You Like It, I Love It is a 16 minute short by James Vaughan. Neither non-narrative nor entirely experimental, Vaughan has an impressionist, poetic sensibility not dissimilar to Harmony Korine in his more dour work (Mr Lonely, Umshini Wam), or the films of Amiel Courtin-Wilson, who has acted both as a mentor and producer to Vaughan.
In a series of vignettes we watch two brothers, Roberto and Chris, idle their way through a couple of days at home. They watch telly, eat pizza, drive around town, shoot the shit, swim in the family pool, and throw household junk off the veranda. Their brotherly listlessness is punctuated by their slightly odd but good-natured neighbour Tony, who has an idea for an educational non-profit music festival that he’s failing to get Roberto excited about. Overall, no-one gets up to much of anything, but the rhythms of images and dialogue capture the feeling of suburban stasis with great accuracy. The effect is pleasingly contiguous with real life, but You Like It I Love It pushes for more, and if the piece achieves an authentic tone it does so via a dreamy yet pressurised surreality.
Greg Zimbulis is funny, believable and charming as the chatty Tony, a sincere portrait of late middle age. Roberto, a masters student reaping the cushy comforts of the family nest, is played by Kirin J Callinan, in a nicely modulated performance that nails the kind of post art school/artist manqué/poly-practicing dude you’re liable to catch haunting the sub-gentrified areas of Australia’s cultural centres. More pointedly, and personally, Roberto eerily resembles some of my better mates, and if I’m being honest, a little bit of me. He resembles James Vaughan, too. This specificity is highly co-ordinated, as Vaughan addresses in the conversation below, making YLIILI aesthetically and spiritually comparable to Lena Dunham’s excellent breakthrough feature Tiny Furniture — for those who need a same-generation referent. Yet YLIILI is hardly your standard mumblecore indie flick fare, and the comparisons end there. YLIILI is a magic little opal of hypnotic (anti-) Australiana. Vaughan both floats around and dives into something ineffably unique about Australian life in the new millennium, something only really sensed over time, yet accessible here through narrative art. While clearly an auteur piece, YLIILI is boosted by elegant and unified sound and production design, and under Vaughan’s direction vacillates between flattened vérité and sensual escapism, successfully building to a hyperreal blending of both.
You Like It, I Love It was completed in 2013, and had a solid go around of the film festival circuit, and won Vaughan the Swinburne Award for Emerging Australian Filmmaker at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2013 and the ATOM Award for Best Experimental Film 2013.
He also made it available on Vimeo On Demand last year. With fellow filmmakers Alena Lodkina, Isaac Wall, and Sam Dixon, Vaughan has since co-formed Fountain Vista, a directors cinema collective. They’re based in Melbourne, and have released three films and have four more in the pipeline, most of them due, hopefully, for completion this year. Most recently, James co-directed, created and produced The Canterbury Tales at The New Theatre in Newtown, collaborating again with Callinan and Lodkina.
I emailed James to discuss the film, and his replies to my queries were as interesting and illuminating as the film itself.
I love the look and feel of You Like It, I Love It. It’s really beautifully shot and designed. Was it important to you to have a good looking film, and was this in some way to help communicate the subject matter? For example, there’s a lot of attention paid to surfaces. Long meditative shots of fairly non-suspect things. Pools, vets, cars, televisions, trees. Things become strange in this way in your film, sort of like seeing or saying a word too many times until it becomes weird in the mind and on your tongue. I think you and I have a similar taste, from what I know about you, of films that complicate the audience’s gaze through sheer duration. Would you say there’s a bit of that going on or am I projecting?
Absolutely. The film was set in my house, with someone playing a version of myself, my brother playing my brother, and so there was this inward-looking foundation. But the intent was to really to reach out — to find an unfamiliar perspective on the familiar that came from a desire to make sense of my own life and, if not to come up with answers, at least to be an observer. And physical surfaces felt to me a really appropriate way of exploring that.
I’m really obsessed with trying to find ways of drawing abstraction from the concrete. The physical world is kind of the basic input, and if I am thinking about things I find it tends to happen while staring absent-mindedly at familiar surfaces and objects, as well as ordinary spectacles, like a toaster cooking or a traffic light on the corner. So I find the binary between pure thought, and it’s opposite — physicality, space, and materiality — a really interesting one. And the repetition you mentioned is really important too, because thoughts and physical geographies can change, sometimes dramatically and sometimes in sync with each other, but more often, for me anyway, they loop on a cycle. So it was about finding a way of accessing those cycles, to create a conscious rather than subliminal experience of them. The overall aesthetic was an attempt to find that access.
I get the sense of a kind of laziness or boredom that approaches apathy from the characters. At times you present it as poetic, other times flat, other times funny, but I couldn’t help feeling a certain level of toxic laziness too. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the character’s celebrate or relish their apathy or boredom, but there is a sense of turning the other way because it’s easier. Most obviously from Roberto, but in a way even from Tony. Tony’s got good ideas, but there’s an overwhelming feeling that it’s all talk, and it seems unlikely that his plans will eventuate. Roberto has certainly distanced himself from it. It feels like a missed opportunity, simply because it’s too hard and there’s a lack of communication between the generations — despite the fact that they’re next door neighbours, or perhaps because of it. Roberto is polite and all, but there’s that sense that he doesn’t take Tony very seriously, that he’s indulging Tony. I was wondering in that way how seriously you take your characters, and how seriously you expect the viewer to take them?
Without discrediting the efforts and achievements of individuals, I think the idea of a completely self-made person is obscene and equally I don’t like blaming individuals for indolence and passivity, so in that sense I never wanted any of the characters to be easy targets for scorn. It had to be more nuanced.
You mention the toxic element to passivity and I agree with that. But rather than activity equaling success and passivity equaling failure I think they’re just two sides of the same coin. In a world bonkers about freedom we’re just radically amplifying these two states which have always existed naturally and comfortably inside all of us. And so, as you pointed out, the film presents a pretty ambivalent picture of laziness, neither lauding nor attacking it, just exploring it. It may be toxic, perhaps there’s beauty there. Like anything organic, it’s a vessel for the full spectrum.
I try to be proactive in my life but I’m also very aware of my passive side. I have a desire to feel chance’s influence in my life, I like being carried away by things, being affected and moved by things completely external to myself. I really like watching things unfold. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. In a way, making films is a method of deliberately and meticulously setting up a situation where things are going to happen, and your job is to observe it: both active and passive at the same time. It’s a combination I love.
So the characters are very important to me. They represent a kind of dynamic ambivalence, actively passive, contradictory and interlocking. Tony actively promotes an idea he doesn’t really care about at the end of the day, while Roberto passively resists him. They don’t have much in common except their ambivalence toward one another, but that’s enough to make the interaction quite hypnotic. I don’t necessarily expect or want the viewer to take the characters seriously, I wanted them to be amusing, but I hope what they evoke together gestures subtly toward something that is important, namely, the choices we make or don’t make about what we want to be, and how we succeed or fail to relate those things to each other.
There’s an incredibly wonderful section of the film that goes down a sort of rabbit hole, i.e. the scene in the trenches. I haven’t had a chance to check, but is the film you’re referencing a real film? This leads me into the next set of questions…
It’s a bit of a tired word now but it’s an important one, this idea of privilege. Your film explores it in a very cool way. I think that the dumbed-down, “Check Your Privilege” shrieking that is coming from all corners of the popular public discourse is a bit breathless and not at all helpful. Not least of all because it’s coming from those who have most of the privileges that they’re telling everyone to check. It seems a bit like class-shaming from both the top down and the bottom up. Of course, however, privilege is important to point out, because it’s something that people take advantage of. I can’t imagine a single human that wouldn’t enjoy a bit of personal freedom and privilege if they could get it, but the problem might be when privileges are being enjoyed at the expense of others, which of course is what the more interesting criticisms are all about.
I feel like your film manages somehow to sidestep becoming a didactic sermon on the of evils of privilege in an interesting way. Is this part of the reason that the narrative is experimental? Did you work outside of the more traditional narrative techniques so that you could tackle these issues outside of the storytelling frameworks that tend to perpetuate this “blind privilege”?
I did intend for the film to be about privilege and you’re right that it’s very difficult to say anything about it directly, but in any case I find that approach tedious and ineffective. A much more exciting, not to mention genuinely democratic, way of approaching morality in art is to create a space that facilitates people choosing to think about it for themselves. I believe art is the process of mapping the zone that separates what the world is from what we think it should be. Which makes it about aspirations, dreams and desire, but also about failure and disappointment. But when you try to pin it down, it’s an ambient space, it’s air, it’s vagueness; there can be no true map for that territory. So there’s tension there — a paradoxical aspect. Finding new vantage points through the mist becomes the only appropriate goal.
For me, narrative is such a seductive way of exploring this because there is so much room for playfulness. It is possible for things to closely resemble ordinary narrative structure but to be counterfeit, or even better, partially counterfeit. I love these identity games, they are exciting, but they also have the function of destabilising entrenched but unproductive ideas by encouraging a certain line of questioning which I find very positive: How does what I’m watching relate to what I am familiar with? What makes what is familiar good or bad? What makes what I’m now watching good or bad? Which of the two is the right way, or is there one? And like you said, these questions have a political dimension too. They naturally extend to a more critical perspective on established orders and hopefully force a broad enough view where it’s possible to acknowledge the absurd sequence of fate and fortune that leads any individual to a position of privilege.
Answering that first question — it’s not a reference to a real film. It was an attempt to capture the way that kind of film would have imprinted itself on the character, Roberto.
Continuing this critical line, I guess there’s also the massive elephant in the room which is that filmmaking is a luxury in itself, mostly due to its costliness. My question is: do you feel an upper-middle-class responsibility to cast a critical look at the upper middle class?
I don’t think class is talked about nearly enough in Australia but that said I’d never approach the issue out of a sense of duty. Like everything else you end up working into a film, it just feels good instinctively. I find the mystery of how class affects personality, belief, and behaviour fascinating.
