FILM: Candy

Sinking to the depths of pleasure

Pushing the limits … Candy (Abbie Cornish) and Dan (Heath Ledger) seek to stop time with the help of heroin.

By Andrew McCathie
February 15, 2006

Berlin Film Festival

THE horrors and destructive force of heroin are clear enough even to many of those addicted to the drug.

But in his first major feature film, the Australian director Neil Armfield seeks to explain the apparent pleasure and sense of escape that the drug can provide. He charts the relationship of Candy, a young painter, and Dan, an occasional poet, and the depths they find themselves sinking to as a result of their addiction.

Based on the best-selling novel by Luke Davies, Candy, starring the Oscar-nominated Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, from the Australian movie Somersault, premieres today at the Berlin International Film Festival, one of the world's top three movie showcases. Speaking in Berlin, Armfield insists Candy is not necessarily a film about heroin, but a story about the yearning to escape the present.

"At the heart [of the film] is a fascination with the human desire to push any pleasurable experience absolutely to a kind of impossible point of continuation," he says.

Candy - the first Australian film to be entered in the Berlin festival's main competition for three years - is a story about the desire to make time stop, and how heroin can help to achieve this.

"It is a way of getting rid of the future and getting rid of the past," says Armfield. "It seems to be an addiction that the Western world is also going through now, which is an addiction to pleasure and to funding our desires well beyond what any of us, or the planet, can afford."

The film seeks to use the kind of silence that surrounds heroin addiction as a way of examining the dynamics of a middle-class Australian family, he says. The movie brings to the fore the reaction of Candy's parents to their daughter's plight.

Set largely in Sydney's inner west and also starring the Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush, Candy shows how the main characters' addiction appears to drive the family closer together, until Candy decides to check into a clinic.

Armfield has a formidable international reputation as a theatre and opera director. Even so, it is rare that a director could claim two major openings in less than a week. Armfield jetted into Berlin on Sunday for the screening of Candy after overseeing the opening on Saturday night of his Welsh National Opera production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, in Cardiff.

The calibre of Candy's cast is also a major force behind the film. Basking in the success of Brokeback Mountain - for which he has the Oscar nomination - 26-year-old Ledger is one of the world's hottest male stars.

"His performance really holds the film together," says Armfield. Ledger read the script about three years ago and said that he was in.

Candy is one of 19 films competing at the festival, also known as the Berlinale, for the coveted Golden and Silver Bears. A large number of the entries explore the harder edge of modern life.

After a slow start to the 10-day festival, Candy will be screened as the battle for the Berlinale's top honours is starting to hot up.

It is a measure of the woes that have descended on the Australian film industry that it has been several years since an Australian movie was selected for the Berlinale's main competition.

But Armfield believes a series of recent Australian films, including Little Fish, Look Both Ways, and Three Dollars, could underscore a new self-confidence among local movie makers.

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Addicted to love
By Alexa Moses
May 19, 2006

Trailer: Candy

Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish love each other, heroin and your car stereo.

It's not easy selling a film about love, drug addiction and why junkies never manage to get the bond back on their rental houses, even when you have Heath Ledger signed on. So Sydney director Neil Armfield concentrated on the positive side.

When Armfield spoke in a boardroom about Candy as a love story, "you could see the investors' faces light up; it wasn't the same story that they were expecting," he says. "This is really a film about the responsibilities of love. I see the addiction as a kind of crisis through which we view different kinds of love."

Candy, starring Ledger, Somersault's Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, is adapted from Luke Davies's Australian bestseller of the same name.

The dark, passionate story is set in Sydney's city, inner west and north west. Candy travels down the tortuous paths of lovers tangled together by addiction. Cornish plays Candy, a talented young artist who starts to experiment with heroin with her addicted boyfriend Dan, a skanky would-be poet.

"The story is a window into a world that's unfamiliar but very close to everyone in a way," Armfield says.

"It seems to me that it's one of the things about any drug: we're all interested in trying to stop time. Heroin seems to give that experience more powerfully than anything else."

Armfield, the artistic director of Company B at Belvoir St Theatre, knew casting was the key to turning the story into a successful film.

"When [Ledger] was originally suggested, I thought he wasn't right; he was too heroic a persona. But then I saw Monster's Ball. He's only in it for 15 minutes at the beginning, but his performance was so complex and sad and troubled that I thought that he had depths that I hadn't realised at all from seeing [A] Knight's Tale."

Armfield didn't think Cornish was old enough to have the necessary "rage" when she first tested for the title role 2 & 1/2 years before landing it. But Cornish had matured by the time Armfield and producer Margaret Fink had convinced investors to finance the film.

"It became very clear when Abbie and Heath tested together that they were right," Armfield says. "It was essential to the story that she is young enough to, in a sense, give [credibility to] the terrible decisions that are made. But she's got to be old enough for us to feel that there has been some experience of life, and that the love and the artistic engagement of life is deep."

Cornish, in England shooting Shekhar Kapur's sequel to Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett, loved the character.

"She's this full-of-life, zesty young girl who, even though she was 19, hadn't felt the rigours of life," she says. "But I think her character even at 30 would be full of this energy. I think she has baggage, but that baggage doesn't overrun or ruin her life. I think that if there was room for that to alleviate itself, it would. She's very much a wild animal. I just loved her."

The actors and filmmakers visited Kings Cross and a drug users' association, where the staff taught them about the day-to-day life of heroin addicts.

"We learnt how to 'shoot up' into a prosthetic arm," Cornish says. "We learnt about heroin, what it did to your body, what the consequences are for the long term and the short term.

"The withdrawal is excruciating. The scene where Dan's in the shower, yelling - apparently it's like getting showered with needles. Everything's heightened."

The group also visited Narcotics Anonymous meetings with current and former addicts. These meetings moved Cornish most.

"Each of these people had gone through hell and lived to see another day. That in itself was propelling enough for me, for my story, for the way I would play Candy, and this movie."

The film shoot wasn't entirely sombre. Candy's joyous opening scene was filmed at Luna Park in the Rotor, a ride that pins you to the wall as it spins around.

"Once we put Abbie and Heath together on that thing and made it spin, they just played," Armfield says. "They were having such a ball doing it.

"Abbie and Heath didn't have to do every run of it, but the kids did. One was so enthusiastic, he went outside and vomited and then went straight back in."

Armfield pauses, then emphasises all occupational health and safety regulations were met.

"The second assistant was careful," he says. "Very careful."

CANDY

Director: Neil Armfield
Stars: Abbie Cornish, Heath Ledger, Geoffrey Rush
Rated: MA 15+
Opens: Thursday

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Candy
director: Neil Armfield
country: Australia
Dendy Films
official website
rated: 4/5
review date: 18/05/2006

cast: Abbie Cornish, Heath Ledger

Candy is the long-awaited film adaptation of Luke Davies' superb 1997 novel. Swapping his Brokeback Mountain cowboy hat for greasy hair and a rabid drug habit, Heath Ledger stars alongside Somersault's Abbie Cornish and Shine's Geoffrey Rush. Candy is also the first dramatic feature by noted Australian theatre director, Neil Armfield.

Candy is a love story, a love triangle between three main characters: young couple Dan and Candy - Ledger and Cornish - and the most dangerous "candy" of them all: heroin. Dan and Candy live in a beautiful twilight. Their lives are easy early on, occasionally scamming, scoring and using. But as their addiction ramps up their relationship begins to crumble. In desperation (and because Dan won't), Candy turns to prostitution to keep things afloat while Dan turns to friend, mentor 'drug professor' Casper (Rush), for survival advice and the odd 'loan' of cash. It's doomed to fail and as the saying goes, love soon tears them apart...

Candy may not offer much new in the way of 'drug movies'. The film is modestly made, lacking the high-octane visuals of something like Trainspotting (1996) or Requiem For A Dream (2000), and the story is fairly standard too: boy meets girl, girl meets boy; they fall in love; they start using; they get strung out; their lives screw up royally; they try and kick... Girl loses her mind and boy loses everything but hope...

But the 'less is more' approach taken by director Armfield is precisely why Candy works and works well. It's not a flashy film and it didn't need to be. Candy the book was a small personal story. It has been made for film the same way. It's not what Candy is about but the way in which the story is told that makes it unique and ultimately a successful film and adaptation. The quiet poetry of the characters and the tragedy of their situation are preserved. It is emotionally honest without being overly romantic. It is compassionate with huge insight into the perils - and pleasures - of addiction. For those who love the book - as I do - Candy will be a minor revelation.

Whether we want to admit it or not, addiction - and the heroin epidemic - is still very prevalent in our culture. Candy should affect us all. In the way Little Fish was embraced by mainstream Australian audiences last year, Candy too will hopefully strike a similar chord.

4 stars

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Sevoflurane said:

I think Shuman the other character in the scene sums it up best with the line

"Theres no way it was the fucking salt"

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