Bruce Beresford’s The Travellers blends opera and the outback in a heartfelt story about homecoming
- Written by The Conversation
Famed Australian director Bruce Beresford loves opera. If you weren’t aware of this before watching his new film, The Travellers, you most likely will be by the time the credits roll.
It would be reductive to suggest this movie is one big ad for opera’s ability to unite rural Australia. Yet, the way in which Beresford folds this art form into The Travellers across 97 minutes is at once beguiling, heartfelt and at times quite on the nose.
Despite this occasional clunkiness, Beresford has written and directed a film sure to please the broad swathe of Australian cinemagoers who know and care for popular Australian actor Bryan Brown’s big screen career.
The local film landscape
Australians are, unsurprisingly, a natural audience for Australian feature films. We make quite a few, by global standards, and these films continue to find receptive audiences both here and overseas.
Our domestic box office for locally produced films remains stubbornly low compared to other nations. Nonetheless, there seems to be a strong desire for recognisably Australian screen stories, particularly on mobile and TV screens.
It’s easy to find Australians who say they enjoy local film. But getting audiences to show up during the crucial first week of a film’s theatrical release is hard.
The first week in the box office sets up a film’s success in the screen space; session times and word of mouth allow a film to actually stay in cinemas and be found by audiences. As one industry adage goes: like a parachute, if your film doesn’t open, it’s death.
The gap between how much audiences say they want to support local film, and how much actually do, can partly be linked to a struggle to understand what actually constitutes “Australian” film.
Let’s take the body horror Together, released in July, as an example. The degree to which this film was understood as an Australian feature varied greatly.
The film was shot in Melbourne, but set in Washington, United States. And while it was written and directed by Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks, it starred American actors Dave Franco and Alison Brie. It is both very Australian, and yet almost unrecognisable as an Australian film.
An ode to opera
The Travellers, on the other hand, is very recognisably Australian, from the establishing shot of Perth, to the next shot of the iconic Qantas 737 touching down to return protagonist Stephen Seary (Luke Bracey) to his troubled West Australian family. Beresford has compellingly and unashamedly anchored his story in an Australia many of us recognise.
Alongside his substantial film credits (including Driving Miss Daisy, Mao’s Last Dancer and Ladies in Black), Beresford is also an accomplished opera director.
In The Travellers, which he both writes and directs, he revels in telling the tale of acclaimed stage designer Stephen Seary, who returns to his regional hometown to attend to his dying mother, Enid (Christine Jeffery), and his recalcitrant, curmudgeonly father, Fred (Bryan Brown).
Just as ballet was displayed so beautifully in Mao’s Last Dancer (2009) as vibrant, contemporary and accessible, Beresford’s portrayal of opera (albeit not the Australian staging of opera) can’t be faulted in its love for the form.
The Travellers feels very much of a piece with Australian writer/director Bill Bennett’s successful 2024 theatrical release The Way, My Way, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles Bennett’s efforts to complete the Camino de Santiago trail in Spain.
Tonally, both films share what might be described as a “heightened naturalism”. In The Travellers, this works well in scenes where Brown plays the well-recognised archetype of an older, grumpy, blokey dad.
But this tone is less effective in other scenes, such as when a minor character has to convincingly throw a punch at Stephen – or when we have to suspend disbelief as a live stream of Verdi’s La Traviatta holds an outback pub transfixed.
In one of the film’s several moments of opera boosterism, two industry folk gently rib each other on the state of Australian opera, which is “still staging the same six operas every year”. This is followed by a telling hypothetical: “what if they showed the same six films in cinemas every year?”
There won’t be five other titles much like The Travellers in Australian cinemas this year, or any other year. Its window to be seen is brief, not unlike the Verdi arias Beresford so carefully captures in the film.
But those who do see it will be rewarded with a gently unfurling yarn that delivers on the promise of Beresford’s and Brown’s brand of prestige Australian drama.
The Travellers is in cinemas from today.
