Greetings, faithful readers! We’re very excited to announce a pre-release look at the exciting new Australian film, Cedar Boys, due for release on July 30.

The trailer presents us with a vision of a classic crime film, complete with an 8 Mile-esque soundtrack and premise, but when we dig deeper we see it offers us much more than another tale about youth embroiled in crime. Tarek, played by Les Chantery, is a young Lebanese-Australian man who is stuck in a rut and a dead-end job as a panel beater. When presented with an opportunity to steal a vast quantity of pills from a drug-dealer’s apartment, he seizes it as an obvious chance to make a vast quantity of money and set himself up for life. Despite the trailer’s marketing itself to a younger generation with needlessly flashy editing and an overtly gritty sensibility, the film itself presents an interesting synthesis of the gangster film and that most steadfast of Australian cinematic traditions, the Australian ethnic drama.

Running against the grain of the gangster genre is the film’s ability to humanise these disreputable and oft-outright criminal characters and effectively communicate the very human costs that their lives have to both themselves and their families. Like the so-called ‘heroes’ of the gangster genre, Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, Henry Hill and Frank Lucas. the characters of Cedar Boys endure the same heady highs and harrowing lows of a life of crime and of a classically-informed tragedy, but do so in the vastly understated, fundamentally parochial manner that marks many of the best Australian character-based dramas.While many gangster films focus on characters with immigrant or ethnic characters, Cedar Boys also draws on a long Australian tradition of films dealing with immigration, ethnicity, racial tension, the fight to attain or resist assimilation and the loneliness and alienation of being a stranger in a strange land. From the misguidedly prejudiced They’re a Weird Mob to The Combination, Romulus, My Father, Romper Stomper and the astounding mini-series Marking Time, Australian filmmakers have been exploring and expounding upon the pathos of migrant life for decades.

A still from Serhat Caradee's Cedar Boys

The combination of these two genres gifts a third dimension to the film. The careful and patient attention paid to showing us the lives of the characters before before the fall makes the consequences of that fall devastating, to both the characters and audience. This gives the film a definite noir sensibility. This is nothing new in Australian film, the many shining moments of which include Two Hands, The Bank and The Square. This film is, essentially, more than the sum of its parts and they’re all good parts. - Morgan

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What strikes me perhaps most forcefully about Cedar Boys is the manner in which its atmosphere, sensibility and aesthetic are all procured through, and sustained by, an arguable lack. Digital video lacks the sumptuous analog texture and vibrancy of the 35mm film stock that informed crime epics like The Godfather (though shooting digitally gifts Cedar Boys with a greater sense of urgency, immediacy and spontaneity than that film), while the contemporaneous era in which the film is set lacks the overwrought sense of self that characterised the ’70s and ’80s and films (and media, more generally, regardless of its medium of production) of and about those eras, and even Australian currency lacks the sheer value and worth of, say, the British pound or the American dollar, imparting a certain provincial triviality to the proceedings in the context of global crime narratives.

Chief amongst these is that last: there is a charming and beguiling lack of pretension about Cedar Boys. There is no real effort made to aggrandise the grubby, low-down business of drug dealing or those who are drawn to it, and the privileges and advantages that Tarek and his friends risk their lives and their futures for are transient at best and heartbreakingly ephemeral at worst.   Sam, for instance, buys rims with his newly acquired wealth, in what might very well be seen as a vicious parody of the classic montage-sequence-as-indicator-of-success, while all Tarek wants, desperately, is to raise the funds necessary to fast-track his older brother’s legal appeal. The overarching message of Cedar Boys, to its audience as well as to those disaffected youths it hopes to portray (and these two groups may very well be separate), is that this, all of this, is fundamentally and inarguably not worth it, in the most literal as well as abstract fashions, and it manages to say so without preaching.

Aesthetically, this dearth of glamour is reflected always and primarily in the workmanlike cinematography, ‘workmanlike’ being a descriptor I choose carefully and without deprecatory intent: by this I mean the art direction to be rarely showy, always prizing functionality and the comprehension of the audience over the artistic qualities of compositions such as you might find in, say, the work of Scorcese (most, if not all, of Scorcese’s efforts in manipulating the frame alone could be framed in their own right, his penchant for characterising his cities of choice through their architecture is a trend that goes back at least as far as Mean Streets), and in this way Caradee retains the essential kernel of truth at the heart of his film: by not giving in to the desire to make things more than they are, a commendable instinct and one that the odious One Perfect Day (which deals with similar subject matter, if tangentially and with hands of ham) could have benefited greatly from. Les Chantery’s performance as the disabused Tarek is remarkable in its spareness, in its very minimalism; he conveys only just as much as is needed in the early stages in the film so that when he is finally called upon to express something, anything, in the vein of Travis Bickle, he seems to suddenly explode (though unlike Travis, it is grief rather than rage that fuels the fire and that mushrooms up from the ruins of his life). So it is that Chantery sublimates himself in service to the film, to the point that the untrained eye might suspect him of genuine reticence or some form of thespian incompetence when the reality is far-removed from such assertions.

That said, the film is rarely drab, in either performance or the visual aspect, but one occasionally wishes Caradee would loosen the reins ever-so-slightly: there are a handful of moments that display his natural cinematic flair (a late-night party at a suburban mansion, for instance, is luscious with wealth and dimly-lit sleaze), and on the quality of that handful alone, a few more would have been unlikely to endanger the serious (often dour) nature of the tale under discussion: indeed,  noir was always, historically, attracted to and informed by the stark lines and monochromatic obsessions of German expressionism and later architectural modernism, and in its unrepentant identification with the noir ideal, Cedar Boys could afford to freewheel further than it does.

If Cedar Boys can truly be said to fall down in any way, it is only in the straightforwardness of its gist, in its lack of twists and turns, in the telegraphing of its punches. As an exercise in mimicry of what, it might be argued, is a steadfastly American criminal-tragedy tradition, a staggering, stumbling post-modern behemoth like the permanently off-kilter Two Hands does a much better job of making the form its own, however grotesquely bloated it eventually becomes through its own narcissism.

I don’t think, however, that Cedar Boys should be marked on its ability to bend its genre of choice or its ability to make fresh again perhaps that most overdone of cinematic formulas. Instead, it should be marked on its honesty, its refreshing lack of irony, and its steadfast desire to depict a ethno-subcultural tradition: it’s more social document than narrative innovator. Cedar Boys is to be commended for, perhaps like (of all things) The Wrestler, being of the world it depicts instead of about the world it depicts, for better or worse (David Field’s The Combination functions in a similarly narratively transcendent manner). Its portraits are perhaps not deep, but they are vivid, and that counts for a lot. - Martin

Cedar Boys opens in a limited release in Australia and screening locations can be found at the official website. While the release is certainly limited, it’s not that limited, with the film receiving screenings at most Hoyts and Palace Cinemas.

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