Siam Sunset (1999)

Thanks for the memories!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's been over a decade since I first caught this film and I've got to say that in spite of playing with stereotypes, it still has a rare quality; something quintessentially Australian entirely devoid of our renowned cringe factor. Linus Roache, Danielle Cormack and Ian Bliss bring each of their characters to life with great craft and humour. Two Hands is the Sydney experience, Animal Kingdom is the Melbourne experience but Siam Sunset is the completely Oz experience. John Polson and the writers Max Dann and Andrew Knight did a wonderful job in highlighting many of our quirks and mores (for better or for worse) in a thoughtful and funny as hell way as we follow Perry (Roache) - the hapless disaster magnet from England through the shockingly funny death of his wife, his suburban London life crippled by the memories, and on to the tourist trip from hell as he sets off from Adelaide into the red heart of Australia. Grace (Cormack) and Martin (Bliss) are two of the most original cinema characters I've seen in years. In fact, these two characters remind me of many people I've known over the years, so in spite of comments of this movie playing to populism or stereotypes, I can't help but watch it and see the opposite. Alan Borough shines as Stuart - the Stratocaster-mangling singer songwriter and Bill Leach (Roy Billing) who still sticks in my mind not so much as the bus driver from hell, but rather as a ubiquitous bureaucrat of the worst order. Overall a surrealist but highly accurate and well observed ninety minute odyssey that will keep you laughing years after you've experienced it.

A wonderful, black farce. The idea of an industrial chemist whose wife is killed by a refigerator accidentally dropped from an air cargo liner, learning to laugh about it under a starlight Australian outback sky with a woman on the run from a psycho is...well...perfect. If you don't like the opening premise -- his loving marriage is terminated by a dropped fridge from the sky -- you're not going to like this. But if you can stay with it, you'll find a perfectly constructed, slaptstick noir with wonderful views and extremely concise, clever dialogue. The bonus is a number of wacky twists and turns, including a very poisonous serpent and a sagging electric ceiling fan. And the very last picture is a beautiful technical tour de force which you'll love. Linus Roache underplays nicely, and the female lead is as sexily Australian as we always dreamed of. The seemingly cliched B-parts actually come to life. This is 'The Castle' with a star cast and a few extra million for effects. You miss it and you're a drongo.

Yesterday, in a Haymarket cinema in London, I watched "Siam Sunset", an australian movie starring Danielle Cormack (Ephiny in Xena) and Linus Roache. It's about this English guy (Linus Roache) who loses his beloved wife in a very stupid way (a refrigerator fell off a cargo plane and landed on top of her). From that moment, very weird things (mostly dangerous accidents) start to happen around him. He works creating color squemes for a paint company, but he suffers an acute depression following his wife's death and is given a long holiday to work through his pain. His personal quest for a very particular color, "Siam sunset", sets him off to a cheap tour of Australia with a bunch of wacky holidaymakers, from Adelaide to nowhere (they never get to Darwin, as planned), while he rediscovers love with a runaway australian girl, Grace, whose not very nice ex-boyfriend wants to find her at all costs (to inflict, we fear, as much pain as possible). You can see it coming: Grace and the Englishman fall in love, of course, and decide to live together happily ever after, and the Englishman finally find his Siam Sunset color. It's, after all, a small romantic comedy and shouldn't you have harboured bigger expectations, you'll like this movie. I did, it put a smile on my face.

I was a bit perplexed by the first half of Siam Sunset. It was trying to be a comedy, tradgedy and a serious piece all at the same time.The poor wife gets flattened by a fridge, people fall down stairs for no apparent reason, and in the meantime our hero is moaning about loss and strange things that happen, quite straight faced...