Sometimes sharp cultural satire comes from people outside the culture being lampooned – or, in the case of How to Talk Australians: The Movie, framed in a way that implies so. Adapted from the popular YouTube short-form series of the same name, the film’s principal characters are students and teachers from the (fictitious) Delhi College of Linguistics, though neither the director (Tony Rogers, co-creator/director of the 2007–2010 Australian series Wilfred) nor the screenwriters (Rogers and Rob Hibbert) are of Indian heritage. This allows the creators to draw on deeply ingrained knowledge of Australian culture while satirically positioning the work through an external lens.
The aforementioned folk from Delhi – including staff members Dean Devdan (Vikrant Narain), Professor Dillip (Robert Santiago), Chester (Rohan Ganju) and a dozen students – are devoted to learning the peculiar linguistic and cultural phenomenon known as (my words) sheer bloody Australianness. The central trick of the film – as in the famous Simpsons episode Bart vs Australia, and Stephan Elliott’s criminally under-appreciated Welcome to Woop Woop – is to present Australia as the rest of the world imagines us (Crocodile Dundee also did this, but without the satirical edge).
To wit: a sun-baked exotic frontier populated by beer-swilling rubes, who do things like construct giant fruit-shaped buildings for no particular reason and speak a barely comprehensible mutation of what was once considered English. Those of us who are a little more, shall we say, cosmopolitan might like to believe such a nation no longer exists. Though we know in our hearts it does: those gigantic fruits really are out there, mate, as are a thousand other examples (cough, splutter, One Nation) of the country not exactly being positioned at the vanguard of sophistication and intellectualism. In other words: the humour resonates with an uncomfortable ring of truth.
How to Talk Australians begins at the college, which is a fun location: a run-down, cut-rate place with malfunctioning old technology. Devdan promises the “how to talk Australians” class an authentic study tour during which they’re certain to meet “outback bushmen or a sheila” and even “touch a big pineapple”. On the flight over, the Aussie pilot wolfs down a beer and lights up a ciggie, because true blue mate, you bloody ripper. But instead of landing in Sydney, storms (read: a stroke of narrative convenience) result in the plane getting diverted and landing in Dubbo airport, which, amusingly, is basically a crappy warehouse with some tin sheds in it.
After an incident with customs, Devdan is separated from the pack, scoring a car from a grubby local (Shane Jacobson) while the rest of the group hop on a bus. Thus their tour of the “real” Awstraya begins. The group encounter all sorts of filthy two-bit locations – motels, caravan parks and roadside diners, where they can buy local delicacies (AKA “grub”). These include, of course, Chiko Rolls; when the question of what’s in these deep-fried tubes is asked, the befuddled staff member of course responds: “I don’t know. Nobody knows.”
Crucially, the cast never appears to be working hard for laughs. In human terms Vikrant Narain is the film’s comic centre of gravity, wandering through scenes with a wonderfully dazed, stoner-ish energy, amusingly resigned to whatever fresh absurdity is thrown at him. I was also quite taken by Rohan Ganju’s performance as Chester, whose easy-going presence again suits the material; another cast in a lesser film might’ve amped up the shock factor and OMG expressions. Quite the contrary for Chester, who at one point declares himself in love with an Australian woman (named, of course, Karen) who he praises for introducing him to “meat pies, AFL, casual racism – it’s a rich cultural stew”.
Interspersed throughout the run time are short, entertaining snippets from faux educational videos, unpacking subjects such as the admittedly confusing number of sizes of beer glasses – pots, pints, schooners, middies, ponies, jugs. These moments are good pick-me-ups, keeping the pace nice and bouncy as the characters roll into an array of random scenarios and encounter more of this country’s most terrifying creatures: the locals.
There’s an argument to say the film is a bit of a one-trick pony, but for me, that proverbial horse felt more like a mutant Godzilla-sized cow, with more than enough milk to keep squeezing. The shtick never got old. Everything builds towards an enjoyably daffy climax involving an airborne emergency, during which a student must rise to a challenge, tapping into hitherto unrealised reserves of strength expressed through that timeless declaration of duty and resolve: “We’re not here to fuck spiders.”
How to Talk Australians: The Movie is in Australian cinemas from 11 June
