Richard Lowenstein
He Died With A Felafel In His Hand

Please, forgive me a DeBaserian user, whose nickname might icastically nullify any attempt I make to pay homage to this film, but so be it... I'll try anyway.

The story is set in Australia, in a city-climbing climax: Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney. The protagonist, already a skilled pianist in 'Shine' and a penniless father in the Burtonian remake of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” is a tenant bound to lose. This curriculum makes him rightly join the gallery of my favorite characters. Whoever hasn't changed at least 15 houses in their life and had as many neuropathological roommates is kindly asked to prefer, I don't know... Leonidas from “300”...
His poorly playing a guitar, always venturing on the notes of “California Dreamin'”, foreshadows a malaise that finds its only outlet in an ideal of escape, promptly realized.

My grandmother used to tell me, “you are like a golden fly, turning and spinning, you’ll end up landing on a pile of crap (literal)... and to me who liked Lucia so much... she was such a good little warbler...”

It’s in my somewhat gypsy nature to seek the difficult and the laborious; too easy to sleep under the same roof for more than 10 months. Even women, you know, we like them kind of this way...
Like the femme fatale from “He Died with a Felafel in His Hand,” for everyone a gloomy little thing, with a pimple near her nose and slightly crossed eyes, for you a bewitching and enchanting princess of future moons, and those crossed eyes are a Venus’s strabismus, and that pimple a tiny blemish that amplifies her beauty... which isn’t a flaw at all, let’s call it a peculiarity... We don’t even look at the blondie who's been courting us forever, the one who tries to kill herself listening to “The Mercy Seat” by Nick Cave. We only remember her towards the end. After all, it’s a movie. And an overly sweet one at that...

The film is grotesque and deliberately over the top. The protagonist would like to write like the great Fedor of “White Nights” and yet his only literary work finds space in the centerfolds of Penthouse. Even his “friends” aren’t faring any better: lovers of the albino tan, frustrated models, womanizers with slightly “Nazi” friends, slaves to the remote control and Star Trek, drug addicts and anarcho-nihilists, all in search of living space. Not even the shadow of a koala or kangaroo. Just lives adrift, like in Rome, like in New York, like in Berlin.
Australia, according to this film, counts 20 million tormented souls, in a native wild village as vast as a continent. Memorable is the crass intransigence of the police, the tax collectors, and the employees constantly searching for a sacrificial victim, almost always the weakest in the group.

The film flows through eternal returns, continuous misfortunes, and cigarettes, thousands of cigarettes. Accompanied by excellent music and borderline dialogues (think of the analysis in a gay context of the Reservoir Dogs ending), it is an escape into inconsolable existence.

Little appreciated by critics and audiences, in my opinion, it is a small bittersweet masterpiece.