In development

By David Freeman
Low Budget feature
Digital 90 mins
Developed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission

Sex and Death . A passionate and intense psycho-sexual music drama.

Writer/director David Freeman has deftly adapted Monazemon Chikamatsu’s eighteenth century Japanese classic, Love Suicides at Amijima, to twenty-first century multicultural Australia. With an powerfully poetic aesthetic, Floating explores the dark side of desire and the conflict of human emotions in a subversive and energeic retelling of this Japanese classic.

The floating world of hedonism and insatiable passion clashes so violently with middle-class, upwardly-mobile, domesticity and respectability that only in death can the protagonist find reward.

:: synopsis

Floating begins enigmatically with two fishermen in a floating islands landscape, for whom the only bites are fish so small they must be thrown back.  Two small fish, gasping for air on land, look as though they are trying to kiss.

Craig and Osan are an interracial, upwardly mobile young married couple living in the Western suburbs of Sydney.  Osan is a well paid translator for a large Japanese banking corporation, though she also translates Japanese literature, less well-paid, for pleasure.  Craig is an assistant to a high-flying futures trader.  They have two young children, both boys.  Married life is pretty satisfying, despite or because of demanding jobs and two kids.  They like everything that smells of success and belong to that group of people who don't care about anything passionately, except the good life.

Craig goes to the latest club in town, The Planetarium, to celebrate his cousin Brett's birthday.  Here he sees K, an avant-garde performance artist and occasional prostitute.  She is a cult figure, late 30's /early 40's, sexually alluring, and the star attraction at The Planetarium, presenting an SM Fantasy world which doesn't conform to the usual cliches.  She and Craig begin, unexpectedly, an affair, which soon becomes an obsession for both of them.  They never talk.

The obsession deepens and starts to dominate both their ability to perform in their work and their other relationships.  Craig, particularly, is torn between family and K.  In a desperate bid to bring Craig to his senses, Brett tries to buy K's services at The Planetarium, but succeeds only in provoking a fight with Craig and having them both thrown out.  Craig returns home after spending the night with K to be confronted by Osan, who now knows all.  She tries to make him see the unreality of his obsession, but he is in too deep and returns to K.

Osan finally appears at The Planetarium and takes over K's act in a bid to win back her errant husband.  She performs a traditional Japanese ceremony of a prostitute who falls in love with her client and presents him her severed finger.  By the end of the ceremony she has entered an ecstatic trance.  She has completely upstaged K, the crowd is transfixed, and Craig, confronted with his two worlds meeting in the same space, flees.  K, also confused and confronted by Osan's intervention, follows Craig to his car, and speaks to him for the first time privately.  She says she loves him, and the two of them drive off.

For three days they travel, stopping each day for sex and sleep.  It is a return to nature, and each day they get more battered, more ripped.  Their physical and psychic state and the sex they have, become more and more extreme.  By day 3, they have abandoned the car and continue on foot.

Over the same three days, Osan, in total confusion, prepares to suicide, locking her children in their room.

At dusk on the third day, Craig and K make love a last time, fulfilling a fantasy which formed part of K's performance, they strangle each other as they have sex.  The little death meets the big death.

At the same time, Osan unlocks the door to her children's room.  She will return to the continuity of life.

We return to the fishermen of the beginning, who still aren't getting any decent bites.  They discuss a newspaper report of a couple who killed themselves, rather like the small fish which wilfully swim into their nets.  What could be so bad that you would rush your death?

:: ABOUT MDTV

[1] mdTV was an initiative by ABCTV, Oz Opera and MusicArtsDance films to address the future of opera in Australia. Using the success of the MTV phenomenon to attract wide audiences, Australian artists were challenged to create original music drama works for television and thereby create new local and international audiences. In 1997 artists were invited to apply for funding to develop and create four one-hour music dramas to be broadcast and distributed by the ABC and MusicArtsDance films. One Night The Moon and The Widower are the first two projects in this initiative.