Past and present, documentary and fiction, and script and improv come together in a real-life Sydney funeral home
Australian actor Christian Byers (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) lived near a funeral home when he was a child, where the gurneys out front were commonplace and left an indelible print. In fact they led him to Adelaide Film Fest with a debut directorial work called Death of an Undertaker.
Byers plays Sparrow, a down-on-his-luck young man who becomes an apprentice at a funeral home. It’s an interesting choice for Sparrow, since he’s still grieving the death of his twin sister, who died when he was eleven. Her ghostly voice is an incantation throughout the film: Remember Christmas? Remember eshays? Remember me? With the guidance of real-life undertaker Michele ‘Mick’ Salamone and funeral director Rosa Peronace (playing themselves), Sparrow struggles to wrap his head around not thinking of death as something overwhelming, as something emotional and spiritual, but rather as an occupation that means looking at computer screens, vacuuming the entrance way, throwing office birthday parties, and oh, yeah, exhuming bodies, repatriating bodies, rubbing your face raw from stress over the impending clean-up of a leaky tomb where parts of a body floated in their own juices. ‘I just want to be over this,’ he says, but his positioning at a funeral home means his mourning meshes with his work, no matter how often one refers to a body as ‘it’.
Death of an Undertaker is an experimental narrative collage, mixing not only truth and fiction, but interview-style clips with dreamy images. It’s a patchwork of black and white VHS and handycam footage in sepia interspersed with Steadicam colour, bringing the past forward into the present. Which is apt, since the making of the film was an 8-year experience. Byers began by interviewing Salamone and Peronace at A O Hare Funeral Directors in Sydney, hoping to make a documentary, then started working with the team and finally deciding to fictionalise the film. The end result is a mammoth editing achievement, as well as a hybrid in every form of the word.
Hectic at times, surreal others, cold, humane – it’s impossible to look away.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Death of an Undertaker is screening as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
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