The Curiosity of Inanimate Objects

For the past few months I've been working at an op shop. Spending my day sorting through donations, helping customers, and playing dress-ups when I have a minute of free time has been a dream come true. Surrounded by piles of discarded kitsch and unidentified doohickeys, I spend a lot of time thinking about people's relationships to their belongings. So when a DVD of an Australian film titled Inanimate Objects (2009) landed in the donation pile, I knew it was meant to come home with me*.

(*After it had been on the shelf for two days! Despite popular belief, op-shop workers aren't able to just pick and choose whatever they want for themselves, even if it's a $2 DVD.)

An opening montage and narration introduces us to Bill (Daniel Fletcher), a young man stifled in his life on his family's rural Victorian egg farm. He longs for a career and a girlfriend, but is thwarted daily by an apparently generational curse. "Your dad was killed by a chair," Bill's grandpa (Monty Maizels) reminds him, "mahogany with hand-carved arm rests." When Bill announces he's going into town for work, his mum (a welcome, if barely utilised Anne Phelan) is less sentimental: "Don't come back dead like your father or I'll kill you."

While I tried to keep my expectations low, a local comedy seemingly about a dude constantly coming to grief with furniture and objets d'art alike could not be more my thing. The premise suggested low-budget but inventive slapstick, in my view an under-appreciated comedic form. Maybe someone else out there had had similar ideas?

Arriving in the fictional town of Pooguna, Bill is instantly taken with newcomer Skye (Josephine Croft), a treechanger with a new age store advertising tantric sex classes. Here the film's bait-and-switch story reveals itself: despite its title, Inanimate Objects is actually an almost-sex comedy. Bill has a fixation on short women (who he exclusively calls "small girls", causing everyone around him, including his school-age sister, to hilariously think he's a pedophile). His artless, uninspired accidents with all manner of objects happen because he's a careless idiot rather than through any kind of cosmic or filmic choreography. He goes to the pub and somehow doesn't know it's gay night (on a Friday in a town of 400, no less!). While Fletcher's performance is suitably daggy, Bill's cartoonish obliviousness to everything around him is too repetitive to be endearing.

Shot on location in Bunyip, Pooguna looks warm and cosy, even when covered in cobwebs and dirt. (It certainly feels more real than Rebel Wilson's much more recent outback town comedy, The Deb.) Exterior angles are carefully considered and a lot of information is conveyed in a relatively economic way, from Skye's peculiar shop to the local pub and the rest of the town's main strip. The ramped-up, oversaturated colours and at times soap-opera soft cinematography gives Inanimate Objects a sweet and unassuming look perfect for its romcom ambitions. Small touches suggest a similarly thoughtful approach to costuming: hosting gay night, pub owner Jimmy (Jim Daly) wears a vintage "We're not all straight in the Garden State" badge.

But a comedy is only as good as its jokes, and Inanimate Objects suffers from an uneven and at times painfully unfunny script. Bill's insistence on wanting "small girls" isn't funny the first time and only gets worse, describing Skye as, "cute... small... compact... she's a girlette." Some moments aren't clear if they're jokes at all—nothing is made of a woman lighting a cigarette inside the pub while sitting directly below a no smoking sign. The hacky finale involving Bill's gig as a nude life model (you can probably guess what happens) takes too long for a joke so obvious, and doesn't meaningfully pay off in a narrative way either.

At 54 minutes including credits, the low-stakes romcom is less cinematic experience, more TV pilot: something along the lines of a raunchier Always Greener or SeaChange. Yet it fails when measured against that standard too, with no sense of what a full season of television would look like. Bill and Skye are into each other from the get-go, kept apart by contrived sliding doors moments and mishaps rather than any deeper character tension or plot. The undercurrent of Pooguna as a much queerer place than Bill realises is a more interesting angle, but Bill as a protagonist is too clueless and homophobic to make it work, annoying even in such a short runtime.

Yet even when the cinematic journey is an unsatisfying one, a $2 bet on a film I haven't seen will always be worth it. If the DVD hadn't been donated to my own workplace, chances are I would never have come across Inanimate Objects at all. These obscure independent sidebars of Australian cinema are too often forgotten completely, even in the low-budget world where quirky romcoms can still thrive. I just hope my next mystery DVD is less short-sighted.