Richard Lowenstein
E morì con un felafel in mano

"Do you want to marry me?"

"I can't, I've got to leave soon"

Brisbane, Australia. Danny has already moved through 46 houses; the story of his adventure begins in number 47. He is surrounded by a group of friends (friends?) different from each other and who are a sort of summary of humanity. The house still has rooms for rent: all the tenants are on the verge of desperation and a bit of money doesn’t hurt. Along comes the goth Anya, intoxicated by philosophical fantasies on the temporal succession of patriarchy, there comes the little Chinese girl who doesn’t speak English and is forced to sleep in a sort of closet, and also arrive two bruisers ready to collect the unpaid rent without much delicacy.

This is enough to understand the essence of the film. A delirious, chaotic, surreal journey into human diversity, into the instincts of our nature that often lead us to negative consequences, into the deepest feelings that sometimes we reveal for what they are, sometimes we suppress them. 

Danny is the symbol of a generation that has failed, a son of that much-idolized but also much-utopian beat generation (twin to the flower children of the Sixties), who needs a ridiculous expedient (his alleged ability to make women "delirious") to survive in the jungle of obsessions surrounding his life. The splendid "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas & The Papas, played with his guitar as a symbol of transition from one house to another, is the perfect soundtrack of his existence, a mix of melancholy and joy, the very feelings that the song's listening evokes (a track-symbol also of an era and a philosophy of life, perhaps precisely the same philosophy of Danny and part of the excellent soundtrack of the film). 

The felafel of the title is the sandwich that poor Flipp, a hopeless addict and devotee of the "albino tan," is eating, while watching TV sitting in the living room. Death takes him by surprise and the whole film revolves around this emblematic scene; the awareness that in the end, we all have the same fate, regardless of how we live our lives. Perhaps it is this certainty that drives Flipp, the sweet and sensitive Sam, the mysterious and cryptic Anya, the womanizer Taylor to follow Danny wherever he goes, in any house he decides to live in, forming a group that can hardly dissolve, despite the adversities they must overcome and face in each relocation: unpaid rents, troubles with the police, arcane rituals complete with sacrificial victim, false identities, ambiguous and unbridled love (and hate) relationships.

And framing all this is the endless forest of human beings with whom the group shares every moment of its life: as Danny himself remarks in house number 49, in the only sequence where he loses control and finally vents all his accumulated anger: "I lived with aging bankers, devotees of the albino tan, gas transmitters, pathetic neurotic actresses, acid suckers, hallucinogenic mushroom growers, brothel frequenters, telematic fatties, separatist lesbian fundamentalists, enigmatic little Japanese in shitty tiger outfits..."

"If prostituting oneself means renting one's body, marrying means selling it" is one of the phrases recurring in the film, uttered with different meanings depending on who says it, but always in an ironic context, which more than once elicits a satisfying laugh, thanks also to the skill of all the actors and an almost perfect direction. The philosophy (often simplistic) that fills the film is also amusing, and at the same time makes one dream, dream of being a bit like Danny, who even if he is a man in trouble still manages to be happy, to live fully and intensely, to play his favorite song on the guitar.