Peter Vanessa “Troy” Davies has a curious place in the Australian cultural landscape – not so much indelible as intangible. The career of the late cross-dressing artist, actor and performer was etched in the post-punk drug-washed haze of Melbourne circa the 80s, around the time a friend and collaborator, Michael Hutchence of INXS, was rising to stardom.
Davies’ celebrity – like many of the findings in this new film, which investigates his life and returns paradoxical results – is a bit of a contradiction: not famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, but famous enough for a feature-length documentary executive produced by Bono and Ben Mendelsohn.
Co-directors Richard Lowenstein (Dogs in Space, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand) and Lynn-Maree Milburn (In Bob We Trust, John Safran’s Race Relations) approach their elusive subject’s life as one great big puzzle with plenty of mismatched pieces, arriving at an overall picture that looks more than a little disorderly.
In a sense Ecco Homo plays like a younger, cooler, queer relative of Gillian Armstrong’s 2006 film Unfolding Florence: the Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst, another highly creative documentary about a part-time artist and full-time shit spinner with a foot in celebrity and pop culture.
A conga line of talent including several film and music producers, friends and family, Bono and the director, Kriv Stenders, reflect mixed feelings and memories of Davies, a long-time sex worker and drug addict who died in 2007. He had an opportunity to make it as a musician after producing two singles (in 1988 and 1990), but blew his album advance on parties and drugs. The consensus is that he was a shapeshifting figure, adept at presenting different versions of himself depending on who was around.
Lowenstein and Milburn varnish Ecco Homo in beautiful and slightly surreal production values. They give it a polished texture that feels alchemistic, almost liquefied, as if you don’t just watch the film but end up kind of covered in it.
Proceedings begin mysteriously, with grainy, sun-dipped, wobbly, retro footage of children playing outside; then the otherworldly vision of a topless man with deer antlers affixed to his face. The intensity of images is scaled back but the sense of style remains.
In his framing of interviewees, the cinematographer, Andrew de Groot, incorporates the very contemporary technique of dictating attention by blurring out the background or other portions of the frame. It’s a stylistic choice overused in narrative cinema, but Lowenstein and Milburn (also the editors) show it can scrub up a beaut in documentary, the foggy presence of liquor bottles and candlelit-bar style decorations providing some slick arty scaffolding.
Davies appears from the grave in lo-fi footage recorded before he died, smoking, drinking and yabbering on about this and that. Light years from a gooey group love-in, interviewees describe him as scheming, twisted, monstrous, calculating, game-playing and self-sabotaging. Also brilliant, charismatic, beautiful, seductive – and on it goes.
Things get next-level weird when the directors find themselves investigating allegations of incest, dedicating a significant chunk of the film to it. They speak to each of Davies’ brothers, who offer conflicting accounts.
Impressively, given how greatly that could have signalled a tonal shift, it doesn’t feel like the directors are in over their heads. There’s a sense from the start – the vision of the antler man; the film’s early enigmatic recreations of night club performances – that Ecco Homo has a dark and abstract complexity at its core. It was clearly intended to be a detective story; participants are even listed as “witnesses” in the credits.
Much like knowing Davies might have felt like in real life, there’s a tantalising – though not entirely satisfying – incompleteness to the documentary that feels like the inevitable result of pouring so much effort into investigating such a slippery piece of work.
If last year’s Women He’s Undressed – another investigation into a legendary Australian sort-of celebrity – felt like cracking open a bottle of champagne at the world’s most fabulous wake, Ecco Homo feels much freakier, the cinematic equivalent of taking acid at a funeral.
• Ecco Homo is playing as part of the Mardi Gras film festival, from 18 February to 3 March
