “People pointed out that I was being a bit cowardly by not putting myself on camera, because it was so obvious that they were relating to someone they knew.”
Love, Lust & Lies, is a deeper film than the others, she says, because. “I think, once you reach that mid-point in your life” – the 'girls' are now 47 – “you start to think you only have maybe twenty years left and you begin to ask, 'am I happy with what I am?'”
Now a veteran filmmaker Armstrong says she was still deeply moved by this latest encounter with Kerry, Diana and Josie. Some of the revelations in Love, Lust & Lies are indeed emotionally shattering (which is why they go unmentioned here, at the request of the production). Still, this film, like the others in the series, maintains a loving and compassionate tone: “The camera has a power... they do tell me it's all a bit like therapy, these great revelations happen in the moment because as they say, 'whenever you come back you make us think about our lives.' ”
