The Flip Side – Review

Film Review: The Flip Side; comedy, drama, film review, Eddie Izzard

Film Review: The Flip Side; comedy, drama, film review, Eddie IzzardDirector: Marion Pilowsky

Duration: 90 wine-sculling minutes

Watching Marion Pilowsky’s The Flip Side was a lot like drinking an unfamiliar red wine. At first I’m tepid and resistant, but sometime between the first and second bottle, I’ve somewhat surrendered myself. Written by Pilowsky and Lee Sellars (an appropriate name), The Flip Side takes two couples, almost four individuals, and puts them into rooms and spaces together, as we suspect they might all secretly want to have sex with each other, and then shoves them into the Australian outback set for a collision with each other’s egos, and their own. It provides a few laughs, a good vehicle for performance, culminating with a feeling that something has happened and something has been learnt. Sometimes you leave the cinema with a feeling that you are stupider than when you walked in. At the end of The Flip Side, my thought was, “I could have told them that, but I’m glad they got there.” Yes, I am a narcissist.

The film opens with Henry (Eddie Izzard), who seems to be an actor, making out with Veronica/Ronnie/Ronald (Emily Taheny), who seems to be a cook. We know this because Henry is complaining about his hi-vis attire not being dirty enough to be believable, and because we see Ronnie preparing food. The camera loves to meditate on food in this film. Food, Nissan cars, beers, wine, and food. There are times it feels like an advertisement. That’s the reality of film in Australia, I suppose. There’s an oddly basic screen credits sequence over Adelaide to a Kylie Minogue song, which felt like it had nothing to do with the film itself, and then we discover that Ronnie is now dating Jeff (Luke McKenzie) and Henry is now dating Sophie (Vanessa Guide), and that Henry and Sophie are now coming to visit because Henry is back in Australia after going back to the UK. And Henry and Ronnie hooked up once. Awkward.

For a little while, this felt like it was going to be a weird movie about four adults who just can’t talk about their sex lives. Taheny gossips with a co-worker at her bakery (Susie Youssef) about how awkward it is that Henry and his new girlfriend are going to be hanging out with her and Jeff. Eventually, way too far into the film, we discover heartbreak was involved. It seems like a simple conversation to have with your partner and the guy that’s trying to just walk back into your life in the age of social media. But we get way too many scenes of people drinking Coopers (I wonder if Izzard is familiar with Coopers selling promotion to anti-gay groups), and Henry trying to assert his dominance over Jeff, and Sophie pulling goo-goo faces at Jeff, leading us to believe that some sort of “flip” will be coming. The performances are all good (I keep using that word to describe them, but I don’t want to reach into hyperbole).   

There is a scene where things turn around, however. All four characters are on the beach. Sophie is prancing around in her bikini with the naïve Jeff, and Henry and Ronnie walk off further and finally have a talk. It’s a novel concept. It turns out that Henry didn’t mean to break Ronnie’s heart, and that he was not allowed to talk to anyone while doing a top secret filming project (OK) and Ronnie never returned his calls. She thought his secretary was lying when she was saying he was not there and couldn’t talk, you see. Henry has always loved Ronnie, and Ronnie has always loved Henry. Oops. How to deal with this? Taking a ride into the outback together, keeping all their cards close to their chest—as Jeff naively thinks Henry actually wants to make his movie about a spider that falls in love with a human (oh, Jeff’s a novelist, by the way)—seems like the best bet to at least four of them. But at least now we are playing with real emotional stakes, and not simply “my ex is in town.”

Izzard is good as Henry. He’s perfectly charming in the role of an older actor who uses his experience and charm to supplant youthful good looks and rigor. It’s the script that lets him down here. Henry is also given vigor, overpowering the character somewhat. Of course Ronnie has to lie in bed and hear Sophie have incredible orgasms all night, while the young Jeff lies passed out next to her. Or was Sophie just faking to bother Ronnie? She does make a lot of blatant jabs in her direction that lack any of the subtlety of sincere social sabotage (although they seemed to impress the audience I was with). Regardless, Henry’s lines designed to charm feel like lines written by someone that doesn’t have that skill-set writing lines designed to charm. Izzard probably could have done a better job on his own. The script also reduces Henry to more of a big child when he is trying to use his advantages over Jeff. I’d suggest that this could have been the point of the film, but I think that is just my head canon.

Taheny is good as Ronnie. I didn’t really feel for her struggles until far too long into the film, however. Her mother is sick and mean to her. I guess we’re supposed to think it’s sweet that Ronnie sticks around for her. We discover she is in debt. I guess we’re supposed to feel especially sorry for her particular economic pressures. The script never really gets us there though. She can’t keep her mum in the really expensive retirement home because she is poor, so she’ll have to go to the retirement home with the retired plebeians. Can you think of a worse fate? I mean, other than being one of those plebeians. It’s very possible to see Ronnie as a fiscally irresponsible masochistic snob. I’d suggest that this is the point, but I think that is just my head canon.

Guide is good as Sophie. She lacks the subtlety of knowing how to fake orgasm, but she’s not the actress, is she? Sophie tries to get what she wants. If she wants sex, she’ll try and get the sex. She and Henry seem to have a relationship where they are very aware of their bed traits, but she never teases him about business. Honestly, Sophie had a lot more nuance than Ronnie, but I don’t think we’re supposed to like Sophie, because a lot of the film seems to be punching at her snobbery, how she is a “boys’ girl” and that one of her boyfriends was once murdered and put into a barrel (no one tells her about Snowtown). Yet Ronnie also seems to be a “boys’ girl” and seems unnecessarily threatened by Sophie, who already has her relationship with Henry and has agreed to accompany him back to see her. I’d suggest that is the point, but I think that is just my head canon.     

McKenzie does perhaps the best job of the entire cast in his main role with Jeff. At first I think I was supposed to think Jeff is a bit of an idiot. He smiles too much, says vague things and lies around a lot. He’s a novelist, remember. He also teaches part-time. There are some jokes about how low being a teacher is. The aim of this film seems to be off a lot of the time, to be honest. But as I got to know more about Jeff, I realised that his kindness is not weakness. He’s capable of doing basic math and adding two and two—when he’s not smiling to be handsome and being charmed by everyone around him without realising they are all trying to charm him. I’d suggest that I was supposed to go from being positioned against Jeff because of his basic demeanor, to supporting him when I realised there was more there, but I think that is just my head canon.  

There were some big laughs in my cinema. After hitting a kangaroo on their outback excursion, a mechanic remarks, “Must have been a big fucking ‘roo. The fucking thing is fucking fucked.” The mechanic is played by Tiriel Mora, who deserves a mention for being the brightest spark in this movie. The film seems to know it has a good line because it gets Jeff to repeat “The fucking thing is fucking fucked” as a button straight after. The cast milk some laughs out of simple lines with their good performances.

I must admit that I was surprised by the ending. I won’t go into it much, other than to say it wants to tug at a string of awareness. A lot of the complaints I have alluded to over the course of this review are nodded at, and the egos of all of these characters gets a check at some point. Everyone scrapes their knees and we get to see how they respond, but it feels more like an escape-hatch than a probe, and it doesn’t have much to say about the flaws it puts in these people in the first place, or why we should, frankly, give a damn.

The Flip Side isn’t really all about wine. A lot of the promotional material makes it out to be that way though. The wine connotation and the “side” in the title got me thinking a lot about Sideways (2004), a film in which another writer and another actor go on a journey through wine country and learn some unpleasant truths about each other and themselves. In Sideways, the characters really have to face the damage from themselves. In that film, Paul Giamatti’s Miles steals from his mother, instead of having his mother steal from him; he’s an unsuccessful writer instead of an aspiring one; and Thomas Hayden Church’s Jack is a failed actor instead of one that has women fawning over his conversation skills. But they were characters that had lost something instead of never having it in the first place. The Flip Side would have been better going sideways.

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