2000 - Colour, Stereo: 3:03 min.
Donigan Cumming takes the risk of going out of frame such is his joyous desire to occupy all of the space. A prominent nose, a pallid sweaty face, he plays a terrible scene with two voices. One of them claims it is high time to go. The character, Dan, is furious and menacing. Nothing will stop him! Donigan fades into the next scene. Alice is begging Dan not to abandon her and the children. He is risking his life! "Don't be a hero!" she implores. But Dan tells her to go to the devil. Inspired by a western it is in the kitsch melodramatic tone of a soap opera that Cumming practices excess with delight. This satire is a cruel joke. Illustrating the paradox of the actor, he plays the parts of these two characters just as much as he is them.
sets down his approach consisting of filming up close to men and women who are both themselves and the characters they are portraying. Here, in an archetypal role-play, Cumming exists in the painful exaggeration and redeeming truth of his real and fantasised self. He makes this legendary story of intrepid and fragile heroes his own.
