2023-12-03 22:44:46
The worst series of the week
Updated Sunday, December 3, 2023 – 21:44
Baz Luhrmann repeats the mistakes of ‘Australia’ in another series that doesn’t even serve to make a bad joke
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in a scene from ‘Faraway Downs’
What a great idea: Baz Luhrmann’s Australia turned into a miniseries. One of the most ridiculous films in history expanded and re-released in pieces. What a bad idea. And what a bad series.
Faraway Downsavailable on Disney +, is one of the most Martian television projects of recent times. So much so that I thought its existence was a joke. What need does anyone have to see Australia again? Didn’t those responsible have enough in 2009? 14 years later, Baz Luhrmann will have to read the same humiliating reviews from then… and some more.
On the other hand, Faraway Downs makes some sense. It is nothing more than the reassembly of a material already filmed and post-produced. What if it finds a new audience now? It’s a kamikaze proposal, but we’ve seen stranger things. Spoiler: it goes wrong.
At the time Australia was considered maximalist and histrionic idiocy. Two adjectives on which Baz Luhrmann has based a filmography with titles so powerful like Moulin Rouge or Elvis, but on that occasion they didn’t work. Australia’s Great Australian Pica Film Ambitionsthey stayed with that, with ambitions. Its protagonists, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, shortly after the premiere they stopped talking about her.
A couple of years after its highly touted release, Australia had been conveniently forgotten. And he should have stayed in the well of oblivion. Luhrmann’s film is not Heaven’s Gate or Blade Runner 2049. It is not a film of sufficient quality to be vindicated beyond its initial commercial failure. Already in 2009 Australia It was so bad that it wasn’t even worth joking about.. The exact same thing happens to Faraway Downs.
One of Australia’s most failed attempts, that of maintaining various narrative tones facing time, in Faraway Downs is revealed as one of the worst script, direction and editing decisions of all times. What in the film were small acts that were carried out in succession, in the series are independent episodes. So, the first episode of Faraway Downs is posh lady comedy (Nicole Kidman) misplaced between rude country men led by Hugh Jackman. Two episodes later comes the epic (with a supernatural touch) and then the drama with a social touch, in case there was any genre left to play. It’s as if they were episodes of different series and none of those series are good.
Furthermore, in 2023 it is difficult not to see Kidman and Jackman’s work in Australia (sorry: in Faraway Downs) as self-parody exercises: She has the most artificial face of her entire career (shortly later she would admit that she overdid it with Botox) and he looks like something out of a stripper calendar. In other circumstances, Baz Luhrmann could have gotten gold of so many contradictions and excesses on screen, but it seems that in 2008 the Australian director I wanted to make a serious film. I wonder if in 2023 Faraway Downs wants to be a serious series. For me it is just a grotesque and unnecessary circus.
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