Alena Lodkina’s sophomore release Petrol was a standout feature in MIFF’s 2022 selection and is currently undergoing its theatrical release. The film tracks young film student Eva as she develops her documentary project, becoming enrapt by her subject: a mesmeric performance artist. Petrol fills the shoes of its older sibling Strange Colours, Lodkina’s debut feature back in 2018, but Petrol‘s story is teased out using techniques and textures that enliven conventional storytelling and adds fresh paint to the palette of Lodkina’s work. Here, she experiments with the film form: toying with convention, realism and linearity. With a musing protagonist, this film is entrancing. Amidst a serene soundscape and paired back cinematography, Lodkina evokes a pastel Melbourne and invites inside an honest story about self-discovery, told with an innovative cinematic language.
Last week, I spoke to writer/director Alena Lodkina about the film, where we discussed the Melbourne International Film Festival, convention and character, and the meaning behind the title Petrol.
Madison Stephens: We spoke, roughly four years ago about Strange Colours, and I was excited to speak to you again about your latest feature Petrol. It’s empowering to see the development of Australian filmmakers. And it’s become increasingly clear to me the power certain organisations have in facilitating opportunities for rising stars and mid-career filmmakers. I wanted to start with your experience with MIFF – the Melbourne International Film Festival – having completed the highly competitive the Accelerator Lab program and securing the Premiere fund. What did this process look like for you?
Alena Lodkina: MIFF has been such a formative part of my growth as a filmmaker. I moved to Melbourne in 2012. I moved in the winter and was rushing to get there to catch my first Melbourne Film Festival. It was very exciting. And, you know, even when I was broke and just post being a student, I just always made sure to save up to be able to buy the passport and attend and see movies.
I think that a place where you see films and then they create the spaces where you can hang out and meet filmmakers and talk about them. Every year since then, it’s been an important part of my life, like an arena to watch and experience films and to have conversations about them. And then [with] things like Accelerator, the most important part of it is meeting other people and creating community. MIFF has been the community creating institutions, space, time; however you want to call it. Also, all the parties they throw are just wonderful. You meet people and filmmakers and talk to them and understand their ideas.
There was one year where Albert Serra was out and we got to chat to him all night. And it was just amazing because he’s got such interesting ideas about movies. It’s been an honour to be able to show my work there over the years. And it’s also so wonderful to show work at MIFF because all your friends and family get to go. It’s a festival that has fostered community over the years.
MS: You make a good point. It’s like breaking down those barriers, which I think sometimes can feel really hard to break when you are very first starting out. It’s really powerful that they are able to create that community.
AL: Filmmaking is so much about community because it’s a collective medium. And also because it can be quite lonely out there. To me conversation is also important. It’s important to be able to discuss and argue about films and read about films and write about films and how things change. MIFF has been the most formative festival in that respect.
MS: Yes amazing. Petrol is your second feature following after Strange Colours back in 2018. That film painted an enigmatic portrait of the world of Lightning Ride. And the worlds in Petrol that you engage with, they’re very different. They’re metropolitan, they’re youthful. I sense in Petrol there was quite a push / pull between the young filmmaker Eva and her world. And then there’s Mia thrown into the mix as well. So how do you think, if at all, these characters are in conversation with their world?
AL: Yes. That’s an interesting question. In Petrol there’s a very small journey of Eva from the more isolated family home that is a bit further out, and into the inner suburbs of the city of Melbourne, being swept up in Mia’s world. Inner city world is Mia’s world. So it’s kind of like a micro journey.
MS: It is, and the space of the film industry when you are starting out, can feel sometimes a bit — I don’t know if daunting is the right word, but you’re trying to find your place in it.
AL: A bit. For me, because she’s just a student, the film’s not really about the filmmaker’s journey in the industry so much, because she’s not interested in that. It was more like: she’s a student, she’s someone who’s trying to find a place that is exciting for her and she’s in film school, but she feels kind of isolated in the film school.
And then when she meets Mia, Mia is an entry point into the world of art and ideas, excitement and decadence and beauty. Eva is a romantic, so that’s what she’s seeking. She’s not interested in making it as a filmmaker. That’s what her whole problem is; like, she’s not excited about being in film school because she doesn’t care about making genre films and she doesn’t care about Spielberg and she doesn’t care about all this stuff. She’s like this novice romantic.
And so when she meets Mia, it’s exactly what she wants. Then, of course, she also discovers the bittersweet nature of that world of beauty and ideas, because it proves to be fraught and complex and maddening at times as well. I think it’s about art and beauty: something that you seek, but also something that is dangerous, and destructive. It’s about the destructive side of these things as well.
MS: Yes. And I felt like the dialogue was sometimes quite restrained, which beautifully framed the silences and the expressions between Eva and Mia. And that technique can also invite the audience in to really sit with the characters in those moments, with those emotions. Was there a kind of relationship you were interested in examining through Eva and Mia?
AL: Yes, I mean it’s something I haven’t thought about a whole lot, but it’s quite an interesting note that you make about the restraint of dialogue. I think it’s to do with this film – and probably in my other work as well – I try to seek for a way to have characters talk that is both familiar and a little distracted. I’m on a journey to discover that still because I want my films to feel familiar and recognisable. I work with the actors to give naturalistic performances and for them to feel at ease with the dialogue, like they don’t have to try too hard to hit beats. It’s conversational, but at the same time it’s highly edited and almost literary.
The desire is to abstract things a little bit so that the audience is also in a world that is constructed. It’s a film; it’s not reality. I don’t want people to sound like they do in real life entirely either because it is a work of art and I guess the work of art frames certain things and edits things. And that’s the work that we do. So yes, a little bit of alienation while working in the naturalistic mode.
MS: Mmm. That actually leads on really nicely to the next question that I had, which was about convention. I felt like Petrol walks that line of convention where it’s blending some experimental filmmaking techniques but with a clear and solid story at its heart. And to me, my interpretation of that was: it’s acknowledging experimentation as a means of learning, which speaks to Eva’s journey in that narrative. And you have those meta moments in the film where Eva’s talking to a professor about unconventional storytelling and how he’s saying you need to have a strong grasp on convention in order to break it. I was curious about what your opinions were on convention and breaking it and what inspired you to play with the cinematography, those zooms, the lighting, the surrealism in the piece.
AL: Thank you, that’s a nice way of summing up the elements of the film. I wanted to create something that is original, interesting and is exciting to me and to play with various elements and create a world that was its own. But at the same time, I did also want to create a story that was relatable, that invited people in and that had a clear structure. A simple, clear structure and that coming-of-age journey and loose three acts. When the tutor tells Eva that you have to understand convention in order to break it, it’s such a cliche of a teacher. But at the same time, the joke’s on her because she’s a character who’s very ambitious and a little bit too big for her shoes in some ways.The film makes fun of her as much as any of the other characters because she gets lost because she wants to do so much. She doesn’t know how to do it all yet, and as a result she’s lost and tormented. She gets confused. It’s really a film about getting confused!
The teacher, even if it’s a little simplistic and cliched or whatever, he’s trying to offer her a way of making sense of the work and [give her] something to latch onto. That’s what conventions are; they’re traditions that are agreed on for people to make things a bit easier. And sometimes people make things a little bit too easy for themselves in some kinds of mainstream filmmaking – but I try to be playful with conventions. I also half the time don’t know what I’m doing so it’s good to experiment and take risks.
MS: I also wanted to ask about the title. Naming a project can sometimes feel like a really big thing because you’re trying to distill it down into a metaphor or a feeling. I’m curious: what does ‘petrol’ mean to you and when, during that process of production, was it decided?
AL: Actually, it’s a name that was there from the start of the project. It was even before I wrote the script, I had a document of notes that I started for the film and I called it Petrol. It was a really long time ago in 2014 or 2015 or something. At that point, I didn’t even know what the film was going to become. I just had this seed of the world and the mood. And something about this relationship between two women. And it stuck.
I think it is a very lateral title – I get asked about it a lot. We knew that it was an unusual way to go about naming film such as this. We stuck with it because it felt right. It felt right to give the film a title that was so left of centre. I wanted the audience to go into the film with this image of an urban kind of filth, in the back of their mind, that would offset or create a contrast with the very romantic and youthful story, and gentle story of the film. I think it adds that touch of the forces of power and the exchanges of power that go on in the background. It’s a city film and cities are built on these such things. The title speaks to that, but also, I wanted the audience to go into the film and see: this is a film where the title doesn’t describe the story and you have to make connections and think laterally.
MS: Yes, I like how the document was called Petrol. It’s like that document back then, is fuelling what it then became. It’s like a strange, lovely full circle moment.
AL: That’s such a nice way of putting it!
MS: Last time we spoke I asked you a question about early career advice. And you said something about how you had kept some retail and cafe jobs because they afforded you that flexibility to prioritise creative projects when they popped up. I’m finding that myself: it’s really common that as an early creative to find that your career and your income are very different games! And this film kind of addresses that, you know, that film school feeling of early-career ‘finding out where you want that journey to take you’. So I’m interested, do bits of Eva’s journey feel nostalgic to you at all? Was this writing process a nostalgic one or do you feel that you relate to Eva even now?
AL: Yes, it’s a little bit both actually. I mean, there’s a nostalgia about a certain youthfulness when you’re in your early twenties and that kind of ability to get lost in the world and be so vulnerable. Maybe I don’t miss it entirely, but yeah, it’s an interesting part of one’s life.
I think the precocity is something that I still relate to. In a way, I did put certain preoccupations that I have as an adult into that character as well. I think the life of an artist is unfortunately precarious for most. It’s each to their own and everyone’s on their own path. But yeah, I certainly have experienced that and seen it in my community as well.
MS: I have one more question to wrap it up. At Film in Revolt, we like to bring things back to the mission of empowering young people to pursue film and get involved with the industry. So a question that we like to finish up with is: what is a film from your youth that inspired you then and maybe still inspires you now?
AL: A film that inspired me when I was quite young was Mirror by Andrei Tarkovskyi. It’s a Soviet film and I have Russian background so I was introduced to his work through my parents and it’s just a film that I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. It’s structured entirely in its own way. It’s a really personal film, but it works through association and builds this world. It’s cinematic and personal and mysterious. And it just made perfect sense to me. When I saw it, I was like: oh, I want to make films like this. I probably made things hard for myself by falling in love with that film and not, you know, probably something a bit more…
MS: Bridget Jones’ Diary or something?
AL: Yes – that’s a great film, I love romantic comedies as well. But yes, it just opened up a world and it’s, it’s a film that I still return to. I introduced it at a film festival last year and it was an occasion to revisit it and I was like: I still have so much to learn from this film. It’s just still incredible. And it still mystifies me and inspires me.
MS: Yeah. Wow. That’s lovely!
Thank you so much for speaking with me about the wonderful Petrol and your experiences so far as a filmmaker. I do think it’s always especially exciting to celebrate quality Australian cinema and to see ourselves reflected authentically in film.
AL: That’s so nice to hear, thank you very much.
Melbourne’s Cinema Nova on June 15