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WHO-WILL-DO-IT: Four of 2:37’s troubled teens
by MATTHEW HAYS
Murali K. Thalluri has what every young filmmaker could possibly hope for. At 22 years of age, his directorial debut, 2:37, has received rave reviews on the festival circuit, a legion of online admirers and words of praise from the likes of Gus Van Sant and Kevin Smith. When I interviewed him, the Australian director had been keeping up a packed interview schedule at the Toronto International Film Festival, where 2:37 had its North American premiere. “I always feel so terrified at screenings,” he confides. “I’m never quite sure about how an audience will react to such a personal film.”
For the most part, pretty damn well, as it turns out. 2:37 is a sombre, unblinking look into the lives of six disillusioned students. The film’s narrative plays itself out in reverse; the opening images are of a bloody suicide scene discovered by a teacher in a dorm. The film then becomes a who-will-do-it, rewinding to the beginning of the day to show us its characters dealing with a broad range of issues—from medical concerns to being gay to rape—and finally letting us in on who decided to pack it in. People have praised 2:37 for its gritty realism and solid performances, comparing it in style and narrative structure to Van Sant’s 2003 riff on Columbine, Elephant.
But as sweet as all the accolades are for Thalluri, the unassuming young filmmaker points out that this place of success and happiness couldn’t be further away from where he was a few years ago. And that incredibly dark period in his life is where 2:37 comes from. It was just over three years ago when Thalluri learned that a very dear friend of his had committed suicide in a particularly bloody and horrific manner, apparently after a long period of simply being unable to cope with severe depression. Thalluri’s own sense of shock and sorrow only grew when he received a package that his friend had mailed before their death, and with it a videotaped suicide note, in which his friend cried about their life and their own feelings of helplessness. Six months later, Thalluri found himself overwhelmed by his own grief, unable to mourn for his friend in a healthy way. “I just didn’t feel equipped for what happened,” he says now. “I couldn’t deal with it. I was having ongoing health problems with my kidneys and my dream of becoming a filmmaker seemed hopeless.”
Paralysing thoughts
AVOIDING POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: Thalluri Thalluri then attempted to take an overdose and end his life. It didn’t work, and when Thalluri regained consciousness, he lay paralysed for several days. In this time, he realized what a mistake he’d made, and decided that if he did manage to recover, he’d put all of his energy into turning his horrid experiences with suicide into creating a movie—a living document that he hoped might touch others who are suffering with suicidal feelings.
“I think, for a long time, there was a mistaken sense that if you didn’t talk about suicide, we were all better off,” Thalluri argues. “I think we’re now at the point that we were with rape in the ’70s. Back then, that issue wasn’t discussed—but they started to, which improved the situation. Now they run ads on TV about suicide prevention. People need to know that there are others going through the same thing in order to prevent it.”
Thalluri wrote a screenplay, and then began to think about possible investors for his film. (The film’s title is derived from the exact moment in time that his friend committed suicide.) Thalluri says he went to his local bookstore and read every book he could find about film, theatre and television, and studied Australia’s tax system so he could find out where the loopholes were, in order to maximize financing for the project. He began to assemble a team, and to travel to find international backing for the project. It was a two-year journey, from the moment he recovered from his own suicide attempt to the completion of 2:37.
While conceiving of an aesthetic quality for the film—it’s a stark, realistic movie, and yet there’s also a sense of heightened drama that hangs over it—Thalluri says he was acutely aware that when you put something on the big screen, even something as horrific as suicide can seem somehow glorified. “Films like The Rules of Attraction, and even 13, have tended to make the things that they’ve wanted to expose also seem cool. I didn’t want to do that at all. Much as I love Gus Van Sant, the suicide in Last Days, the climb into the heavens, I just felt I couldn’t do it like that. My feeling was, if I’m going to show suicide, I’m not going to flinch or cut away. I’m going to show the pain and suffering. But more than anything, I wanted to show the regret. When you see how we’ve depicted it, I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind who would say it’s sexy or that it’s glorified. We show the reality.
“I think it’s a myth that more reporting on suicide, or more representation of it, creates more suicide. I wanted to avoid any political correctness while making this film.”
Aussie controversy
In terms of its visual style, 2:37 has drawn numerous comparisons to Elephant. “And there are a lot of the same ingredients in both films,” notes Thalluri. “The most amazing thing was when Gus [Van Sant] saw it, he called me up, and I was like, ‘Who’s this?’ And he says, ‘It’s Gus.’ I almost dropped the phone! He said 2:37 was a lot like Elephant, but that 2:37 had a plot. I was just so amazed that he took the time to call me.”
With the contentious issue of suicide at its core, it wasn’t too long before 2:37 began to inspire controversy. But it wasn’t the representation of suicide that led to Thalluri coming under attack. The trouble began when journalists in Australia asked for Thalluri to hand over the videotape that his friend had sent him before dying. “I couldn’t believe it,” Thalluri says. “They wanted to broadcast it, or parts of it, on television. There was just no way I was going to do that. It would have made my friend’s family’s pain all the worse. It would have been terribly exploitative.”
And Thalluri contends that declining the request made a few of those Australian journalists very angry, and they turned on him. They began to question the authenticity of the story of his friend’s suicide. “Because I’d succeeded, they really wanted to bring me down. They were hanging around my house at 11 p.m., waiting for my sister to get home, trying to dig up some dirt on me. They quoted an anonymous teacher at my school. But Kevin Smith, who’d seen the film and was a fan, came to my defence and blasted them. That shut them up. I really thanked Kevin for that.”
But aside from that, Thalluri chooses to focus on the positive impact that 2:37 has had. “My dream for 2:37 came a week ago when I got an e-mail from someone who said that he had been seriously considering suicide. He even sent me a link to a site that told him how he could do it. Then he saw the film, and he said once he’d heard my story, he was intent upon turning his life around and not ending it. When I hear about positive effects like these, that really makes the entire film worth it.”
And what’s next for Thalluri, after such an auspicious debut? “I don’t think I want to do anything with teens next time,” he says. “I like Larry Clark’s work, but I don’t want to be a director whose only focus seems to be the same thing.”
Then, Thalluri offers a strange confession: “A dream of mine would be to direct a Michael Jackson video. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say that, but I don’t mind. He’s a great pop star and he’s been misjudged.”
2:37 opens this Friday, April 27
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