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Crossing Tracks - Saturday Night, Sunday Morning: Crying wolf
Title:
Crossing Tracks - Saturday Night, Sunday Morning: Crying wolf
NFSA ID
601507
Year
1999
Warnings
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that the following program may contain images and/or audio of deceased persons
The three – Melanie (Alyssa McClelland), Elvis (Luke Carroll) and Perry (Jie Pittman) – are holed up in an old house. Perry and Elvis are playing cards and banter between themselves. Melanie is bound and gagged. Unable to stand it any longer, Perry undoes the ropes and removes the gag from Melanie’s mouth. The boys brag about being master criminals, and are insulted when Melanie tells them she thinks otherwise.
Summary by Romaine Moreton.
The underlying dynamic between all characters is one of youth, and the dream of another place, chronic themes of the young in isolated areas. The relationship between Perry and Elvis is one of culture, language and blood, but Melanie offers Perry something else – the chance to entertain the fantasy of ‘what if’. The violence of the situation that has thrown them all together eventually ends with a volatile break up; and perhaps here is the subtext of the film – the social relationship between an Indigenous male and a non-Indigenous female is contextualised first by violence, even though both are dreamers set adrift and alienated by society.
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning synopsis
A short film based on a story by Archie Weller, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning is the story of a robbery gone wrong, an unplanned kidnapping and its consequences. A young white girl is kidnapped by three youths – two black, one white.
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning Curator's Notes
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning almost qualifies as a case of Stockholm Syndrome, with the relationship between the kidnap victim and the kidnapper Perry (Jie Pittman) depicted as a romantic one. Melanie (Alyssa McClelland), the daughter of a single parent, seems adrift, when she is suddenly caught up in the drama of a kidnapping. The character Perry prevents Willy (Sam O’Dell) from raping her, and for this she is thankful. The empathy shared by Perry and Melanie is framed as a possible romance that disrupts the relationship between the two cousins, Perry and Elvis (Luke Carroll). The film offers few answers or a resolution as to what the experience means to Melanie, and in the end what is presented is perhaps a possibility of characters trapped in an experience from which all are seeking some form of liberation.
Other films in the AFC Indigenous Branch drama initiative Crossing Tracks (1999) are Harry’s War and Wind.
Notes by Romaine Moreton
Production company
Core Original
Producer
Pauline Clague
Director
Rima Tamou
Writers
Archie Weller, Rima Tamou
Acknowledgements
Produced with the assistance of the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.