Children of the Revolution
Written and directed by Peter Duncan
Reviewed by Nick Fredman
Peter Duncan's first feature had a lot of potential — a decent budget, a stellar cast and an ambitious theme in a satirical look at Stalinism and its effects in Australia. It's a pity, then, that it fails so utterly, but it's also curious that most commentators have given it high marks.
The plot follows Communist Party activist Joan Fraser (Judy Davis), who after corresponding with Stalin (F. Murray Abrahams) is invited by the lonely dictator to an international gathering in Moscow. A night of seduction ensues, which finishes off the ageing Stalin but leaves Joan impregnated by him.
Joan, desperate to ensure the future of the beloved general secretary's love child, whom she names Joe, marries affable but apolitical comrade Welch (Geoffrey Rush). Joe, however, turns out to be more attracted to prisons, police, leather, handcuffs and demagogy than the ideals Joan tries to instil in him.
The rest of the film covers Joe's sinister plotting for power and the complex relations between Joe and his parents, his leather-clad policewoman wife (Rachel Griffiths), whose grandparents were victims of Stalin, and the ASIO-KGB double agent (Sam Neil), who also slept with Joan in Moscow and believes Joe to be his son.
If the story sounds overtly complex, that's because it is. Satire, to work, has to have some plausibility and relationship to reality, however exaggerated and allegorical. The portrayal of the nightmare world of the Kremlin in the last days of Stalin does have some genuinely funny and insightful, blackly absurdist, if heavy-handed, humour. But the portrayal of Australian communists and the historical context in which they operated is simplistic in the extreme.
For all the distortions of Marxism and dogmatism that Stalinism gave to the CPA, a clichéd picture of fanatical extremists facing an indifferent working class is neither an entertaining, enlightening nor true picture of recent Australian history and the role of communists within it.
In showing the parallels between Joe and his father, "ironic" plot devices are piled on top of each other to the point of irritation. Joe's rise to power and his plans for "revolution" are so divorced from any social and political reality that they add to the annoying quality of much of the film. The clumsiness of the plot and dialogue so distance the viewer that when attempts are made to evoke sympathy for the characters they are (unintentionally) laughable.
The cast struggles valiantly with the material, but even Judy Davis can't lift her role much above the portrayal of a hysterical fanatic, and Sam Neil often looks as if he wishes he was elsewhere. The soundtrack is a highlight, apart from a ludicrous use of Billy Bragg's Tender Comrade.
A satire on the complex issues of Stalinism and its collapse would inevitably be a difficult project. Unfortunately, and apart from its major aesthetic failings, Children of the Revolution has no political framework other than an anticommunism so clichéd it would be embarrassing in an undergraduate revue.
Why has it won praise and AFI awards? It is perhaps a mark of the national chauvinism of the liberal intelligentsia that nearly any new Australian film, whether it's a load of tripe or not, is automatically lauded, especially if it features "our" superstars like Judy Davis and Sam Neil. To point out its flaws might also contradict the smug anti-Marxism which is an important part of the party line of the chattering classes.