TRAILERS

New US Trailer for Australian Absurdist Satire 'Friends and Strangers'

by Alex Billington
February 7, 2022
Source: YouTube

"Is it about what's right, or what's practical?" Grasshopper Film has revealed a new US trailer for Friends and Strangers, an experimental indie from Australia which originally premiered at last year's Rotterdam Film Festival. The film also played at New Directors/New Films Fest and the Chicago Film Festival last year. Friends and Strangers follows two upper-middle class wanderers in a dryly comic exploration displacement and ennui in contemporary Australia. Reviews talk about how eccentric but uniquely amusing it is: "Friends and Strangers had me cackling at its dry and gleeful absurdity… it's mumblecore par excellence but laced with a satire of white Australia and its historical amnesia." I can't figure out what to make of the couple in the middle of this trailer. Is it about them, and what's happening to them, or about something else going on and they're just a part of the bigger picture? This film also has one of the best new posters of the year so far.

Here's the official trailer (+ posters) for James Vaughan's Friends and Strangers, from YouTube:

Ray & Alice (Fergus Wilson & Emma Diaz), two Australian twentysomethings that are living cushioned, comfortable lives in affluent Sydney, don’t have any real problems, and that’s their problem. This non-dilemma becomes fodder for wry, incisive comedy of everyday social mortification in writer/director/editor Vaughan’s ennui-drenched Friends and Strangers, in which molehill difficulties—an impromptu camping trip that fails to lead to a desired communion, a series of misunderstandings revolving around a wedding video—take on mountainous significance. A startlingly original piece of work located somewhere at the intersection of screwball comedy and cringe comedy, Antonioniesque alienation, and Rohmerian ravishment, and an exemplary work of art that calls into question the value of art in a modern world that has reduced it to nothing more than a marker of social status. Friends and Strangers is both written and directed by Australian filmmaker James Vaughan, making his feature directorial debut with this film. It originally premiered at the 2021 Rotterdam Film Festival last year. Grasshopper Film release Friends and Strangers in select US theaters + "at home" via Metrograph starting on February 25th, 2022 this winter.

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