Kriv Stenders – Boxing Day (2007)

Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day is a harrowing film, with moments of absolute release and relief.

It is a low-budget work, filmed on digital video – with Stenders behind the camera – in a single location, with a cast of six. It takes place in real time, and it’s shot in long, sometimes relentless scenes that give the appearance of being a single, continuous take. It’s a film that puts its characters under pressure, and in some ways, its audience too. But it’s also a rewarding work to watch, a raw, vivid, risky movie that juggles intensity and excess, yet shows moments of restraint and grace.

Stenders’ first feature, The Illustrated Family Doctor, had a much larger budget and a higher-profile cast, but it sank swiftly at the box office in 2005. His response to this setback was constructive and creative: to take a different tack, to make Boxing Day and its predecessor, Blacktown, features shot on digital video, with shoestring budgets and improvisational elements.

It takes a long time for the first word to be uttered in Boxing Day. But there’s plenty to be observed, as Chris (Richard Green, in a fine, volatile performance) makes his way around his house, preparing for the day. The attention to this domestic detail, to his surroundings and his demeanour, gives us certain clues about him. It’s an anonymously furnished house, a place with barely a personal association or touch, and he goes determinedly about his business: agitated, preoccupied, a little fragile. He’s expecting people, there are Christmas presents, a meal to be served.

Suddenly, he’s interrupted – incursions or unexpected arrivals punctuate the film – by a clearly unwelcome visitor. It’s Owen (Stuart Clarke), a figure from the past, whose jibes and conversational gambits bring some of Chris’ history to the foreground: a shared history of drugs, alcohol, crime, jail. Owen has brought more than an aggressive bonhomie into the house: he has also come with drugs and a proposal. Chris’ rejection is emphatic, but edgy, almost weary. By the time Owen has departed, he has left something else behind: a piece of information with devastating implications. How Chris will choose to act on this reverberates, disturbingly, through the rest of the film.

His guests have arrived: his ex, Donna (Tammy Anderson); their teenage daughter, Brooke (Misty Sparrow); and Donna’s new boyfriend, Dave (Syd Brisbane). But little remains of the scarce, brittle goodwill they brought with them, and a crisis is brewing.

At first, the camera stays tight and involved, and it’s as if it will never let the characters or the viewers off the hook. But there are intriguing moments when it leaves the action behind, when it moves away to observe a silent character, leaving confrontation as background noise, or when it follows someone out of the house, into space or contemplation or some kind of escape. Even then, what’s happening out of frame feels ever-present, simmering with possibility.

Boxing Day might look rough and raw, and the camera sometimes slips briefly out of focus, yet there’s always a sense that, although the characters are not necessarily in control, the film always is: carefully structured, with dramatic momentum, the sense of a trajectory.

Within this structure, certain things are implicit or underplayed, given weight in undemonstrative, resonant ways: Chris’ Aboriginality, for example. The eruptions are often physical rather than verbal: things are left unsaid at crucial moments, yet much is conveyed. Some things are revealed in anger – a fierce, denunciatory outburst from Donna – but the past isn’t always a burden. We learn something halfway through the film about Chris’ relationship with Brooke that clarifies what they are to each other, and it’s a rare moment of lyrical release, a sense of asserting something that lies beyond the confines of space and place.

Boxing Day is a gruelling experience, but not a merely exhausting one: it has plenty to give to its audience.

Philippa Hawker’s review for The Age.

Boxing Day (2007).avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	1h 21mn
Size:	701 MiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	608x352
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 085 Kbps
Audio
English 2.0ch MP3 @ 110 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/B9F351642F17DE4/Boxing_Day_(2007).avi

Language(s):Aboriginal, English
Subtitles:none