At large, the Australian cinema we are used to being exposed to is one of three things: brutal, funny or beautiful, often coupled with a touch of white colonial guilt. Kim Mordaunt’s latest directorial achievement The Rocket, 2014’s Australian Oscar offering, contains a little of each.
Ahlo (Sitthiphon Disamoe), a bright young boy believed to be cursed, and his family live in rural village in Laos. When a corporation plans to build a dam that would flood the village, they are relocated and their whole world is thrown into chaos. While finding a new home and making new friends in a country burdened by war, heritage and industrialisation, Ahlo finds the opportunity to prove himself at the annual rocket festival.
Disamoe gives a stellar performance, delivering a truly heart-warming portrayal of Ahlo’s struggles. The other stand out was Sumrit Warin as Ahlo’s stiff-upper-lipped father, although every performance within is worthy of note.
Something that will catch some by surprise was how straight forward the storytelling is, yet maintaining an art-house thoughtfulness. The Rocket is full of sumptuous imagery, a powerful score and a sense of harsh reality. Yet, you may expect to come along with this a complicated and experimental cinematic language. What The Rocket shows is that these two are not always mutually exclusive, and strikes the perfect balance between a mainstream approach to film making and an independent approach to ideas.
This balance comes across in all aspects of the films language, swinging from the score to James Brown’s Get On The Good Foot, from the luminous colours of their lives and the greyness of concrete globalisation and, most of all, in Ahlo’s story. Ahlo’s travel through Laos shows him all of these aspects of the countries history and tradition as well as the lifelessness and quasi-facisim of global capitalism.
Through all this, however, this is never at the forefront. The drive is always on Alho and his friends and family; their sorrows, joys and in betweens. An unexploded bomb isn’t just a monolith of destruction and a scar on Laos’ history, but a tool by which Ahlo can grow as a human being and come to realisations about himself. Despite this becoming a problem in some of the films more saccharine moments, it will certainly make The Rocket more appealing to a wider audience. For a film dealing with such relevant issues, this is no bad thing.
The largest bone to picked with the film is in it’s approach to the issues of globalisation, taking a more black and white stance. This is a popular opinion, especially with those on the political left, and is undeniably an issue, but it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to a problem perceived as happening too fast to stop and think about. Difficult questions need asked like “are all traditions worth preservation?”. This film does portray some traditions as dark or anachronistic, but you will be left in no doubt of the evils of globalisation, which may not be the best thing.
At it’s heart, The Rocket is a film about displacement and loss: a lost home, a group of lost souls, and a countries lost identity.
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