Aren’t We in Europe is an hour-long 2012 Australian student film, created by Matthew Williams and available on
YouTube here
. It is about the two British immigrants in Australian city of Adelaide, Edmund Grant Canary-Wharf and Winston David Westminster, neither of whom are quite right in the head. For the past 50 or so years since their arrival, they managed to avoid publicity, but now they are found by a student seeking to interview them for his project, which forces them to confront the reality of their world. Or at least, that's what it could have been like. The final product
has to be read as an absurdist production in order to make any sort of sense.
This film features the following tropes:
- Cerebus Rollercoaster: While the overall tone is generally light-hearted, in its latter half it switches between a serious death with legal consequences and flashbacks to care-free slapstick in the present.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Both leads, starting with the fact that they thought they were living in Austria for the last 50 or so years, and dismissed the signs as being spelt wrong.
- Downer Ending: Edmund ends up arrested and Winston’s fate is in question too.
- Flashback: Used in the middle of the film when Winston remembers of how Edmund broke his back years ago.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The poor student gets cut in half in a car crash, at least according to the dialogue between the two.
- Insistent Terminology: Edmund and Winston weren’t soldiers, but cooks, and always point that fact out.
- Knight of Cerebus: The red-haired female lawyer is introduced immediately after the death of the student and introduces all the serious elements like the police arrest.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Parodied when the third veteran is interviewed:
“So you actually fought in a war?”
“Oh, yes, and with machine guns, when enemy pilots were blown into the bloody chunks …”
- Made of Iron: In keeping with the film’s somewhat-slapstick nature, Winston shrugs off having a canister of oil poured down his throat.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: On his way to their friend’s house, Winston sees a house burn, and a demon inside. It is never directly stated whether this was magical or a hallucination (though Winston has clear hallucinations later on in the film).
- Miles Gloriosus: To their credit, both Edmund and Winston avert this trope, always making it clear that they were nothing but cooks at the time.
- Random Events Plot: The way film plays out overall.
- Shout-Out: Some clumsy ones to the director’s previous film, Diamond’s Cut: the school has a poster of it hanging on the wall and it is directly named on a couple of occasions as well.
- Stock British Phrases: Used a lot throughout the film by Winston, in a parody of sorts on traditional tropes.
- There Are No Therapists: In any sort of a slightly realistic setting, Edmund and Winston would have been institutionalised years before the beginning of the film.
- Too Dumb to Live: Letting obviously unstable Edmund drive the car? That student had no chance.
