Name: The Everlasting Secret Family
Genre: Drama
Released: 1988-03-10
Duration: 94 min
Rating: 4.9
Cast: Arthur Dignam, Mark Lee, Heather Mitchell, Dennis Miller, John Meillon

The Everlasting Secret Family

Once promised, forever bound.

A beautiful, if ambitious and amoral, youth is tapped to become the lover of a powerful senator. The young man quickly realizes that he can hold this place, with all its perks, only as long as he is young. He has no other function than being young. With the help of an aged judge, the young man, referred to only as The Lover, contrives a plan to make a change in the way of the world, a plan that will take him years to realize. To succeed, he must manipulate, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the senator, his wife, the family chauffeur (who was, when young, a lover), and, by implication, the entire well-planned and controlling everlasting secret family.

Drama

DirectorMichael Thornhill

WriterFrank Moorhouse

StatusReleased

LanguageEnglish

Release DateMarch 10, 1988

Runtime1h 34m

CinemaSerf

@Geronimo1967

November 15, 20256/10

There is something quite creepily unremarkable about the basic, fairly odious, premise of this drama. That is the fact that a wealthy and influential Australian senator (Arthur Dignam) has a penchant for schoolboys in their later teens, and so sends his Rolls Royce to fetch them from class so that they can come and entertain him. His chauffeur “Eric” (Dennis Miller) is entirely complicit in these activities, as - it would appear - are some of his teachers when the latest conquest (Mark Lee) is summoned. Now there is no suggestion of violence here, he is quite willing to trade his ass for what he perceives will be a life of luxury. What he doesn’t quite figure out, though, is that he is no “Dorian Gray” and as his youth fades, so does his marketability. Fortunately for him he is cute in more ways than one and so also befriends a kinky High Court judge (John Meillon) and the son of his lover (Paul Goddard) so he hopes he has done enough to insulate himself from being moved on, especially when the senator’s wife (Heather Mitchell) tires of him and becomes suspicious of his influence on her son. The story is seamy from the start; the dialogue is nothing special and the production actually reminded me of that “Return to Eden” mini-series from 1983. What is noticeable here is the very natural effort from Lee. He seems entirely comfortable in his character’s skin and he quite unnervingly sails through this drama playing the game for all it’s worth as he tries to King Canute the ageing process. It’s a fairly cynical drama about manipulation and desire, but I found it to be quite a bit better than I was expecting.