Fair Game: Reissued Ozploitation Thriller a Queasy Look Back at Female Vengeance Genre
By Thom Ernst
Rating: C+
The simplest of films can become the most troublesome to review. Fair Game is a simple film.
The review is troubled.
If I were allowed to retrieve any film from obscurity, would I have picked a 1987 Ozploitation film? Would I have chosen Fair Game?
Not that Fair Game is a bad film. It isn't. Well, not entirely.
Fair Game is a decent enough revenge-thriller faithful to the specifics of its genre. It's just that—and here's where things get sticky—genre specifics require at least one character to be tormented for most of the movie. Inevitably that torment will include rape. Inevitably that character will be a woman.
To that point, Fair Game has earned the notoriety that kept it from securing a North American release until now. The film's power to shock has been diluted by decades of cinema pushing the limits of what audiences will take. Yet, Fair Game's depiction of sexual violence remains disturbing.
The movie stars Cassandra Delaney—a name I can't mention without adding that she had once been married to John Denver—as Jessica, a self-reliant woman alone at a wildlife sanctuary in Australia's outback with a faithful dog and a reliable horse for company. But unlike the idyllic country roads Delaney's ex-husband sang about, Jenny drives straight into an encounter with a trio of kangaroo poachers (Peter Ford, Don Barker, and Garry Who).
The encounter grows into a weekend of terror and retribution. The retribution is overkill but fun—the terror not so fun.
The film's about female empowerment, no? After all, Jessica is forced to face her oppressors; the neighbours are gone, and the law is useless. But empowerment—the kind of empowerment these movies tend to celebrate—requires being harassed, terrorized, intimidated, raped, and left for dead. These are the rules. There are no shortcuts. If you want to come out the other side of this a bad ass they should never have messed with, then you gotta' run the gauntlet.
Recently, Fair Game won the praise of Hollywood fanboy Quentin Tarantino who cites the film as the inspiration behind Death Proof. (I don't see the connection). And Fair Game is a noted benchmark in Ozploitation cinema—though that's an achievement not everyone agrees is worth noting.
A sidebar:
I'm not crazy about the term Ozploitation. Despite the convenience of a ready-made category, the word Ozplaitation strikes me as uncomfortably North American, as if a North American label has been surreptitiously slapped on non-North American products so as not to distract from Hollywood. Bad enough that Hollywood had to step aside and watch the French cop the term "New Wave" and the German's score with "Impressionism." Exploitation is ours!
The term is attributed to Australian filmmaker Mark Hartley's documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! In Hartley's documentary, American director Tarantino first coined Aussieploitation. Hartley later condenses it to Ozploitation—but I maintain that an American, Tarantino, said it first.
I don't know enough about the filmmakers—screenwriter Rob George and director Mario Andreacchio who both took a break from documentary shorts to Fair Game—to presume how they might address the film's sexual violence in today's culture. They may drop the phrase "a relentlessly honest depiction" to explain these movies' existence. It's a good spin, but without the benefit of being a woman, can they really determine what a relentlessly honest depiction looks like?
It is possible for films about women turning the table on their tormentors to be about female empowerment—Promising Young Woman jumps to mind. That was written and directed by a woman, so maybe its success has something to do with that.
This might sound needlessly critical of a genre film closing in on 35 years, a film that succeeds on its own criteria to rise above obscurity. It does what it's supposed to: it hits all the cinematic notes meant to stir up self-righteous indignation, building towards a moment of violent gratification.
But the end message is tough to overlook: For a woman to be empowered she must first journey through humiliation and torture to get there. If men were put to a similar test, then Bruce Wayne would be just another billionaire playboy and Clark Kent would be happy keeping a low profile in Smallville.
Fair Game. Directed by Mario Andreacchio. Starring Cassandra Delaney, Peter Ford, Don Barker, and Garry Who. Now available on V.O.D.