A Grand Mockery had its international première at Fantasia 2025, 20 July
Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon’s A Grand Mockery opens with Josie (played by Dixon) wandering through a graveyard and settling on a bench with a view over Brisbane’s CBD in the distance. We hear his voiceover reading a letter addressed to ‘Sal’, in which Josie states the time and his precise location, before he offers detailed descriptions of the different birds, oblivious to the dead, that he can see from his vantage, ponders the cemetery’s ‘postal system’ of niches where he leaves his missives, and imagines “our country going up in flames.” Although we never find out exactly who Sal is, it seems safe to assume that he is someone from whose loss Josie is still struggling to recover – a necropolitan addressee who in fact never responds to the many letters that punctuate the film, and an absence that comes to define Josie’s own empty presence and yearning for what has passed.
A man seemingly with one foot already in the grave and a living-dead portrait in isolation and introversion, Josie is alone (but for his ghosts) at the cemetery, and later alone even at a house party – and though he is central to A Grand Mockery, he is never entirely in focus, owing to the deep grain of the film’s 8mm format. Josie will revisit the cemetery many times over the course of the circling narrative, and in between he has other rituals and routines: working in the “strange world” of a cinema multiplex where he mostly cleans up customers’ vomit, urine and shit; trying to create art in his noisy apartment or visiting his pre-school teacher girlfriend Nelly (Katie Dillon) in hers; checking in on his grandfather (Colin Collins) who, though still living, is as unresponsive as Sal; watching TV (including an audible news show promising an item on a “man who says he’s living in a dead body”) and drinking with fellow artist and alcoholic Jim (James Louis O’Leary – a real-life surrealist/religious painter).
As these repetitive scenes unfold, we are also watching their established patterns distort and fragment, as shy Josie slowly comes apart and succumbs to mental illness. This is marked by the gradual intrusion of Josie’s subjectivity into the frame, including his glitchy hallucinations, vivid realisations of his workplace paranoia, his ever more bizarre rants in voiceover (morbidly obsessed with bodily functions and excretions), juddery visits to a doctor (Edward Smits) and exorcist (Amelia J. Knox) that barely seem anchored to any reality, culminating in a lengthy sequence towards the film’s end where Josie spends the night drinking in a backroad bar that is half Kubrickian Gold Room, part Lynchian Other Place, and very probably all dreamt up in Josie’s addled, intoxicated mind. “You may not actually be here,” a stoned man tells Josie at a party, “nobody’s here… it’s a construction in your own head” – and ever so gradually, A Grand Mockery gives way to such solipsism.
As Josie drives through the darkness in the car he has taken from Nelly, the DJ on the radio introduces a band named “The Josie Experiment”. It is a phrase that serves just as well to describe Briggs and Dixon’s film, which is an experimental portrait of a depressed, lonely man (named Josie) who expressly hopes to become an aestheticised object. “Tell me I’m a work of art!”, Josie drunkenly demands after after Jim has covered his drunken Josie’s torso and face with colourful patches of paint as though he were a canvas for one of Jim’s works. Later, drunk and high on his grandfather’s pills, Josie will wrap his own face in bandages, which he continues wearing to the film’s bitter end. Despite his lack of any physical wounds, those bandages are a potent signifier of his status both as someone deeply damaged, and as an invisible man whose mental decline is not always obvious for others to see.
Meanwhile Josie’s prayers to become art are fulfilled by A Grand Mockery itself, which takes an ordinary man – indeed a regular Joe – and makes him extraordinary by foregrounding him against a backdrop of underground arthouse sensibilities. This is a tragedy whose protagonist, found on civilisation’s margins from the very start, will eventually abandon the city altogether on a one-way trip into the rainforest and his own unravelling nature. It is a singular and strange odyssey, where ultimately Queensland’s and Josie’s interiors merge into a single psychogeographical space – with the loud tropical birdlife remaining every bit as indifferent to all the human drama and death below.
strap: The Josie Experiment: Adam C. Briggs and Sam Dixon’s unravelling 8mm odyssey is a portrait of an artist as a young damaged man
© Anton Bitel
