Requiem for a Candy

Went to see Candy, this year’s sex-and-drugs morality play on the nature of addiction, last night at the Ritzy. It’s basically an Australian take on Requiem for a Dream, and equally as traumatic and upsetting as that film, while also equally as great. There’s some lovely direction (and by that I mean over the top: silly camera angles, a long shot of the pretty patterns made by a trickle of honey…), a great soundtrack, and really powerful performances by both Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish (who I may have fallen in love with last night. Which is a shame because she’s an insane junkie who covers farmhouses in lipstick graffiti poetry, and thus potentially fairly high maintenance).

It’s weird though, watching an Australian film about drug addiction. It’s every bit as gritty as a Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, but no matter how harrowing, it’s still set in Australia, where you can leave the city and get out to beautiful open fields within minutes. And where your dealer says “G’day” in a chipper tone as he sells you your smack. And where even junkies have swimming pools…

Dammit, if it wasn’t for all the bloody locals I’d be there in a flash.

Still, meantime I’ll just watch the film in the Ritzy (which, as ever, delivered: a couple of beers before the film, half listening to a free screening of a Spanish documentary on the revolutionary possibilities offered by organic crops. Happy days…) and ponder the greatest line of the entire film: “They say for every ten years you’re a junkie, you spend seven of them waiting”.

I just can’t imagine Lou Reed sippin’ a VB waiting for his man.