Romper Stomper

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1992

Romper Stomper
Geoffrey Wright
Australia, 1992, 94 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: Romper Stomper Pty. Ltd.
Producer: Daniel Scharf, lan Pringle
Screenplay: Geoffrey Wright
Cinematography: Ron Hagen
Editor: Bill Murphy
Art Director: Steven Jones-Evans
Sound: Frank Lipson, David Lee, Steve Burgess
Music: John Clifford White
Principal Cast: Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock, Jacqueline McKenzie, Alex Scott

An utterly terrifying story of rampaging neo-Nazi skinheads, Romper Stomper may well be the most disturbing film in this year’s Festival. Its intoxicating violence, not to mention its willingness to suspend moral judgement on its hateful characters, prompted one critic to call the film “genuinely appalling” and “disturbing” for its potential effect on “impressionable audiences.”

Gabe, a young drug addict fleeing from an incestuous relationship with her wealthy father, joins up with a Melbourne skinhead gang, and begins a passionless affair with Hando, their leader (portrayed by Proof’s Russell Crowe with the Messianic fervour of a reborn Christian in heat). Driven by unrelenting anger, hatred, and a brutal white supremacist philosophy, the gang careens from a helter-skelter street-war on Melbourne’s Vietnamese community to the pillage and destruction of Gabe’s father’s house. Unsatisfied by her mechanical relationship (sexual and otherwise) with Hando, she begins to fall for his lieutenant, the quiet, confused Davey. With a love triangle unsettling its apex, the gang careens into a disintegrating spiral of casualties, arrests, frustration, and despair.

Complex and controversial in its politics, this is an exposé from the inside, examining not only the anti-social drives of the characters, but the cinematic iconography which represents such violent passions. In fact, director Geoffrey Wright skewers us throughout with the cliches—rock’n’roll violence; “love in the ruins”—we’ve grown to love, making their mesmerizing power ugly and unsettling. Wright doesn’t flinch in making the audience complicit in the gang’s roller- coaster plight, finally leading us to the film’s bleak conclusion on a windswept beach, where, in a final ironic twist, Asian tourists snap photos of landscape bleakly scarred by these human shards of social chaos.
—Noah Cowan