Tribeca Review: Burke and Wills

One of the best things about film festivals is the exposure they provide. Immersed in a sea of film, we often find ourselves encountering a passionate new director, or left breathless by a foreign work, the name of which we’ve never heard before. There are dual pleasures in these findings: not only are we seeing something wonderful for the first time, but there’s also a secret thrill of discovery; of feeling like the first one to unearth a hidden gem. Along with that joy, however, come risks, and Burke And Wills, the debut feature from Australian director Matthew Zeremes, is a sad reminder of that fact.

Clocking in at short 75 minutes, Zeremes’ film tells the story, not surprisingly, of Burke and Wills, who meet as the movie begins (and share their names with a pair of doomed Australian explorers), when Wills takes a room in Burke’s house. Wills, who just turned 30, is an awkwardly winning bundle of nervous energy, though most of that energy is expended through chatter rather than movement. He’s unemployed, and has a long-term girlfriend whose mother -- calling Wills “a leech” -- has just kicked him out of her house. Wills’ most appealing trait is his jittery warmth. He seems to care very little how people respond to him, as long as they let him take up space nearby, and listen to him talk. Through his early, drunken verbal essays, we learn that Wills would like to be someone -- and somewhere -- else, though whether he’s got the energy or motivation to make his desires a reality is another thing entirely. He’s not, however, unhappy, just a bit wistful. After all, he thinks: Who wouldn’t want to be Spanish?

Burke, meanwhile, is Wills’ polar opposite. Quiet where Wills is very much not, Burke’s height and coloring make him look like a rather dignified corpse, particularly when he’s near the shorter, dark-haired Wills. Early on, the two get along well, with Burke tolerating and sometimes taking pleasure in his new housemate’s tales; he even becomes something of a confidant for Wills, when he begins to have trouble with his girlfriend.

To this point, Burke and Wills is harmless. The story, while totally unoriginal, is reasonably well-told, and the film is visually interesting, with its grainy black and white and surveillance-style camera angles. Things all goes terribly wrong, though, when two totally unrelated events occur: Burke’s grandmother, to whom he is totally devoted, dies, and Wills gets a job interview. Both take place a little less than half-way through Zeremes’ film, and they immediately drive it straight into the ground, changing what had been a modest debut into a howling nightmare of self-importance and heavy-handedness. (And it really is that bad.)

The death of his grandmother sends Burke into a downward spiral, causing him to act out in completely nonsensical ways. Wills, meanwhile, has a dreadful job interview with a mobile phone salesman whose personality is so painfully one-note and aggressive that it gives one the odd feeling that the actor is a minor celebrity, appearing as a hilarious gag. Inexplicably, Wills gets the job, and his boss suddenly moves into the center of film, completely destroying its momentum. The relationship between Burke and Wills, also rather suddenly and without explanation, sours, and similarly unmotivated things of A Very Serious Nature take place.

What’s most objectionable about the film’s collapse is less the absurd events that bring it about than their aural accompaniment. What feels like 95% of Burke and Wills is accompanied by a score featuring only a male voice and a guitar, both which are far too loud all of the time. Under most circumstances, one would blame the projectionist (or, in this case, the guy who turned on the DVD player in the screening room) for the problem. In this one, however, Zeremes is most certainly at fault. In the section of the film in which the music is loudest (Burke, for some reason, is meeting with his father and another man who may be a lawyer, signing some papers, and hiding in the bathroom), the director actually provides subtitles -- for only some of the statements, not all of them -- rather than simply lowering the levels on the soundtrack

By the time Burke and Wills is over, the viewer has experienced a whirlwind of emotions, but they’re in reaction to the gradual collapse of the movie, and not of its characters. What begins as the painless experience of a new filmmaker turns into a painful reminder of the risks we take by blindly walking into a theater at a huge film festival. Sometimes, we stumble upon magic. At others, however, what we find is just a terrible, infuriating mess.