Dead Letter Office

 Seen at the Star Cinema, Eaglehawk, VIC

Bea says: I left Australia originally in 1995, just around the cusp of the buzz around Death in Brunswick, and completely missed Dead Letter Office's release in 1998.

We saw this at the Star in Eaglehawk as well, as part of the Australian Film Festival weekend and it was enhanced by a Q&A with the director.

It is a charming film, with the office of the title being a subdivision of the post office service which tries to track down impossible addresses and addresees. Our heroine Alice (Miranda Otto) is compelled to work there in order to track down her absent father, who she has written to since she was a child - and her letters have been going to the Dead Letter Office.

It was a lovely, nostalgic step back to the simpler 1990s. People were lonely, sad, and down on their luck, but were also kind, funny, thoughtful and warm.  Absolute standout performance from George DelHoyo as Frank Lopez. The ending made me so happy. Highly recommended if you see it anywhere.
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 Cecil says: Dead Letter Office brought back so many memories of past lives.

I too, worked in a postal sorting office in 1986. It was the kind of old-fashioned place that probably changed enormously in the years after that: it was not just the manual labour of lugging sacks of parcels off conveyor belts onto vans to delivery but the whole culture of the workplace then, with its men in brown coats supervising things, the canteen where I went for meals, including custard with my fruit pies (no canteen in this film, mind), and the slightly awkward relationships between colleagues whose only connection really is the workplace.

The ‘Dead Letter Office’ also reminded me of all the filing I used to do in my first office job, starting in 1987. And just like in this film, which was made in 1998, but has much more the feel of a late 80s atmosphere, I imagine at some point the equivalent of the JCB Bob-Cat moved in to shovel away to the tip all those carefully filed sheets and copies made for the seven years I did that job (computers were just starting to appear as I left that office in 1994).

And then the whole Chilean connection resonated so strongly for me. I worked with many Chileans in the late 80s and early 90s, mainly in London, but the atmosphere of the social gatherings in suburban Melbourne could just as easily have been the places I went to in Peckham or Finsbury Park.

The star of this film is George DelHoyo, who plays Frank, the head of department for the Dead Letter Office, who can snap into action and trace lost people in a matter of minutes if he decides to, but is also languishing in the tragic memories of his past in Chile. We were lucky enough to have a Q&A with the Director (John Ruane), who revealed they had tracked DelHoyo down via the small ads of a local Latino newspaper in LA, and had to deal with DelHoyo being 6’1” and therefore much taller than any Chilean any of them had ever met. But his acting was superb and he held the film together single-handedly.

Miranda Otto (who later played the Elfine Queen Eowyn in Lord of the Rings) was OK as the young woman desperately looking for her father, and using the Dead Letter Office as a means to track him down. She was endearing, if slightly wooden, or was that just the awkwardness of young adulthood?

Her accommodation reminded me so much of friends’ house shares in Brighton in the 1980s also, so that was very genuine, and her flatmates also came across as the types I moved around in my university days (and those unemployed times after uni).

So, as a drop back into my lives that are now long gone, this was a delightful film. We didn’t really get the impression the Director really had much connection to the film, though I guess he has probably done a lot in the subsequent 23 years, so who can blame him. I enjoyed it, though.

Oh, and spot the Dad from Strictly Ballroom, a few years older than when he danced in that classic, but very recognisable…

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