Romper Stomper

Hando is the leader of a gang of Neo-Nazi skinheads which he controls with the help of his right-hand, Davey. The gang members are bitter, unemployed and full of hatred and their only pastime is to fight immigrants in their surroundings. Young, rootless Gabe is drawn into the violent world of the gang. She becomes Hando's girl friend, but also develops a friendship with Handa's only friend Davey. When a group of Vietnamese buy the local pub, the result is a bloody showdown which marks the beginning of the end of the gang.

Comment:
”They exist in Australia too ... ?”
Of course my first reaction after seeing Australian Romper Stamper was idiotic. Why shouldn't there be any skinheads, this dreg of European colonial mentality, in Australia?
The director and script writer Geoffrey Wright describes a group of neo-nazi skinheads. He shows them in their intoxicated aggression, in their adrenalin explosions of violence and in their bitter sobs of misery.
This is what makes the film so remarkable. It takes the skinheads seriously as human beings, not just as a threat, as
representatives of depression or just pure stupidity. The violence doesn't only strike the beaten Vietnamese. it also eats into to the perpetrators and tears them apart inside and tears them apart from eachother.
It all feels like the real thing, like the reality behind the headlines. At times the fiction resembles a documentary. It could have happened just like this. Notice one detail. A policeman shoots one of the gang members to death. There is chaos and suddenly the trigger has been pulled. The image of the frightened face of the shooting police stays on the screen an extra second, as if to show that we can never hide behind anonymous roles in the machinery of society. Look at that scene as a key to Geoffrey Wright's cinematographic narrative art. His visual imagery can resemble both the flickering images of the music video and the staccato of the action movie, but its starting point is always the individual human being.
Helena von Zweigbergk

Medverkande
Russell Crowe, Daniel Pollock: Producent
Daniel Scharf, Ian Pringle: Manus
Geoffrey Wright: Foto
Ron Hagen: Musik
John Clifford White: Talat språk
English