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The
basic premise of PARTISAN is terrific.
“A
zealot collects young children, born of vulnerable mothers, trains and
indoctrinates them to become assassins to protect his ‘tribe’ in a dystopian
world.”
Gregori,
the dictator/guru who heads up the small commune has the following advice for
11 year old child assassin and protégé, Alexander.
“Sometimes
to tell the truth is the hardest thing to do.”
The
truth about PARTISAN, hard and painful for all concerned, is that the screenplay
is so bad the question must be asked:
“How
could so many film bureaucrats at Screen Victoria and Screen Australia not
recognize the blindingly obvious script problems and declare, before investing
in the film, ‘This script is not ready
to go into production’.”
We
have been here before, too many times – looking on with professional horror at
filmic train wrecks, wondering how a worse-than-mediocre-screenplay could be
given the thumbs up as ready to go into production by a bevvy of film
bureaucrats whose job, surely, it is to be able to discern the difference is
between a good and a bad screenplay.
How
and why has PARTISAN failed so badly to realize its potential?
Have
Screen Australia and Screen Victoria done Ariel Kleiman a favour by allowing him to take such an undercooked
screenplay into production?
Is
it possible to ask such questions; to seek answers in hopes that some lessons
might be learnt and the same mistakes not made, as they tend to be with
Australian film, over and over again?
Alas,
history suggests that the answer is ‘no’. There will be no dialogue or debate
within the film community or between filmmakers and the funding bodies that
invested in the film. There will be no post-mortem on the corpse that is
PARTISAN and the same film bureaucrats who greenlit it will continue to decide
which films are developed and receive production funding and which are allowed
to wither on the development vine.
Is
it not time, has it not been time, for a long time, for film bureaucrats who
‘greelight’ films to be held accountable for their decisions? Especially when
these decisions, time and time again, result in films that audiences stay away
from in droves?
“Without
rules we will become like them”
So
says Gregori (Vincent Cassel) to his ‘son’, protégé and apprentice assassin, Alexander
(Jeremy Chabriel) in a film that
habitually steers clear of dramatizing that which can be put into expository
dialogue.
But
who is or are ‘them’?
Gregori
again:
“It is
so important to cherish the things you love. To protect them. Be the elder
brother, their protector and destroy anyone who tries to do them wrong.”
This
is a solid premise for a character (even a mentally deranged cult leader) to
behave in a particular way – including the assassination of those who wish to
destroy the things and people the character loves. However, in order for the premise
to carry dramatic weight we, the audience, need to know in what way those being
assassinated pose a threat to Gregor’s self-contained utopian/dystopian world.
In
the brief glimpses we have of those marked for assassination they seem to be as
poor and powerless as the members of Gregori’s ‘tribe’ and, if they have
committed some heinous crime, the screenwriter is not going to let us know what
it is.
Because
there is no antagonist –Alexander (protagonist) is left by the screenplay with
no choice but to act in a vacuum – to perform senseless killings for no
apparent reason and to achieve no identifiable end.
OK,
maybe this is the point of the film. For all his rhetoric about protecting
those he loves, perhaps Gregori is just a nutter who is using ‘ideology’ as an
excuse to carry out, though the children, his desire to kill innocent men? OK,
I can accept this as a premise but what kind of audience did Screen Australia
and Screen Victoria think would be prepared to pay $19.50 to see a film about
an amoral and mentally unbalanced psychopath?
It
has been suggested that Gregori is ‘charismatic’. If he were, perhaps the film
might have worked but he is (for me at least) totally lacking in the kind of
charisma that makes it possible for cult leaders to acquire followers prepared
to kill for them.
Yes,
of course it is easy to be wise after the event but it seems to me that anyone
with a modicum of experience in the craft of screenwriting would have seen that
the draft of PARTISAN that was taken into production was nowhere near being
ready. It was a draft about which Screen
Victoria and Screen Australia could well have declared:
“This
screenplay has great potential but it is nowhere near being ready to go into
production. We look forward to reading subsequent drafts.”
If
I focus on the film funding bodies here it is because they are ultimately the
gate-keepers that decide which films get made and which do not. They have
enormous power and the question arises: “Do they use their power wisely?”
Too
often they do not. And never are they held accountable for their decisions.
