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Cherie Nowlan's second feature, Clubland, hasn't exactly followed hard on the heels of her first. It has been 10 years since the release of her debut feature, Thank God He Met Lizzie, starring Cate Blanchett. This is, Nowlan says with equanimity, the way things work.
Ten years is a long time, but she has been busy, she has been part of the industry, and she has built some strong creative partnerships. "There has been TV and there have been commercials, and the thing is, I love directing - it could be a toothpaste ad or a telemovie, it's all the same to me."
But, she admits, there was a point when she felt that Clubland - from a script that the writer, Keith Thompson, began 14 years ago - was not going to go into production. "I think I had given up, at one point," she says, "and the producer, Rosemary Blight, sensed this, and it made her even more determined to make it happen."
Clubland is a story of a family in transition. The matriarch is the formidable Jean (Brenda Blethyn), who quit a promising career in comedy in England to come to Australia with her country-singer husband (Frankie J. Holden). They split up and she stayed here and raised their two sons, one of them with special needs, on her own. She works in a canteen by day, and doggedly hustles the comedy circuit by night: her older boy, Tim (Khan Chittenden) drives her to gigs. But her children are growing away from her, and her professional life, finally, is at the crossroads.
The film, like its characters' lives, is full of balancing acts. Clubland is divided between mother and son: there's a coming-of-age narrative for Tim, and a coming-to-terms story for Jean, who has to realise that things are not what they were.
There are other divisions too: a struggle for power, over Tim, between his mother and his new girlfriend, Jill (Emma Booth), who don't actually meet, Nowlan points out, until 49 minutes into the film. "My model for that, actually, is The Graduate, where the girlfriend isn't revealed until almost an hour in." She was, she says, "forever, with the script and in the editing room, making sure that the balance between the separate stories was right."
Another balancing act was Jean and her comic impact. The audience needs to register that she is a smart and funny woman, but that her humour sometimes misses the mark. Nowlan and Blethyn worked on this with comedian Jo Brand, refining comedy routines: "Brenda kept exploring her monologues; she dreamt them actually."
Nowlan is reluctant to concede that the word "monster" might be used about Jean. "For me, she's a very real character. She's got her edges and her barbs, and that's what I love about her." And, she says, "let's face it, if she isn't difficult, then the journey is so much less interesting." But, at the same time, she adds, "I always say that characters don't have to be likeable, but actors do. And when you cast someone like Brenda Blethyn you're sending a message to your audience that you're probably going to like this woman, no matter what she does."
Nowlan can't say enough about Blethyn's commitment to the role. She is also full of praise for Emma Booth and her "abundant natural ability". "When I worked with Cate Blanchett, she had three years of drama school, four years of pretty much non-stop work in theatre and TV, but this kid was pretty much intuitive. If she isn't a star, I'll eat my hat, as my mother would say."
© The Age
