In 1970 the under-construction Westgate Bridge in Melbourne collapsed, the biggest industrial accident to ever occur in Australia. 35 people died. It changed the way the industry approached safety around the world. For relatives of the 35 who were killed it changed lives and created a generational trauma.
Footscray, 1999. A mother drives her son to the emergency department. He’s been having regular migraines, but this time he has lost consciousness. She’s panicked and although the nurses take immediate action there is the nowhere-world that is the hallway waiting area where she sits in quiet panic. A cigarette smoked outside and a phone call to her mother. The call is in Italian and it’s tense. Her son being in hospital is an addition to the litany of “insufficient mother” arguments she’s been dealing with too long. Meet Netta (Sarah Nicolazzo), single mother, sometimes poor decision maker, fiercely independent, and the daughter of a single mother. This weekend she will reach breaking point, a point that can’t be indulged because she’s meant to be, needs to be, everything for her mysteriously ill twelve-year-old son, Julian (Max Nappo).
Westgate, Adrian Ortega’s sophomore feature after Cerulean Blue, feels immersively authentic. Not only is the audience dropped directly into Netta (Antoinette) and Julian’s life, but they are also dropped into Melbourne suburbs in the late 90s. Ortega grew up in Footscray and astutely shoots the suburb with an eye for period detail and attitudes. Once at home with Jules (dehydrated, not fully investigated, without a prescription) with her stress levels slightly lower, Netta invites her insomniac son to cuddle with her and watch television. Ortega inserts a nostalgia touchstone, a Franco Cozzo advertisement. The standard late night television ad. Franco Cozzo was a larger than life Italian-Australian furniture retailer in Melbourne with storefronts in Brunswick and “Foot(a)scray” His famous ad was in three languages and featured some of the most confounding furniture available. Julian asks, “Are we Italian like him?” Netta answers, “We’re not Italian, we’re Australian. We were born here.”
Two interactions at the hospital give context as to why Netta is erasing her Italian heritage. Both involve her given name, Antonietta. A look of blankness by a nurse register when Netta says it, and as she is asked to spell it she picks up the form and fills her name in. “Much quicker,” she says and has no doubt said for years. The doctor who examined Julian also has trouble pronouncing her name. Her mother, Giuseppina (Rosa Nix) on the other end of the payphone speaking only in Italian although she understands and speaks English. Netta, with her beautiful hair like a pre-Raphaelite model and her striking features, is not a person who could sink into the background and growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as a first-generation Australian has left her exhausted with the explicit racism (subtler but still present in the 1990s) towards Melbourne’s second largest ethnic group.
Exhaustion is what characterises Netta. She’s already an open wire ready to spark which is made worse by her landlord George (Sal Galofaro) demanding her back rent for her home with a solid threat that if the money isn’t with him in two days he will not only change the locks on the doors, he will also sell her possessions until her debt is paid. She begs for more time as her hair salon will be opening soon and a solid income is imminent (the salon is Netta’s fix all fixation). George has heard it too many times. “Your mother has the money,” he tells Netta which makes her more defiant. “I will work it out on my own,” is a phrase Netta uses as a shield.
On her own is how Netta is raising Julian with his deadbeat dad not paying child support and leaving both she and Julian in the lurch when he cancels taking his son for the day. Julian, who is AFL obsessed, has a match and a presentation. Netta had already committed herself to going to the salon and now also has to apply for emergency funds from a case worker. Netta’s plan-B to drop Julian off with his grandmother doesn’t work because the two women reignite old arguments. Antonietta resents her mother’s open implications that she doesn’t know how to care for her son. “Why haven’t you…? Why don’t you…? If you listened to me…?” hang between the mother and daughter like a glass-shard path they end up on recursively. Doors slam, more promises are broken, and Netta’s aggression puts a wall between herself and her son as he begins to question why she can’t put his needs for that day first. He’s a child and he misses the larger picture – but perhaps Netta is also always a child in her mother’s house and misses a larger picture.
Ortega’s ability to recreate the Melbourne West in the 90s is impeccable. Tight shots frame the characters as they move from place to place on a stress-filled odyssey of bitter disappointment and healing realisations. Netta’s best friend and business partner Taj (Hannah Sims) tries to make light of the failure to launch of their salon, and for a moment Netta feels a sense of sorority and understanding but those moments fade as she and Julian miss out on what was meant to be his big day. “One day you’ll understand,” she tells him. But he’s as exhausted as she is, and her failures loom large for both of them. Simply keeping her head above water means everything feels as if it is pulling them down. With the Westgate Bridge looming large over them as a place of pain and distrust for Netta, her “Australian home” is conditional.
Westgate is a story of mothers and their children doing what they can to be what a mother should be in their understanding of the role. Netta’s love for Julian is palpable as is her need to protect him from her own battle wounds. Casual racism, exclusion, and a fractured notion of what community means add weight to Netta’s collapsing certainty that she can be everything that she must be for her child. The same goes for Netta’s mother Guiseppina who also brought up a child on her own and did what she thought was best. Adrian Ortega’s film is a paean to the fierce and imperfect humans who fight to raise their children. Westgate is a gift.
Director: Adrian Ortega
Cast: Sarah Nicolazzo, Max Nappo, Hannah Sims
Writer: Adrian Ortega
Producer: Danaë Grieef, Adrian Ortega
Composer: Wes Larsen
Cinematographer: Tavis Pinnington
Editor: Arlo Dean Cook
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