A Song to Wake the Lovesick

Australian director Shirley Barrett’s debut film, “Love Serenade,” is many things--a black comedy, a coming-of-age story, a surrealistic fable.

More than anything, however, it’s a cautionary tale about the power of projection that often goes hand in hand with romantic love. The capacity to perceive qualities in one’s love object that aren’t actually there has wrecked many lives, and Barrett exploits this scenario to great comic effect.

“Seeing things in others that have no basis in reality is a very funny human foible, and women are especially good at it,” says the 34-year-old director in an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel. “Women are socialized to tolerate bad behavior in men. Moreover, this culture puts such an emphasis on romantic love that women feel they must have it at any cost.”

Starring Miranda Otto, Rebecca Frith and George Shevtsov, “Love Serenade,” which opens Friday, chronicles the romantic misadventures of two teenage sisters, Dimity and Vicki-Ann Hurley, when oily big-city DJ Ken Sherry blows into their sleepy little town announcing that he “specializes in virgins.”

“What I wanted to get at was the capacity women have to romanticize situations that are really quite grim,” Barrett says. “We lose our heads over terrible men, we’re treated badly and we aren’t even aware of what’s going on. I’ve been with my husband since I was 19, so this experience is part of my past, but when I read my old diaries, it’s painfully clear to me that I was naive and rather pathetic and so were my friends. It just never occurred to us that men were far more pragmatic than we were.”

The character of Dimity is the one that Barrett identifies with. “Dimity’s capacity for self-delusion is the main theme of the story. . . . She’s a fish out of water who always feels at odds with things, and I felt that way when I was young. I fortunately outgrew it, although I still see myself that way on bad days--and I certainly feel that way in L.A.

“This is obviously a bad town for women,” she adds. “Coming here from Australia, it’s shocking to see the amount of plastic surgery that goes on--there’s not an original nose to be seen! You get the sense the men here just hate women and that the women struggle endlessly to transform themselves trying to please the men.”

A central element in Barrett’s film is the music of disco seducer Barry White; his sultry love tunes--so over-the-top they verge on the sinister--growl and purr throughout the film, and they underscore Barrett’s satirical tone perfectly.

“I wanted the soundtrack to help tell the story,” Barrett says. “As I was writing the script, I listened to lots of smoldering, highly orchestrated music from the ‘70s, and Barry White is, of course, the master of the style. I love that kind of music, probably because I heard it on the radio as a teenager.

“Pop music can have a profound impact when you hear it at an impressionable age, and the songs of that period are idealized evocations of an intensely sexy kind of love. I wanted this sleazy DJ to come to this emotionally starved town and bring these songs that overwhelm people with feelings of longing.

“Ken Sherry [the DJ] is completely under their spell too--in fact, all three lead characters live in a dream world. And why wouldn’t they? The reality of their lives is quite lonely. They’re all also rather predatory in that each has an agenda driving them.”

The agenda driving Vicki-Ann is the fantasy of marriage. Of that, Barrett says, “in small Australian country towns where there’s not much to do, weddings are a very big deal. There’s an old-fashioned attitude toward them, and many small-town girls actually still have glory boxes [hope chests].” Yes, Vicki-Ann has one in the film.

Of Ken Sherry, the jaded Lothario played by George Shevtsov who sets her story in motion, Barrett says, “Ken is withdrawn and withholding, and the less he does the more Ken-like he becomes; in other words, the blanker the screen, the better the fantasy projection.”

*

The youngest of four children, Barrett was born in Melbourne where she lived until 1984, when she moved to Sydney to attend Australia’s Film, Television and Radio School.

“I came to filmmaking slowly,” recalls Barrett, who now lives in Sydney with her husband, Chris, who’s a computer animator, and their two baby daughters. “The film that had the biggest impact on me when I was young and is probably my all-time favorite is ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ I love the way it just lets the story unfold--it’s almost like a documentary in that it really takes its time telling the story. Unfortunately, filmmakers are rarely given the opportunity to let a story unfold in its own time, because audiences have become more impatient and they get nervous if a movie moves slowly.”

It was long after seeing “Dog Day Afternoon,” however, that she finally decided on filmmaking as a career.

“I went to university for a while, then dropped out when I was 22, and at that point I was really floundering. My sister was editing the in-house magazine at Australia’s national film school and suggested I try film, so I decided to have a go. The national film school is small and quite competitive because it doesn’t take many students, so it took me three years to get in.”

In 1988, the year she graduated, Barrett completed a critically acclaimed short, “Cherith,” that led to directing work in television, which she found “endlessly frustrating. I hope not to do television again because it’s a demoralizing experience for a director.”

Beginning in 1992, while she was working in television, Barrett started writing the script for “Love Serenade.” The project picked up steam in 1994, when producer Jan Chapman (the producer of Jane Campion’s last three films) came on board, and the following year Barrett shot “Love Serenade” on location in the tiny town of Robinvale.

“My husband grew up in Robinvale, which has a population of 1,700, including residents of outlying farms,” Barrett says. “I know lots of people there because our family summers in Robinvale, and I was nervous about how they’d react to the film. They loved having the film crew there though, and seemed to really enjoy the film.”

The judges at last year’s Cannes Film Festival also enjoyed it--enough, in fact, to award it the Camera d’Or. “People weren’t beating my door down after I won the prize at Cannes,” she says, laughing. “Like most directors, I’d like to make a film in America--the allure being that you get to make films that cost more money--but I have reservations.

“Films made in Australia are usually funded by the government through a grant system,” says Barrett, who’s at work on the script for her second feature, which she plans to shoot in Australia and hopes to complete in two years.

“ ‘Love Serenade’ was budgeted at $2.5 million and the money came almost entirely from the government, which puts no creative restrictions on filmmakers. The government realizes Australia is getting a reputation for producing idiosyncratic films and they’re eager to encourage that, so there’s little interference.

“Once you’ve worked with that kind of freedom it’s hard to make films without it,” she says, “so the thought of working here is a little scary.”