2:37

"A couple of years ago a friend of mine committed suicide and none of us saw it coming," recalls Murali Thalluri, the 22 year old writer and director of the new Australian film '2:37'. "A couple of days later I received a video suicide note, and that's the most heartbreaking thing you could ever see; seeing someone screaming and shouting as they know they're going to do it after they press stop. I didn't understand it, I hated her. I thought it was weak, selfish, and so on, until a good six months later I was running into a lot of problems and I tried to take my own life. Thank God I survived. In the morning I threw everything up I'd taken, and wrote the film's first draft, of 76 drafts, in 36 hours."

Considering all this it isn't surprising that '2:37's content is somewhat psychologically heavy. It concerns all manner of social dysfunction, from sexual confusion and suppression to depression and suicide. The latter takes the vanguard though, and the inclusion of a graphic scene of the completion of such an act has been, unsurprisingly, a source of much classification controversy and the film's eventual R-rating. Murali staunchly defends his decision to leave nothing to the imagination though.

"To me it was about showing suicide for what it is - rather than in something like 'Rules Of Attraction' where you see the girl calmly sink into the bath as she cuts her wrists and slowly dies. I had to show it as brutal as possible, so if someone's watching '2:37' and thinking about suicide, they're not gonna do it, they're gonna be horrified. It works as a deterrent. It shows the regret, the pain, the suffering, and so on. I do think a lot of the time that less is more, and I employed that in the rape scene and certain other scenes as well, but in the suicide scene I couldn't. I have a responsibility to my viewers."

Indeed, as Murali points out, the Australian youth suicide organisation 'Here For Life' checked over "every draft of the script and signed off on the final draft".

The hapless subjects of all the abovementioned pain-inducing abnormalities are six or so students in their late teens attending high school and that Murali says are all "based on people I knew". One could hardly tell that they were attending any institution apart from a mental one though, as their daily activities seem to consist almost entirely of dwelling on their various psychosocial issues in sterile, ordered indoor environments (often mind-numbingly white) or on friendly benches in friendly parks. Of course all these things can be explained-away as locker halls, toilets, and schoolyards, but one is inclined to think otherwise with a pervasive and dense atmospheric anguish clearing the place of any personality.

In fact filming did take place in a school - Adelaide's own Saint Ignatius' College.

"The reason I shot there - I went to a whole bunch of schools - was because it had a real international feel to it," Murali explains. "I didn't want it to look really Aussie, with bitumen or gum trees in the background."

And the desired result is achieved in this case, the only clear indication of Australianness being most characters' accents.

But any universal appeal - or being able to relate - is more than cancelled out by the incredibility of the whole scenario. The six or so students included are shown as having virtually no interests outside of their immediate social grouping, and their interest in the latter is minute and always restricted to factors that affect themselves. All they have is their problems and, if lucky, a friend or two - the friend often being the source of the problems anyway.

And every feature of '2:37' does its best to evoke the unrealistically absolute darkness, isolation, and self-absorption of this situation. Every line of dialogue is concerned in some way with something problematic and of interest to the speaker, and is always ridden with a vehement annoyance at life for having dealt them such a wretched hand. The camera, though it moves through numerous modes, is virtually always character focused. And the quasi-transcendent music, though it too shifts in style, is consistently grave, casting extra shades of seriousness on a film that's general super-self-seriousness has already distanced it from viewer concern.

An obvious and debilitating problem that all this unbridled and far-fetched pessimism and hellishness produces is that the suicide that eventually occurs seems a logical and sympathetic reaction, rather than an unusual or unreasonable one. This confuses '2:37's ambitions as a clear deterrent, and makes for a seriously inconsistent, at best unenlightening film whose misery isn't worth enduring.

Wil McGinley

'2:37' screens from Thurs 17 Aug - to win tickets see the Prize Frenzy(tm)