Gill friends

Love Serenade will reel you in

by Peter Keough

LOVE SERENADE. Written and directed by Shirley Barrett. With Miranda Otto, Rebecca Frith, George Shevtsov, John Alansu, and Jessica Napier. A Miramax Films release. At the Janus.

The old saying about there being a lot of fish in the sea gets a new angle in Australian director Shirley Barrett's daft and delightful comedy Love Serenade. An understated farce executed with pinpoint timing, flawless performances, and effortless, zany invention, it manages in the midst of the hilarity to go below the surface of gender roles and sexual politics, landing in the end a fable of metamorphosis and repressed desire worthy of Kafka.

The days are long, slow and tacky down in Sunray, a barren stretch of burnt-out Down Under suburbia whose highlights include a serpentine, overgrown stream, a looming, disembodied neon sign reading "FISH," a bad Chinese restaurant, and rows of weed-covered bungalows, mostly vacant. Social and employment opportunities are scarce -- it's an ideal breeding ground for eccentricity and romantic obsession.

Such is the case with desperate-to-be-married Vicki-Ann (a pursed and determined Rebecca Frith) and her aptly named younger sister, Dimity (a malignantly muppetish Miranda Otto). Vicki-Ann works in the town beauty salon; Dimity waits tables -- or mostly waits -- in the Chinese restaurant owned by Albert (John Alansu, a master of earnest, indignant absurdity), who spends more time musing on nudism and love than he does preparing his noodles with black-bean sauce. In their spare time Vicki-Ann and Dimity squabble over domestic trivialities and imagined slights or troll the local waterway for trout, an invigorating if vain substitute for making a big catch in life.

Meanwhile, tooling in from the big city of Brisbane while singing along to the tunes of Barry White -- the '70s Top 40 equivalent of an obscene phone call -- is DJ Ken Sherry (a smoothly grotesque George Shevtsov). A fugitive from a third divorce, Ken is taking over the moribund Sunray radio station, and he's taken up residence next door to the two sisters. Beguiled by his aloof, insinuating mysteriousness (he does tai-chi and has a stuffed marlin on his wall) and the oily, self-pitying monologues backed by suggestive R&B that he intones on the air (he delivers "Desiderata" almost without irony), they're hooked.

With internecine abandon Vicki-Ann and Dimity wage war over the bemused and sexually nondiscriminating Ken. The more domestic and demented Vicki-Ann leaves him pot roast by his door, gets quickly taken advantage of, and blissfully lives out a detailed, totally imaginary engagement. The more naive Dimity awkwardly engages him in "conversation" at Albert's restaurant, matching his calculated, world-weary clichés with emphatic declarations of irrelevant trivialities from her own life. Despite her seeming vulnerability, Dimity is the one in charge when he "seduces" her into a gawky but game striptease to the tune of "The Hustle."

Love is both unassuming and surrealistic, its uncanny, non sequitur dialogue made totally naturalistic by the timing and deadpan earnestness of the cast. Much of its bite, though, lies in its silences, the long pauses between characters that end with an abrupt realignment of alliances or intentions. And Barrett -- who's a seasonal native of Robinvale, the original of Sunray -- is attuned to the benighted terrain's potential for visual wit and poetry. The pathos, absurdity and disturbing power of Dimity's yearning jostles the comedy as she sits alone before Ken's radio studio, listening to him on a battered loudspeaker. The drab expanse of the Central Australian flatland sprouts triumph and wonder as well as laughable self-delusion when Vicki marches to a rendezvous with a grain silo in a dazzling wedding dress. And when the sleekly seductive lothario oozes digestive fluid from a pair of vestigial gills, easygoing farce gives way to burgeoning nightmare.

Exactly what Barrett's saying about the nature of men and women and sex and power would be hard to summarize -- the piscine references, for example, are both phallic and messianic. But somehow when Dimity announces, "I have reason to believe your boyfriend is a fish," all becomes painfully, uproariously clear. Sisterhood proves more powerful than the lure of the mating game, but Barrett's no hardline feminist. In the end even Ken is a bewildered, sympathetic victim of the drives, designs, and desires that lurk in our souls like alien species in the abyss.