Sometimes sharp cultural satire comes from people outside the culture being lampooned \u2013 or, in the case of How to Talk Australians: The Movie, framed in a way that implies so. Adapted from the popular YouTube short-form series of the same name, the film\u2019s principal characters are students and teachers from the (fictitious) Delhi College of Linguistics, though neither the director (Tony Rogers, co-creator\/director of the 2007\u20132010 Australian series Wilfred) nor the screenwriters (Rogers and Rob Hibbert) are of Indian heritage. This allows the creators to draw on deeply ingrained knowledge of Australian culture while satirically positioning the work through an external lens.<\/p>\n
The aforementioned folk from Delhi \u2013 including staff members Dean Devdan (Vikrant Narain), Professor Dillip (Robert Santiago), Chester (Rohan Ganju) and a dozen students \u2013 are devoted to learning the peculiar linguistic and cultural phenomenon known as (my words) sheer bloody Australianness. The central trick of the film \u2013 as in the famous Simpsons episode Bart vs Australia<\/a>, and Stephan Elliott\u2019s criminally under-appreciated Welcome to Woop Woop<\/a> \u2013 is to present Australia as the rest of the world imagines us (Crocodile Dundee<\/a> also did this, but without the satirical edge).<\/p>\n Staff and students from the fictitious Delhi College of Linguistics, devoted to learning Australian culture. Photograph: Umbrella Entertainment<\/p>\n To wit: a sun-baked exotic frontier populated by beer-swilling rubes, who do things like construct giant fruit-shaped buildings for no particular reason and speak a barely comprehensible mutation of what was once considered English. Those of us who are a little more, shall we say, cosmopolitan might like to believe such a nation no longer exists. Though we know in our hearts it does: those gigantic fruits really are out there, mate, as are a thousand other examples (cough, splutter, One Nation<\/a>) of the country not exactly being positioned at the vanguard of sophistication and intellectualism. In other words: the humour resonates with an uncomfortable ring of truth.<\/p>\n How to Talk Australians begins at the college, which is a fun location: a run-down, cut-rate place with malfunctioning old technology. Devdan promises the \u201chow to talk Australians\u201d class an authentic study tour during which they\u2019re certain to meet \u201coutback bushmen or a sheila\u201d and even \u201ctouch a big pineapple\u201d. On the flight over, the Aussie pilot wolfs down a beer and lights up a ciggie, because true blue mate, you bloody ripper. But instead of landing in Sydney, storms (read: a stroke of narrative convenience) result in the plane getting diverted and landing in Dubbo airport, which, amusingly, is basically a crappy warehouse with some tin sheds in it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n