A Journey Through Time: The Revival of Going Down
Before James Reyne became a household name in the Australian music scene with his band Australian Crawl, he was exploring a different path. He was studying to be an actor at the Victorian College of the Arts, where he met Vera Plevnik, a talented student from the year above him. Their relationship blossomed, and they became a couple.
“She was a big personality,” Reyne recalls from his home on the Mornington Peninsula, an hour out of Melbourne. “A very vivacious woman. I was attracted to that. I don’t know what she saw in me, but anyway.”
Over time, their paths diverged. Reyne pursued a successful music career, beginning with the 1979 hit Beautiful People and later the classic The Boys Light Up. Meanwhile, Plevnik gained recognition as a rising star in Australian television and film. She won a Logie award in 1980 for her role in The Sullivans and appeared in the film Monkey Grip.
It was another film that Plevnik had almost finished shooting when she died in a car accident in early 1982—Haydn Keenan’s gritty, energetic drama Going Down—that brought Reyne and Plevnik back together in a way.
Keenan remembers Reyne calling him to offer a song for the soundtrack out of affection for Plevnik. Reyne, however, thinks it was the other way around. Regardless, Going Down opens with Reyne singing What’s It Like over a tracking shot of the carnage from a party in a Sydney share house.
A Film That Captured a Moment in Time
Centring on four young women (played by Plevnik, Tracy Mann, Julie Barry, and Moira MacLaine-Cross) on a last night out before one leaves for New York, Going Down was warmly reviewed but so disliked by cinema distributors that Keenan had to release it himself in 1983. It found an audience at Sydney’s long-gone Roma cinema but flopped in Melbourne.
The cast also included David Argue, who played a roller-skating employment office clerk and a drag queen, and Esben Storm, who portrayed a sordid writer. Cameos by Hugh Keays-Byrne, Claudia Karvan as a child, former barrister Charles Waterstreet, and activist Gary Foley added to the film’s eclectic mix.
Reyne loved Going Down all those years ago and believes it showcases Plevnik’s talent as an actress.
“I remember laughing and going, ‘This is just life, this is just how we live.’ We all lived in share houses. We went to those sort of parties. Every era has its own drug culture. [In Sydney then] it was Mandrax and booze.”
A Second Life for a Forgotten Film
Going Down was a long-forgotten Australian film that captured a moment in the nation’s social history until an American filmmaker and distributor, Elizabeth Purchell, found an imported VHS of it in a New York video store. She liked that it was a female-centred film that was “so evocative of the time and place” and had a catchy soundtrack featuring Pel Mel, Dynamic Hepnotics, and The Birthday Party.
After Keenan found generous film industry friends who restored it in 4K, Going Down had a boutique cinema release in the US in May last year. It’s now getting a second life—more than four decades on—in Australian cinemas.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Reyne said of the revival. “There’s a great energy around the film because it came out of somewhere real—having to scrimp and save to make the film—and Haydn was probably pulling favours all over the place and using a core group of people.”
A Rare Focus on Female Stories
Reyne appreciates that Going Down was about young women, which was rare in contemporary Australian films at the time.
“They took drugs as well, got messed up and had fights and loved each other. It was real.”
Keenan is “totally excited” that Going Down, having been restored so well that it looks better than it originally did, is heading back to cinemas.
“It’s $100,000 worth of work that I couldn’t have paid for,” he said. “The old-school film family saved the picture. It’s given young people the chance to see that there were different sorts of films being made. I think we’ve got two audiences: the old ones who saw it originally and want to go back and see how young and gorgeous they used to be. Then there’s a new young crowd going, ‘How come we haven’t heard about this film?’”
Keenan says Going Down was made at a time when there was an explosive energy in Australian culture.
“That’s one of the things it reflects—the nightlife in [Kings] Cross, the live bands everywhere,” he said.
“Things are so different now. Trying to raise money for feature films is now a Herculean task. To get a film in cinemas, you deserve an Order of Australia.”
Keenan still thinks of Plevnik’s death as a tragedy.
“It was so, so horrible,” he said. “She was an enormous talent and had a massive career in front of her.”
Going Down is in cinemas from May 14.
