"Farewell to Mother": Australian version The main problem of modern world cinema - it too much divorced people who learned to produce on the sale of sausages.
The film ' Drums' is an eloquent example. Advertised it frankly idiotic, as if this is another Hollywood 'buddy-movie'. 'Jake and Silent Bob retired', 'Dumb and dumber bought a farm', well, or something else in the same sausage spirit.
Meanwhile 'Drums' - this is not a comedy and not even 'dramedy'. Yes, if you wish, you can draw a parallel with the Soviet Georgian comediography (say, some ' Stepmother Samanishvili' where there was also a peasant family quarrel in the plot), but first of all, the Soviet film adaptations ' village prose' - for example, ' Farewell' Klimov.
The main characters of the film are Australian sheep farmers. Breeding sheep for them is not a business, not a sale of sausages, but something like the Holy Grail. Characteristically, when one of them, in parallel with the breeding of sheep, begins to breed llamas (which is rational and brings much more income), the rest laugh at him. Yes, it's good business - but how can you give up the Grail?
And then there is a terrible disaster - an epidemic. Farmers are being asked to act wisely: to carry out total disinfection. That is, slaughter all sheep, burn sheepdogs, disinfect the soil (destroy the upper fertile layer).
Destroy the Grail. Say goodbye to Mother.
Do what is required of you and you will be happy: monetary compensation from the government and two years of subsidies. And the smartest will generally score on sheep (think, they were bred in the family for generations) and go to live in the city in warmth and comfort.
Before us is a real, one might say, classic human tragedy. Which, like all classic tragedies, is not solved.
In this respect 'Drums' - a very old-fashioned movie, shot not in the style of sausage Hollywood cinema and its totalitarian aesthetics. A film in which the viewer is treated not as a manipulated biomass, but as an equal accomplice to the creative process.
This is the main advantage of the tape ... and at the same time a disadvantage.
After all, watching such films after Hollywood blockbusters is unusual and difficult, and criticizing is easy. In the title 'Rams'/Rams - a pun of words, but it is clearly not deployed enough in the picture, the tape itself - long. It seems that the scope of the topic was too great for the scale of Jeremy Sims as a director, including in terms of working with actors. Sam Neal’s dramatic talent was not used to its full potential. Some mysteries remain unsolved, such as why the brothers don’t talk. Maybe for those who lived in the village, it is clear without words (some of the offenses there remember almost for centuries), but most of the spectators are citizens!
Directorial erudition is absolutely insufficient. However, this is a typical shortcoming of directing English-speaking countries - ignorance of world (non-English) cinema. After all, this topic was first touched upon not in Iceland ('Barans' - a remake of the Icelandic tape of the same name) in 2015: there were Italian, Japanese, and Chinese ... well, of course, Soviet tapes.
In part, this is redeemed by directorial sincerity. The location here, declared as Western Australia, looks exactly Western Australia, wherever in reality the film was shot.
And in general, all these shortcomings, in my subjective opinion, are secondary, compared to the presence in ' Drums' good old directorial supertask. Which was not only set, but also solved.
6 out of 10