Tender, 2013.
Directed by Lynette Wallworth.
SYNOPSIS:
Documentary on a small steelworks town’s community who set up their own not-for-profit funeral service.
Tender is the story of a former steelworks town in Australia. Its small, big-hearted community – somehow still cheery and uncomplaining despite how the overbearing factory has assaulted their spirit – launch their own not-for-profit funeral service. It’s a displaced ‘up yours’ to the steelworks, an attempt to reclaim something – in this case, the process of dying – from the big businesses who have monetized and monopolised death.
As anyone who has experienced death knows, it’s either a long, drawn out process where people bloat and discolour in sterile hospital environments, or they suddenly drop dead for the local authorities to quickly take the body away. Neither outcome screams ‘community,’ and the funeral service is the townsfolk of Port Kembla’s way of bringing death back into the home, the family.
The venture is noble, and the documenary’s subjects couldn’t match the cause’s morals more. The community centre is comprised of some incredibly lovely people, from aging hippies who don’t wear shoes and still say things like ‘far out’ to elderly men who have been chewed up, demasculated and spat out by the steelworks. Usually, some of the former could be annoying, but everyone comes across as so genuine that cynasicm is rendered damn near impossible.
The community’s end goal is given an extra dimension when the centre’s caretaker, Nigel, is diagnosed with cancer. Whether this was the initial reason for the new funeral service is never explained, but the two work in tandem nonetheless. While they speak about dying, and how more people should deal with the inevitable before the tap on the shoulder comes, they themselves put off and delay having ‘the talk’ about funeral preparations with Nigel himself. He’ll get better, now’s not the right time.
This underlying denial behind Nigel’s impending death is physically manifest in the vast steelworks plant that towers over the town. Smoke billows from atop chimneys so colossal they seem forged by nature. It is from that monolith that many of the town’s men were made redundant – Nigel being one of them – men who found their place at the community centre. It poetically symbolises death and the big businesses currently striving to control it.
Tender is enormously affecting. Michael Winterbottom’s latest was being screened at the same time, so the small Screen 1 in the Odeon Covent Garden barely had 20 people in. Still, it was the only film I have seen this festival to garner spontaneous applause on the end credits.
The documentary is charming throughout, treating its dark subject with just the right balance of light-heartedness and respect, a balance that is manifest in each one of its wonderful subjects. But it is the last 15 minutes that transcends. The washing of a body, told in still images from the ceremony itself, is overwhelming in its sensitivity.
It’s odd to call a film ‘honest.’ Despite the medium’s claims to “truth 24 frames a second,” everyone knows cinema’s preference for the staged and exaggerated; the poetic license. Tender, however, exudes honesty in every image. In characters, in life, in emotion – this is an honest, genuine film. A magnificent piece of work tackling an important subject that is often ignored.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter (@OliDavis)
Originally published October 19, 2014. Updated November 28, 2022.
