The Firm Man

John Duigan's first film is a bit like a dream or a drug trip. It is an absurdist story of a man who gets a highly sought-after job at The Firm, a rich and bizarre organisation with odd rituals and costumes, where people speak in funny accents and he is given meaningless jobs to complete by an odd couple of guys, one tall and one short, in funny hats. The film seems to have been aiming to be a Fellini-esque or Monty Pythonesque comment on current society and capitalism, but the jokes fall flat and it is a tedious wander around ill-conceived Alice in Wonderland-type situations. Peter Cummins is ok as the main character, but everyone else looks like they are in a school pantomime. The acting is very stagey. Fortunately, Duigan and Australian cinema both got better than this.

Weird, weird, weird. John Duigan's first credit as writer-director is one of those films that seems destined to redefine 'obscurity,' yet somehow, several other motion pictures over the years (from multiple countries) seem to have been influenced by it stylistically and thematically. The nearly incoherent, oddball premise has something to do with an Aussie executive named Gerald Baxter, who drops out socially and mentally, taking a job for a top secret firm where he plays with toys all day long. Throughout the picture, he is followed by two men in trenchcoats (one of whom is Duigan regular Bruce Spence, of "The Year My Voice Broke" and the reprehensible "Dimboola") who spy on him from around corners, fly a biplane overhead, etc. The motion picture makes absolutely no sense -- somehow, Baxter and others eventually wind up at a beach, where a naked hippie smoking a joint sits on a rock, appearing and disappearing randomly.

I saw this on a Steenbeck at the National Museum of Film, Television, and Radio in Sydney. (A STEENBECK. That's how obscure this is).