The Age: Top 5 films of the week (Written by Jake Wilson)

In the spirit of Godard and Wong Kar-Wai, local writer-director Matthew Victor Pastor throws every available idea into this wild goose chase through Melbourne after dark, following various would-be pick-up artists, the women they pursue, and a documentary filmmaker (Bridget O'Brien) whose quest for clarity parallels Pastor's own. An arresting introduction to a talent going places. 

Signs of Life: The 2010s by Bill Mousoulis

Top 10 Australian films of the 2010s as seen in PURE SHIT: AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

Number 3: MELODRAMA / RANDOM / MELBOURNE!

The emblematic film of the current crop of young filmmakers in Australia, pushing the boundaries of cinema. If you want to know what the "alternative" to mainstream cinema is in Australia at the moment, look at this film. Cinema-savvy (Wong meets Godard), bursting with style (different screens, words on the screen karaoke style, wild performances), incisive social critiquing (millenials, racism, the city out of control), MELODRAMA/RANDOM/MELBOURNE! is a rush of neon and music that is unbelievably breathless. And, yes, it is the "Breathless" of the current Australian New Wave.

Pastor is, as I've said many times before, a "phenomenon". A vibrant and imaginative filmmaker, with a committed team around him, he is currently making his films quickly, and constantly trying his hand at new styles and themes. A Filipino-Australian, he is very much like an Asian filmmaker, like a Wong or Tsai or Sono or his fellow countryman, Lav Diaz. Art cinema, formalist exploration, genre work and even spoof genre work – his range is impressive, even if the results fall flat at times. At his best, his work is daring and dazzling, as in the quasi-musical MELODRAMA/RANDOM/MELBOURNE! (2018) or the giallo spoof alternating with auto-biographical portrait MAGANDA! Pinoy Boy vs Milk Man (2018).

Review by Armando Dela Cruz in UNREEL

How does one make an incisive discussion about Filipino diaspora? By busting out the good ol’ Karaoke machine, that’s how. Or at least in Matthew Victor Pastor’s beholding  “Melodrama / Random / Melbourne!”, in Cine-O-Ke!, a series of songs played over vignettes of people, lost and losing it in Australia. There’s one for each facet of life, it seems—sex, connection, and finally, family. They’re set to falsely whimsical alt-rock tunes and against the backdrop of a neon-rimmed nighttime Melbourne. These interstitial vignettes happen in-between confessionals, shot in profile and black-and-white, by Aries (Bridget O’Brien), a Fil-Australian who’s making a film about the tapestry that is dating, the hopeful but possibly futile famine for meaningful connection.

For a good while, the film builds itself around the framework of its protagonist’s documentary. But on the film unfurls and ultimately reveals its documentarian, not as its all-seeing narrator but simply another character suspect to the film’s “might induce emotion” vignettes. We learn that she has a sister, named Angela (Celina Yuen), a dancer moonlighting as a hoodwinking empress, tied with a collective of man-boys selling a pre-packaged service that teaches unskilled males the language of suave. We are offered dubiety Aries feels of her own film, worried if it’s truthful to the existence of Asian-Australians. And we’re met by her mother, Agnes (Rachel Javier), who lodges existentially in a country that beckons but only reluctantly embraces.

Here, it clicks. Talking heads become characters, and red-eyed accounts become disheartening stories of everyday race and gender oppression. Conversations start to carry greater emotion and weight. All of which contributes to its immensely fascinating experiment in structure, and it’s through this narrative flip-flopping that Pastor’s film depicts the Fil-Australian existence with boundless cinematic vigor, even if some of its points don’t quite land.

3.5/5

Above average from down under by Oggs Cruz, Rappler

A stunning discovery, Matthew Victor Pastor’s Melodrama/Random/Melbourne! is a pastiche of many attempts – both somewhat successful or outright failures – to be something. Vague in terms of form and substance, the film, without even perusing its scatterings of plot and characters, is a brash reflection of the waywardness and captivating caprice of the unique millennial culture brought about by cross-border migration. The setting here is Melbourne, a city that the film depicts as one that is undergoing transformation into a bustling center of distinct Asian influences. However, its young and rebellious citizens, heirs of those from a generation that needed to make the city its home, are themselves repelling the waves of new migration, sowing seeds of division.

The film isn’t as dreary and serious as I make it out to be. If anything, the Melodrama/Random/Melbourne! wears its struggle for a definite and distinct identity on its sleeve. It is fun, sometimes to the point of never really knowing whether it wants to be grave or satirical. It never settles, morphing from one thing to another, never focusing on a single character or a story thread, and always evolving its moods and aims. It belatedly coheres near the end, trying to close some plot points in an effort to assemble a thesis, one that involves the fates – disparate but both dealing with the dilemmas of persisting in a land where being women and of foreign descent have apparent consequences – of the two daughters of a Filipina immigrant.