F*king Adelaide (2017), now streaming on Amazon Prime, is a comedy-drama about a family drawn back to Adelaide when Mom makes an Earth-shattering announcement. There are six 15-minute long episodes. I watched the first, about Eli.
Scene 1: Adelaide, 1999. A boy in drag is singing to his two sisters as they hide in a sheet-draped-over-chairs tent from their yelling, smashing-things parents. He stumbles, but his older sister tells him to just keep singing: "One day you'll get out of here, and you'll be a massive star. I know it."
Scene 2: Sydney now. The adult Eli (Brendan Maclean), wearing a weird headdress, is trying to perform on a broken keyboard. Cut to him kissing his girlfriend in their apartment. He's straight? WTF?
It was a misdirection -- Eli is still trying to perform in a coffee house that looks like an apartment. He is angry because the couple is kissing instead of paying attention.
It probably wasn't a misdirection for Australians. Brendan Maclean is a well-known queer musician, with six EPS, two albums, and a number of songs for tv episodes.
He became infamous in 2017 with the music video for his song "House of Air," which pretends to be a training video on "homosexual encounters" around 1980. Strangely, the performers actually engage in the more unusual acts, which may be gross to some viewers, but just simulate the everyday acts.
Brendan was interviewed in Issue 2 of You Otter Know, a queer zine produced by Harry Clayton-Wright during the COVID lockdown in 2020-21. He discusses "lip synching in a jock, hands tied to an over-hanging bar as I'm whipped by a gimp."
He has 14 acting credits listed on the IMDB, including Klipspringer in The Great Gatsby (2013) and How to Make Gravy (2024), "an adaption of Australian music legend Paul Kelly's classic song."
The song is a monologue: a man calls his friend from prison, saying he won't be home to make the gravy for Christmas dinner, so he's giving him the recipe.
After a look at Brendan's butt, we can return to the episode.
"Nope, I'm busy. I've got gigs and a boyfriend and a life. I can't just go running off to Adelaide." 1350 km, a two-three day drive.
The woman in the snogging couple says she used to know a guy from Adelaide. Maybe you know him? That happens when I say I'm from Illinois.
Scene 3: Eli heads to the pub and asks bartender Nathan (Drew Proffitt) to let him perform. "Nope, I pay you to tend bar."
"Ok, then, where are my wages?"
"Oh, I gave them to your boyfriend Peter."
They get into a fight over whether Eli can drink free, and bartender Nathan fires him.
More after the break
Left: Nick Bosa, some sort of sports figure who appears shirtless and buffed in one of the ads that Prime is including in its videos now. Makes you want to return to broadcast tv.
Scene 4: Eli arrives at his apartment to find the door latched. Boyfriend Peter is angry because he hasn't paid rent for three months. "Come back tomorrow and I'll leave your stuff in the hallway for you."
"Wait -- you're breaking up with me?"
"We broke up a long time ago." That explains why the dude is paying rent, but wouldn't you know if your boyfriend broke up with you? The lack of bedroom activity would give me a clue.
Scene 5: With no job, no place to live, no boyfriend, no singing gigs, not even a change of clothes, Eli has no choice but to use Mom's ticket and return to "fucking Adelaide." His sister picks him up, and gives him new clothes. As they drive through the suburbs, he complains that nothing has changed. Funny -- when I go back to Rock Island, I dislike how everything has changed. I don't even recognize the house where I grew up.
This is the younger sister, Kitty, "full of naivity and sexuality," according to Pamela Rabe.
"No, it's changed," sister tells him. "There's heaps to do. It's like Melbourne." There are lots of gay pubs, a sauna, a film festival, a pride festival...
He responds even more rudely, but Kitty keeps up the happy chirping.
They arrive. Mom whoops at him, and notes that she's invited the whole family to discuss something important. Then she sees the clothes that Kitty has given him, and blows up in anger, chasing her into the house.
Scene 5: Kitty runs into her bedroom and locks the door. The family tries to coax her out: "No one is mad at you," the older sister says.
The older sister is Emma (Emma Box), who runs a noprofit in Thailand with her husband Toby (Beau Travis-Williams).
Eli wants to go to bed, but there's someone undressing in his old room. That would be Emma and Toby's daughter, an aspiring magician. She is played by Aud Mason-Hyde (left), nonbinary child of writer/director Sophie Hyde.
Scene 6: Eli returns to the group trying to coax Kitty out of the bedroom to ask Emma to move her daughter out.
"We have this argument every time. We get that room. You get the couch."
Big reveal: Kitty gave Eli some of his clothes. Eli rushes to take them off.
"Where did you even get them? We burned all of his stuff."
"I saved a box...I didn't know it was wrong. I barely knew him."
Everyone smirks: Eli had his stage costume on under his clothes, with a bulge.
Geoff Morrell, who has 84 acting credits on the IMDB, plays Him, the abusive Dad, who apparently isn't dead.
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Left: I couldn't find any frontals of the cast, so here's a random dude.
His phone keeps buzzing, but it's still in his pants, so Eli won't touch them. The sisters retrieve it with tongs.
Apparently he's on a hookup app, but gets no action in Sydney. But here in small-town Adelaide, he's hot stuff. It's the fifth biggest town in Australia, population 1.38 million
They all end up in bed together, with Mum touching their hair. Maybe it's a standard practice in Australia, but...
Time for the Big News. But first, Mom is selling the house! Screaming in agony, Kitty rushes from the room and locks herself in her bedroom to sob hysterically. Eli tries to comfort her through the door. Lady needs lithium if she responds so dramatically to minor news. Wait until she hears the Earth-shaking announcement.
There's a note on Eli's old bedroom door: "Present for you on the couch." He looks: it's the microphone he used to sing to his sisters when they were hiding from abusive Dad, a consolation prize from older sister Emma for taking over his room.
Scene 8: Younger sister Kitty has left the house to walk despondently through the streets of downtown Adelaide. She approaches a man who stopped at the petrol station, and they rush into the restroom for an anonymous encounter. That's one way to overcome your trauma, I guess. The end.
Beefcake: Eli is shirtless a lot
F*king Adelaide: Adelaide is looked down on by the rest of the country as "bland, uninspiring, and sleepy," conservative, with "nothing to do." Someplace to be from, especially if you're LGBTQ. Marriage equality didn't make it to South Australia until 2018.
According to Pamela Rabe, who plays the Mom, this series "perfectly encapsulates the South Australian sensibility of dark self-deprecation mixed with hyper-parochialism. Which may be why I didn't get some of the cultural norms.
Queer Characters: In addition to Eli, Kitty's friend Jade presents as male but wears women's clothes. Eli's hookup Julian is a gay chub.
Cleo has a masculine haircut and wears male-coded clothes, but gets upset when people mistake her for a boy. If your gender presentation doesn't match your gender identiy, you can't get upset if people make a mistake.
My grade: I liked the queer representation, but I can't tell if these people are meant to be despicable, or it's just South Australia culture. And there's a sad ending that's kind of sprung on you. B.
Here is House of air video. https://www.brianandkarl.com/filter/music-video/BRENDAN-MACLEAN-House-of-Air
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