‘Flathead’: Rotterdam Review

Dir/scr: Jaydon Martin. Australia. 2024. 89mins

This affecting, but slightly meandering fiction-documentary hybrid follows septuagenarian Cass Cumerford as he returns to his childhood home, the small Queensland town of Bundaberg in northeastern Australia. Through the connections that Cass forges with the townsfolk, we learn about his troubled past and about the rhythms of life in this predominantly blue-collar farming community. Like the characters it follows, this first feature from director Jaydon Martin is unpolished, honest and a little rough around the edges at times.

Unvarnished, but striking

Shot almost entirely in black and white (the moments of colour are taken from the health and fitness Youtube channel of the picture’s other main character, Andrew Wong) the film is an unvarnished but striking account of life in this working class community. Both in the combination of fiction and non-fiction – the filmmakers describe it as “dramatised verité” – and in the milieu – impoverished, with widespread substance abuse issues – the film has a kinship with the work of the US-based Italian director Roberto Minervini (The Other Side, What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire?). As such, it’s likely a picture that will play best among festival audiences and fans of the more experimental fringes of documentary cinema.

Like the land to which he has returned, Cass has a weathered, wind-etched quality to his features that seems endlessly fascinating to a camera. Gaunt, with a cigarette permanently dangling from his mouth, his is a face that speaks of hard parties and decades of excess, even before he starts to share his stories of the past. But it doesn’t take long for Cass to open up, to a man (Brodie Poole, who also serves as the film’s cinematographer) while playing guitar outside the budget motel where Cass makes his home.

“Back then, you knew what you were getting,” says Cass, as he waxes nostalgic about the “little brown rocks” of amphetamine that used to be his drug of choice. Prompted by the boredom of parenthood, Cass and his wife graduated from speed to heroin, which he ruefully describes as “a stupid waste of time”– adding “but we had no other hobbies”.

Cass’s return to Bundaberg is tied up, we learn, in a late-life search for spiritual enlightenment. He is drawn into the congregation of a local church and baptised. But Cass’s restless nature leaves him open to other spiritual journeys – he submits to magnet-based meditation and healing, and joins Andrew in lighting incense to commemorate the dead.

This connection between Andrew, a Chnese-Australian upbeat health nut given to posing shirtless on his YouTube channel, and the bedraggled Cass is not fully explained by the film, but there is s an unexpected common ground between the two. Andrew’s father, the owner of the local fish and chip shop, dies during the film’s shoot, opening up a channel of communication through which Andrew and Cass can share their respective stories of loss (Cass had a son who died as a teenager).

Martin adopts a social realist approach, but the film’s use of music adds a poetic quality to the picture. The unaccompanied voice of Angharad Van Rijswijk, performing traditional hymns such as ’Nearer, My God, To Thee’ and ’Precious Lord, Take My Hand’, brings a crystalline beauty. But perhaps even more powerful is the use of a song that was co-written and performed by Cass and Brodie Poole, a bluesy number called River Fish Leap that closes the film and captures very effectively the raw, rough-edged spirituality of the place and its people.