Rated: MA 15+
Directed by: Mirrah Foulkes
Written by: Mirrah Foulkes
Produced by: Michele Bennett, Nash Edgerton, Danny Gabai
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Damon Herriman, Tom Budge, Benedict Hardie, Lucy Velik, Gillian Jones, Terry Norris, Brenda Palmer.
This strangely beautiful fairytale, horror story, social commentary is not an easy film to classify.
Behind the scenes, the director has breathed life into the puppets, allowing the drama of the Punch and Judy Show to play out beyond its predetermined conclusion.
Traditionally Punch batters a whole cast of characters. Often starting by mistreating his own baby, Punch’s other victims include Judy, a police constable, a skeleton, the devil and even a crocodile—with many of those hapless characters now populating the village of Seaside.
In the version of the show that has survived in England from the 17th century until the present day, Punch and Judy are glove puppets voiced by a single storyteller.
Dubbed the Professor, the puppeteer uses a device called a swazzle for the voice of Punch. Since the swazzle renders Punch almost unintelligible, he mutters away, his frustration and fury building, until he finally vents, paying out on anything in reach with his slapstick.
Even so, the film harks back to the earlier marionette theatre that made its way to England from Italy’s commedia dell’arte. The word slapstick in our modern language actually has its origins in the literal slap stick that Punchinello carried across from Europe, while the expression pleased as punch macabrely derives from Punch’s glee when he beats another character senseless and then proudly proclaims, ‘That’s the way to do it’.
As, Punch & Judy opens, it’s a moment where life imitates art imitating life. Professor Punch (Damon Herriman) and Judy (Mia Wasikowska) are taking a bow for their newly revived more punchy and more smashy show when the Professor apropos of nothing, casually flings Judy across the stage and into a wall.
In keeping with the English tradition where the crowd sides with Punch, shouting out warnings to him and revealing the hiding places of the other characters, the living puppets of Seaside have descended into a state of mob rule, with those who are weaker or different are scapegoated as witches.
In this world the voice of the accuser holds sway, while the rabble seizes upon the flimsiest of pretexts to displace their own depravity onto the those unable to defend themselves: ‘This one’s chickens all died on the one night, this one has a rash and that one was out staring at the moon for too long.’
As three women, ‘Fresh filthy examples of the evil sweeping our land,’ cower on the gallows for Stoning Day (a cunning inversion of Mother’s Day), I was struck by a frisson of recognition. The setting was one I’d roamed around in. I’d had picnics there. It wasn’t the English forest that I was seeing, but native Australian bushland.
It was a conundrum. Why set a quintessentially English story on the other side of the world? The film was so beautifully composed, so it didn’t seem accidental. Many of the scenes had been shot with specially-selected lenses from the 1960s and 70s, and some scenes had even been shot by candlelight as way to evoke the rich, dreamlike feel. When I thought about it, I wondered if, maybe, the film had been designed so we could see ourselves more clearly, while we believe that we were looking at them over there.