On Halloween 1997, two estranged teen skaters embark on a surreal journey through their memories, dreams and fears: Boys in the Trees opens on October 20.
When he was at school in Melbourne, film director Nicholas Verso was almost expelled for being a goth. “I blackened everything,” he says. “Lashes, eyebrows: it was a big commitment.” While he thought his friends looked pretty cool in the pipe at the skate park, he was much too unco-ordinated to join in.
“I was more an observer than a participant, more of a goth wearing dark clothes and trying not to move much in the summer.”
He laughs from behind what is now long, all-natural fair hair. We are at the Venice Film Festival; the sun roars like a furnace while we scurry with plastic chairs to find a spot under trees. At 36, Verso’s style has morphed into ragged ’70s hippiedom, but his skin is still porcelain pale. It seems a bit of a shame to waste such a perfect canvas.
Skating looms large and slow-mo in Boys in the Trees, his first feature. The film is set among a group of teenagers in their final year at high school in the ’90s, when Verso himself was at school in Kew, with torrents of music to match. Corey, played by Toby Wallace, is an aspiring photographer who dreams of living in New York, although probably anywhere that wasn’t an Australian suburb would do.
He can’t say too much about that to the other dudes in the gang. For Jango (Justin Holborow), his ostensible best mate and the pack leader, everything anyone could want – “weed to smoke, bitches to f—, fags to bash” – is right here. Those things
include the much brighter Corey; he needs him to want the life they have. Way across the gender divide, however, their classmate Romany (Mitzi Ruhlmann) gets it; her own hope is to escape to a dreamland Canada, with its extreme weather, pine-clad mountains and bears.
This clash of aspirations reaches crisis point on Halloween, when Corey finds himself alone in his wolf costume with Jonah (Gulliver McGrath). He is the runt of the class, the routine punching bag for Jango and his thicker mates and – as is soon revealed – he was Corey’s best friend when they were in primary school. Feeling guilty about having stood by while Jonah was abused, Corey agrees to walk him home through the dark of All Hallows’ Eve.
Revellers in full carnival dress emerge from the mist; their walk becomes increasingly surreal as they slip from the present into their shared past. A “memory tree” in the forest, illuminated apparently from within, is hung with hundreds of objects culled from childhood, now as magic and faraway as any land in the clouds.
Demons – called “darklings” – emerge from the ground. An Indigenous man appears in the gloaming, wearing a funereal black suit: some kind of harbinger of death, perhaps?
Everything in Boys in the Trees, says Verso, reflects his own life somehow. “They all came from things I felt; I sometimes looked at people together and thought they were like animals, like wolves. The darklings came from listening to what people say when they crush each other’s dreams, just quietly over a drink,” he says.
“I was very inspired by [sci-fi novelist] Ray Bradbury, who said [in Zen and the Art of Writing] you should write about things that enthuse you, so I really tried to write things I had experienced and felt strongly. I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I didn’t want to make a first film I wasn’t willing to die for, to be honest. So I had to pour my blood into it.”
You can see the blood. Along with the ghoulies and ghosties and hallucinatory spectacle, Boys in the Trees deals with the stuff of current headlines: bullying at school, teenage depression and modern confusions about what being a man should mean.
When Verso started writing it, he intended to set it in the present, but technology got in the way: no modern Corey could wander off on a party night without being pursued by a shower of texts. Even his determination to be a photographer seemed dated.
“That was a strange thing to be in the ’90s – it took some effort – whereas everyone thinks they are a photographer now because technology enables that. So I think there was a real innocence in that respect.”
What hasn’t changed – or, in Verso’s opinion, has worsened – is the entrenchment of a vengeful version of thwarted masculinity. It’s unlikely, he agrees, that even a gang led by someone as knuckled-headed as Jango would be so automatically homophobic now; teenagers have moved on. At the same time, he remembers “so many cool female role models”, from his childhood television favourite Roseanne to Sigourney Weaver in Alien to P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love in the music world. “And at a certain point, it felt like that just went away.”
Now we live in a cultural era dominated by the anxious sensibilities of “scared little men” that he thinks probably has its grounding in the world he explored in Boys in the Trees. “I mean, you look at violence against women now. That comes from male fears, from deeply uncivilised men who haven’t learned how to be themselves and who were teenagers at this time. So it’s interesting looking at them in the ’90s and going, ‘Well, this was their last moment of being kids. What were they like, what message weren’t they getting, to know how to be men?’ ”
Not enough attention, he says, is paid to rites of passage. Toby Wallace, who plays Corey, is 21 and grew up in Wheelers Hill; he recognises a lot of the real-life elements in the film. “I had to go through separating myself from group situations or the part of town I was from and say, ‘I am my own person, I can lead my own life’.”
He started acting when he was 13, but it was moving into the city after school that changed him. By the time he was Corey’s age there was, of course, a new kind of bullying afoot, the cyber form. “We are in an age that is more open to talking about those things – depression, anxiety, the stages of people’s lives, bullying – but then the other side of it is that we are in such instant communication with each other.”
Which makes the ’90s, which hardly seem very long ago at all, a different time, even a prelapsarian time. “Kids now are absorbing stuff constantly through their phones and the internet,” says Verso. “I think in the ’90s you had romantic notions that could be shattered.” Romany’s idea of Canada, for example, probably comes from a Joni Mitchell song; these days she could just google everything she wanted to know.
“And I can’t imagine now people talking as much as those two boys talk in the film without looking at their phones or Instagramming along the way. I think people were more in the moment. And you could live out your little teen mistakes without having a camera in your face.” Not much chance of that now; the packs may have loosened, but there’s a lone wolf around every corner.
Stephanie Bunbury – SMH – October 14 2016