pawno poster

 

© Jane Freebury

It’s good to know that a hide like a rhinoceros isn’t a prerequisite for working in a cash converter business in multicultural Footscray. A thicker than usual epidermis helps ensure better than breakeven results, but the experience need not shrivel a bloke’s empathy or drain him of human kindness.

It seems it might even inspire creativity. This is the proposition in this good-natured study of people who are doing it tough and reflects the kind of optimism that probably helped get this entirely independently funded production get up in the first place.

Screenwriter and support actor Damien Hill, who lives in Footscray, has a surprise up his sleeve in the closing scenes that turns some of the grim things that you swear you saw on their head. The turn-around may not  work for everyone—it didn’t quite for me—but there’s no reason why the coda can’t, I suppose, when action is confined to a 24-hour period.

Indeed, it is not nearly long enough to get to know the characters who count in this ambitious drama that managed to get a Tom Waits track for next to nothing to set the tone.

John Brumpton brings a cynical but not unsympathetic tolerance to his character Les, the shop owner, a pawnbroker, a world away from the role made forever famous by Rod Steiger’s staggering treatment in 1965. If Les has anything to hide, you feel pretty sure it’s nothing more than some life choices that didn’t deliver. His best attribute is that he’s got time for folks, whatever their hard luck story. That said, right now he has a bad toothache.

His  assistant is young Danny (Hill), a bit of a day-dreamer with a crush on Kate (Maeve Dermody) who works in a bookshop nearby. Danny’s soft romantic heart is a push over for an earnest young man who wants to propose to his girlfriend that evening but can’t quite afford the diamond ring he finds on the tray and thinks will be perfect.

A film set in a pawnshop is ripe with possibilities.  Hill has built into his screenplay so many characters with hints at their own distinctive backstories that the narrative risks haring off in a dozen different directions. That this doesn’t happen is a tribute to the writer, and first-time director Paul Ireland. Is there a TV series in the offing?

A fair proportion of the action takes place outside the shop premises, grounded in the two men who hang out and provide comment, chorus-like, on the neighbourhood. Meet Carlo (Malcolm Kennard) and Pauly (Mark Coles Smith) who anchor the street as they bludge smokes and share meals from the Vietnamese takeaway owned by Lai (Ngoc Phan). Lai is one of the characters who has something to give back to the community, however the way this is expressed is a big misjudgment on a number of levels. On the other hand, the vignette about transgender woman Paige (Daniel Fredericksen) battling life with two young sons, is touching and makes you want to see more.

Pawno flaunts a bit of cheek with a title that sounds like the generic adult movie. There is a bit of sex and also a brutal violent interlude that I’m not convinced we needed, but the engaging cast, including Kerry Armstrong, too little seen these days, bring many of the stories to life.

3 Stars