By Rachel Power
August 2009

Melbourne director Ana Kokkinos is no stranger to tough material set in the darker backstreets of her hometown. Her short film Only the Brave showed the troubled lives of two teenage girls living on the edge of the city’s barren fringes; Head On was an exhilarating but raw journey into the self-hating world of an unemployed gay Greek man; and The Book of Revelation portrayed a murky mix of revenge and sadomasochism. 

Now Kokkinos has transformed award-winning stage play Who's Afraid of the Working Class? into an equally devastating but more naunced portrayal of struggling families in her new film, Blessed.

“It touches on class issues but in a very subtle, complex way,” says Kokkinos. “In a way, the screenplay’s become less didactic than the play was, because it had to be dramatised.”

The story is told in two parts: first tracking seven children over the course of a day and a night as they roam the suburbs and backstreets of Melbourne; then revisiting the same 24 hours from the mothers’ perspective.

Four celebrated Australian actors lead a large ensemble cast in a film where multiple narratives intersect tenuously but to powerful effect.

Miranda Otto is a lonely single mother frightened by her responsibilities and addicted to the pokies. Deborra-lee Furness plays a hard-working mother with an unemployed, emotionally dehydrated husband (William McInnes). Victoria Haralabidou is a Greek widow who sews private school uniforms to make ends meet. While Frances O’Connor is a welfare-dependent mum whose neglected kids have taken to the streets.

Adapting the play for the screen

In 1997, the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre marked their ten-year anniversary by commissioning a play about the political and socioeconomic issues of the time. Kokkinos was struck by the boldness and veracity of the resulting production, Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?

 

Eva Lazzarro and Reef Ireland

“The characters were so compelling and engaging,” she recalls. “Ordinary people dealing with everyday life and adversity with great courage, humour and energy. I was deeply affected and saw the potential for a very moving and beautiful film.”

She engaged the play’s original writers — Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas — to adapt it for the big screen. But Kokkinos says the screenplay would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda (played in the film by Frances O’Connor) describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”.

“Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.

“What I find quite beautiful about Rhonda is that she’s full of love — her intention is this very passionate and primal love for this children — but she’s incapable of putting the needs of her children before her own needs because she is so under-fed emotionally.”

Realising this needed to be the “emotional core of the film”, she and lead writer Bovell set about transforming the original material into a profoundly compassionate study of the most primal of human relationships: the unbreakable bond between mother and child.

“With any adaptation,” Kokkinos explains, “whether it’s a novel or a play, there comes a point where you have to dispense with the source material and reinvent the work as a film without losing the richness, texture and essence of what initially attracted.”

Frances O’Connor – playing the kind of mother mainstream media loves to hate

With one kid already lost to the state, two on the street, and now pregnant again to yet another abusive partner, Rhonda (Frances O’Connor) is the kind of mother mainstream media loves to hate, says Kokkinos.

In a powerhouse performance, Frances O’Connor is utterly compelling as Rhonda: her love and vulnerability tightly held behind a brittle veneer of jaw-jutting bravado that threatens to break open at any minute.

 

Frances O'Connor

“No matter what the character is, my job is to understand that character and love that character, and try and make the audience understand her,” says O’Connor, who travelled from her home base in the UK to be at the Melbourne International Film Festival’s premiere of Blessed. “I knew that the brief for Rhonda was a little bit tough. I really enjoyed creating that character together because I knew it was a difficult journey for the audience to make.

“To bring the audience on that journey, to judge someone and then to flip that on its head, so that you so empathise with them at the end, if you can do that, it’s very powerful.”

In casting for a character who “pushes and pulls an audience’s sympathies,” Kokkinos needed an actress who could embody her without playing a single false note.

“Frances physically transformed herself into Rhonda so totally, inhabiting her so deeply, that by the end, her emotional truth was undeniable, which is a rare thing to achieve.”


A cast of 13 lead actors

Alongside highly experienced actors such as O’Connor, Blessed stars several remarkable newcomers, including Harrison Gilbertson as Daniel, who has been accused of theft by his mother; Sophie Lowe and Anastasia Baboussouras as wagging high-schoolers; Eamon Farren as a young adult, escaping his devout mother and coming to terms with his sexuality; and Reef Ireland and Eva Lazzaro as Rhonda’s lost children.

“I wouldn’t recommend this kind of film as your first feature,” says Kokkinos, laughing. “I actually had 13 lead actors and that’s how I approached it. I had kids who’d hardly done anything before; then you’re working with the calibre of Frances and Miranda and Deb and Victoria.

 

Anastasia Baboussouras and Sophie Lowe

 “But I knew it was all about time spent in rehearsals and giving ourselves the space and time to do all the work we needed to do. I had thoroughly prepared for each person in different ways. I really enjoy the way different actors work, dealing with the individuality of each actor and relishing that.”

O’Connor says Kokkinos makes actors feel nurtured, taking the time to give every actor what he or she needs to meet the demands of the role.

“There were a lot of mothers on set,” she says, “but she was the top mother! We were making a film for the right reasons, and Ana really set the tone for everything, running a set was very sensitive to everybody, but also really tough too.

“You couldn’t fake a moment; you couldn’t get away with anything. If it wasn’t happening, she makes you lift your game a little bit. To know that someone’s got an eye on you, who’s really watching what you doing and wants you to be as good as you can be, that really focuses you.”

The look of Blessed – heightened realism and moments of great beauty

Blessed is the third collaboration between Kokkinos and Bovell, who also worked on Head On and The Book Of Revelation, and will also reunite Kokkinos with producer Al Clark, editor Jill Bilcock and award-winning cinematographer Geoff Burton.

Blessed was the first major Australian film to use Kodak’s new Vision 2 High Speed Stock (500 ASA), as Burton explains: “I’d been following its development, so when Kodak released it just prior to the shoot, I was ecstatic, and I was lucky to have courageous and trusting producers who were happy for me to use an untried stock on their film.

“We didn’t want Blessed to look like a drama-doco, so any realism had to be heightened and then traded off against moments of great beauty, which happily was made possible by the script.”

Like all Kokkinos’s films, Blessed fiercely refuses to look away from the darkness that lurks in our cities and our hearts. But by combining these truths with moments of great beauty, that journey is arguably well worth the pain. While each character is dealing with his or her own issues, Kokkinos says the film is ultimately about “kids who are pushing their own boundaries and therefore pushing the relationship with their mothers”.

“Events bring those mothers and children together at the end because that connection between them is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.”

Blessed is released nationally on September 10, by Icon Films. It has been selected to screen at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (10-19 September). Blessed is also the opening night film for the 2009 AFI Awards Screenings in Melbourne and Sydney.