Two Friends and The Last Days of Chez Nous
My method of work is a kind of blind scrub-bashing, a blundering through a trackless forest. But now…I had to turn my old, organic, secretive, privileged, hyper-sensitive work process inside out.
HELEN GARNER, INTRODUCTION TO
The Last Days Of Chez Nous & Two Friends (1992)
Midway through my research for this portrait, Michael Heyward asked me what I considered to be the most important book in Garner’s oeuvre. To my surprise, I answered Monkey Grip, not because I consider it Garner’s most impressive work, but because of the ways in which that book and its reception influenced Garner’s writing life. Garner shaped Monkey Grip intuitively. Free from expectations that she was a writer, she was able to experiment and to flounder. Monkey Grip, as Peter Craven described it, is a ‘rough, obsessive, unstoppable’ book. Therein lies part of its power, but the tightly structured and highly polished three books that followed were arguably Garner’s response to the patronising implication that she was not a real writer. In these books she demonstrated that she was a brilliant stylist who could shape language to great effect. Yet something began to shift after Postcards. Perhaps it was a growing confidence in her ability. Perhaps it was something more fundamental in her personal relationships. Maybe it related to her burgeoning spiritual interest. Most likely, it was a combination of all these things. Garner began to experiment even further with form and style. Her sentences lengthened and her subject matter broadened. Before all that, however, she ventured into film.
Jan Chapman had suggested to Garner that she would be open to producing her work if she ever decided to write for film. In desperate need of money, Garner thought she would give screenwriting a go. Her first step was to devise a strict structure. From there the writing happened at an alarmingly fast rate. It seemed too easy.
Her screenplay for Two Friends was directed by Jane Campion and produced by Chapman. The telemovie was first screened on ABC television in 1986. As Craven noted in his Age review, the match of Campion and Garner ‘seemed exact’; Campion understood that ‘in Garner small is always beautiful: never over-emphasise, never emote even when the emotion to be registered is violent’. Both the script and film are divided into five self-contained sections that trace the relationship of two fourteen-year-old girls back in time from July 1985 to October 1984. This reverse timeline operates simultaneously to control emotion through dramatic irony and to intensify, particularly at the film’s conclusion, a bitter and haunting sense of lost opportunity.
Malouf had cautioned Garner that after The Children’s Bach she had exhausted the theme of teenage girls. She proved him wrong. In Two Friends she captures the intensity of the girls’ relationship as well as their innocence, confusion, vulnerability and burgeoning sexuality. Louise and Kelly are poised between childhood and adolescence. Louise is studious and uncool. The more physically developed and sexually curious Kelly is less uptight. The greatest difference between her and Louise is that she suffers cruelly from parental neglect.
It is possible yet again to overlay biographical details onto this story, and Garner admits that when she came to write the screenplay she ‘saw a little story, a little shape’ in some of her recent experiences. She thought she was basing the story on her daughter’s relationship with a friend some years earlier. Partly Garner was driven by a sense that she had failed the friend by not intervening in her difficult family circumstances. Partly she was interrogating her own actions as a single mother who had ‘dragged’ her daughter through her personal life. More interestingly, she discovered, when she saw the film, that it was ‘really, in a funny sort of way, about me’. Garner had read that the ‘behaviour of delinquent adolescent girls was often a kind of wild protest against the weakness of their mothers…to stand up for them’. She realised that in Kelly she had crafted a character psychologically similar to herself.
When I mention Two Friends, Garner exclaims: ‘Ah, I LOVE Two Friends. Tonally it is exactly what I wanted.’ She was thrilled by what Campion did with the screenplay: ‘She got hold of it and flew away.’ In the introduction to The Last Days of Chez Nous & Two Friends, published in 1992, Garner writes of the terror she experienced on surrendering her novelist’s independence, compelled to hand over a script that was less than perfect. Yet she did relinquish control. She learned about outlines and treatments. She had to plan the territory to be covered ahead of the actual writing process, rather than rely on the act of writing to make sense of experience. Alarmingly, she could no longer work alone: ‘I had to learn to walk into someone else’s room, whack down my idea like a lump of raw meat, and watch it quiver while it was rolled and prodded on the table.’ She enjoyed it. While she still clung to her need for ‘long spells of obsessive loneliness’ writing fiction, she enjoyed the pleasure of collaboration and watching her characters come to life on the screen. Two Friends screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. In 1987 it won the Australian Film Institute Award for best telefeature and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for television writing.
Garner’s next foray into film was her screenplay for Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous, which was released on 8 October 1992. The film draws its story from Garner’s 1985 marriage break-up with Jean-Jacques Portail, who fell in love with and later married Garner’s youngest sister. Obviously this subject matter, with its attendant hurt and intricate family dynamics, was potentially explosive. While she may not have seen it this way, I would suggest that Garner’s decision to write a screenplay rather than a novel was apposite, precisely because she would not be able to maintain total control of the script or its dramatisation.
Back in June 1987, Garner had written to Craven declaring that she had just finished the draft of a telemovie that was funnier than Two Friends. By the time she delivered a series of scenes, roughly in filmic order, to her publishers, she explained to them that her aim was ‘to write “a gay comedy, almost a farce”—(Chekov’s description of The Cherry Orchard)—beneath the noisy surface of which lies a rather painful story about the necessity for emotional violence at times when people are resisting change’. Garner outlined the ‘bones of the plot’:
BETH and JP are in disarray. Their marriage is cracking seriously under the strains of its history and of being cross-cultural; various painful infidelities on both sides have taken place; JP is fed up and not even trying to hide it, but BETH is hanging on like grim death. VICKI comes back from another country and rejoins the household. While BETH is on a ridiculous, comical and sad trip into the desert with her domineering FATHER, JP and VICKI begin an involvement which explodes the household out of existence.
The combined screenplays of Two Friends and The Last Days of Chez Nous were published to coincide with the latter film’s release. With their acute dialogue and wry observations, they read like Garner’s fiction. Chez Nous develops many of the themes of Garner’s earlier writing: a woman in her forties anxious about fertility, motherhood, being desirable and sustaining a committed relationship; that same woman trying to make peace with an intransigent father; adolescents negotiating a complicated adult world; and questions about God, spirituality and death.
Unfortunately, much of Garner’s direction for Chez Nous has been edited out of the published script, and in the translation from page to screen some of her vision was lost. She was disappointed by a number of aspects of the finished film, particularly its tone. She hoped for a ‘dense crazy little movie, without melancholy or correct line on anything’. Armstrong got the second part of that suggestion right; no one is judged or blamed, except perhaps Beth. Because she is Garner’s ‘me’ character it is possible to say that Garner mercilessly represents herself. In a tortured scene with J.P., Beth cries: ‘Do you think I need to be told I’m not lovable? I know that! I know what I’m like! I’m bossy, impatient, too motherly, ill-mannered, unfaithful, greedy, a spend-thrift.’ Later, when she has humiliated J.P. and is reprimanded, she hides her discomfort by trying to joke that she is not good at being a couple, only to be struck down by a familiar Garner line: ‘What have you women done to yourselves? You’re like husks.’
Armstrong was concerned that Beth appeared too strong on the page, so she softened her through her direction and her casting of Lisa Harrow, a New Zealand actress who had worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was best known on Australian screens for her role as Claire Jeffries in Come in Spinner. Craven was scathing. He acknowledged that Harrow’s was ‘not a bad performance’—she won an AFI award for best actress—before laying the blame squarely at Armstrong’s feet: ‘it’s simply a pity that Armstrong’s direction has encouraged Harrow to give a performance that is essentially external to this portrait of a woman shuffling among lovers and fathers, intent on preserving the myth of a family while being constricted by the myth that her various “families” lay upon her.’ He continued: ‘[Judy] Davis (or Helen Morse) would have captured the shrewd intelligence in this woman, as well as the spoilt hippie still searching for the meaning of it all and for her father’s love.’ It is a fair, but tough, assessment. In softening Beth and overplaying the emotional potential of the material, Armstrong delivered a more sentimental film than the ironic, understated feature Garner had intended.
The Last Days of Chez Nous has considerable merit. I doubt Garner could ever have been entirely happy with the finished product, given the painful circumstances at its heart. In her introduction to the screenplays, she zeroes in on the replacement of her preferred row of pencil cypress trees with a church spire as one of two core disappointments. Garner had specified some essential characteristics for the house. When Armstrong found the close-to-perfect house in Glebe, she took Garner to see it. They sat on the back steps and rewrote scenes around its physical limitations. When they saw the spire that seemed to be floating in the middle distance, ‘it seemed a gift, and we persuaded ourselves that the spire would do’. Yet Garner insists that the compromise was too great: ‘A spire, no matter how indistinct and beautiful, is literal. It represents a known religion, a particular theology, with all the sectarian and social meanings that this entails. The mystery of the image is lost.’
Garner’s second major complaint related to geography. The Last Days of Chez Nous was imagined in Melbourne, yet filmed in Sydney, as was Monkey Grip before it. For a writer so acutely attuned to her environment, this relocation was problematic. Both movies demonstrated that the ‘qualities of air and light in a certain place…are more than purely aesthetic. They form the tone of people’s lives, the way people move about and behave towards each other and feel about themselves.’ In her original notes Garner had wanted the atmosphere in the house to be ‘inbred and claustrophobic’. Armstrong achieves that sense at times, but, as Garner discovered, ‘The very image of a house, on which both films heavily depend, bears one sort of psychological emphasis in warm, open Sydney, and a completely different one in Melbourne, where dwellings are enclosing, curtained, cold-weather-resisting; more like burrows.’
Arguably Garner’s filmic imagination was asking too much. Her insistence on the theatrical and screen images of the house and the extent and character of the games she wanted played were ambitious. Of central importance was her desire that the script ‘be played with exaggerated realism’ and that the ‘peculiarities should intensify the potential emotionalism of the plot…way past the point of sociological realism’. Needless to say, some viewers interpreted the film as a slice of life dramatising simply the breakdown of Garner’s second marriage and subsequent family tensions. After Craven wrote his review slamming what he perceived to be the movie’s sentimentality, Garner dropped him a postcard:
Dear Peter, I suppose this is unethical or something but thanks so much for the piece you did in the Age abt Chez Nous…I think that the wild swings of reaction people display probably show that I _hadn’t digested the subject matter as well as I thought I had—people react to it as if it were a piece of gossip they’d been told—they gasp & TAKE SIDES between the characters. So your piece is a place for me to stand—thankyou—Helen.
The Last Days of Chez Nous screened at twenty-one film festivals in Australia and around the world. Garner was particularly pleased by the positive reception it received at the 1992 Berlin Film Festival; not only did the audience laugh, they laughed in all the right places.