Swinging Safari is a comedy about a teenager comes of age in a small Australian town when something strange washes ashore.
It’s probably not possible to look back in nostalgia and not have it be a little discolored by personal experience and a tendency to overstuff bits about both the good and bad. The movies in particular have gone out of their way in turning back the dial in remembering past decades with unrestrained imaginations and with writer and director Stephan Elliott‘s latest oddity Swinging Safari – a dizzying return to the 1970s in Australia where all sense of sanity seems to have been abandoned – we’re at it again in this often funny, raucous tale of families on the edge.
On the shores of a small Australian beach town, smack in the middle of the 70s, young teenager Jeff Marsh (Atticus Robb) has big dreams of being a filmmaker, spending most of his time pointing his handheld camera at his friends and family, documenting the madness. He’s part of a gaggle of three close families of eccentrics, including struggling encyclopedia salesman Keith Hall (Guy Pearce) and his near agoraphobic wife Kaye (Kylie Minogue), wealthy pharmaceutical guru Rick Jones (Julian McMahon) and wife Jo (Radha Mitchell), and lastly Gale (Asher Keddie) and Bob (Jeremy Sims), held together with paper thin hooks. Jeff is drawn to Melly (Darcey Wilson), daughter of Rick and Jo, a shy and withdrawn girl soon taken by the sudden arrival of a blue whale that has beached itself and died.
Loosely based on Elliott’s own childhood, a director many might remember who burst on the scene with 1994’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Swinging Safari is another colorful and bizarre entry into the weird, following the exploits of these families living in a time of excess and few limitations, indulging in outlandish fashion, synthetic materials, Evel Knievel, fondue pots, sexual swingers, and speedo swimsuits. It’s a wildly fast paced spread of mayhem as the ‘story’ – as much as it is – sort of just tracks a single summer in town, trying to keep up with the chaos.
And chaos is the right word, Elliott making it a point to reveal just how out of control the times were where the many children of the three couples run rampant with Jeff’s desires to make a movie prompting much of the carnage where his fascination with Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws has him exploring over-the-top stunts for his ‘Death Cheater Production’ home reels, often putting the other kids in some serious danger. Meanwhile, the parents, who falsely hold onto some kind of familiar kinship, slowly erode under the pressures of the current cultural pop sensations. Then there’s the bloated decaying whale carcass keeping everyone off the once popular beach, a giant metaphor for the times.
Swinging Safari is a madcap adventure into a world maybe best left in the past and certainly, Elliott takes a lot of creative license in over-doing the whole bit but in so doing manages to really capture a look and feel that keeps it fun to watch. It’s never meant to be authentic, more like an overwatered parable designed to get those who lived through it to smile knowingly and help those that didn’t to shake their heads in disbelief. For that, it succeeds. It might not have the over emotional smack in the nostalgia glands intended, but absolutely entertains.