Director: Joshua Trett
Writer: Joshua Trett
Cast: Kyle Malan, Darcy Winters, Will Pierson, Mark Nash, David Norfolk
Running time: 15mins
As a hideously clammy May gives way to the relentless heat of June, the dread of another ‘unusually hot’ summer looms ahead. And for a generation of young adults, on top of the horrors our changing climate has in store, that also means returning to the nightmares of the summer job.
Joshua Trett’s third film submitted to Indy Film Library follows Isaac (Kyle Malan), as he slogs his way through seemingly endless shifts at a local pub – occupying the bottom rung of the ladder in its ecosystem; Potwash. In an understaffed rural kitchen, Isaac is not only expected to wash plates and cutlery, though – he is treated as an end-to-end skivvy by the pub’s gnarled head chef (Mark Nash).
Nash is excellent, in exuding a very particular kind of disdain for his young employee. Whatever Isaac’s life is like beyond the walls of the pub (we don’t learn if he is a student, hoping for a career in cuisine, or just taking whatever work he can get), he has significantly more time, more potential, than the old and embittered chef – who uses every opportunity he can to take his own frustrations out on the pot washer. He doesn’t just give him tasks he hopes to see done – he gives Isaac tasks he knows he doesn’t understand, while withholding the basic training to complete them.
When Isaac is tasked with cleaning and debearding mussels, this comes to a head. I did double-check to see if this was a particularly realistic workload. I know people who have worked in pot wash, who have never been asked to prepare food – especially shellfish, which, as Gordon Ramsay so often screamed in Kitchen Nightmares can “KILL PEOPLE” when mishandled. But I also know that in smaller kitchens, with limited resources, this is the kind of task that does sometimes get delegated to pot wash.
Isaac dumps the mussels into a sink, and covers them in hot water. That is to some degree a failure of common sense. But it is also a failure that Isaac has been set up for, by a chef who knows he is more interested in a future which lays away from this backwater bar, a bar that – after all his years of graft – is as good as it will probably ever get for the chef. So, the chef seizes the opportunity to lay into Isaac – and to revel in his lack of ‘street smarts’, to gloss over the ways his youth makes the chef conscious of his own disappointments, and his own mortality.
The doe-eyed Malan is well cast as Isaac, absorbing the malice from Nash’s skulking super-ego of a chef. And overall, it’s an interesting inversion of the usual focus on the other end of the food chain – so often a restaurant-story centres on the head of the kitchen, treating them as an auteur, or a conductor of a chaotic orchestra, and the drama hinging largely on their shortcomings or their brilliance as a result. There is potential here to show what life is like at the foot of that pyramid though – for the many other workers without whom everything falls apart; and the pressures the pretentions or proclivities of their bosses place them under.
But that potential of exploring that dynamic, and exploring the toxic class relations that many restaurant-based movies and television reinforce, largely goes begging. Trett’s script is determined to introduce two other characters into proceedings: a jovial buddy in the form of a sous chef played by Will Pierson, and a love-interest – the only other character with a name – Charlotte, played by Darcy Winters. While both actors give solid performances in their archetypal roles, interactions with them feel more like an opportunity for exposition around things Isaac likes (the big one being music – and burning ‘mixtape’ CDs for his friends) than developing him, or them, to tell a story.
This lack of development means that when things take a dark turn, after the revelry of a feel-good musical montage, it doesn’t feel earned. Losing one of the side characters – or indeed, the musical montage – might have left more time and space for a more gradual shift in tone. But when things finally come to a head between Isaac and his apparently tyrannical chef, the outcome feels genuinely disconnected, and disturbing.
Without getting into spoilers, there are some things I think you can justify doing to a bad employer. There are some terrible bosses out there, and I wouldn’t argue against some terrible things happening to them as a result. But Isaac crosses a line, and then some – especially considering the extent of the crimes we see or hear the chef commit. There is some hinted suggestion that he might have done something which warrants his ‘comeuppance’, but this is also delivered in such a minimalised and non-committal way, that even giving Isaac the benefit of the doubt, it is hard not to feel there were other ways to explore these themes in a less gratuitous, moral pantomime. And considering this film felt like it was shining a light on the lives, hopes and struggles of young workers in an economy that is actively hostile to them, this ending very much undermines that.
If the aim was to make a film about a psychic break, where a protagonist suddenly is shown in the cold light of day to be a psychopath, then I missed the point – and the conclusion is very well done. But if that was the case, nothing in the build-up hints as to why that story is being told, or what we might take away from the experience.
There are plenty of things this production got right. As is generally the case with anything Trett’s team puts out, it is a treat visually – each frame coming alive with colour and with depth – while the performances of the cast are pitch perfect for each character. The key downfall here is that the script does not give them enough to use those skills on, or to help build a better rounded story for us to engage with. Either this needed to be longer – with more time to flesh out each character, but logistically also harder to shoot – or it needed fewer characters in the kitchen. Too many cooks, as they say…
