Clean

One of the many sets of watchwords within the film is "respect and kindness", and for all the potentially upsetting moments within it Clean has both. It opens with a warning for Aboriginal and Torres Street Islander peoples that there may be scenes that depict death and human remains, and for various complicated reasons that is not only justifiable but part and parcel of the film's process.

Mental health is described as a safety issue and while Clean can't and doesn't hide the drops it does a reasonable job of ensuring space and guard rails. There are scenes of death, decay, or rather the aftermath. Our subject is the astonishing Sandra Pankhurst. No stranger to trauma herself, this is not only her story but of the work of the firm she founded, a cleaning company whose team pride themselves on being both qualified and compassionate. Cleaning does not cover the whole of it, however, the list of services runs from hoarding to homicide, a ticked tally of fluids cleaned reads as a shaman's wishlist, a catalogue of the scatalogical.

The language too. Subtitled in places for clarity, sometimes the Australianisms venture from that particular colonial English into full Strine. I didn't need the subtitles to understand when the Buddha was described as a "big fat fucking opium smoking cunt" but the film's caution and confidence in each and all of it subjects helped me understand how someone might come to feel that way about the shit-eating grinner of the Siddhartha Gautama. Trauma carries across generations even without reincarnation, patterns of (mis)behaviour are written in fresh clay. There's mention of Pentridge, a facility that appears in both The True History of The Kelly Gang and Chopper and any number of other criminal biographies. It's closed now, in excavations they found traces of not one but three Panopticons modelled after Bentham's carceral ideal.

Traces abound. There's an outline in the outline on the mattress, a chevron under the carpet in the training exercises. In the credits they are very careful to say that the film was not made in association with Sarah Krasnostein's biography of Pankhurst, 2017's The Trauma Cleaner. The story's the same, but this one has a different ending.

Lachlan Macleod's film is close to its subject, with DOP and co-editor Louis Dai years of interview and speeches and activity (including COVID lockdown) are condensed to a brisk, if not brusque, hour and half or so. Sandra not only gets to tell her story with rare moments of off-screen interlocution but the stories that relate to hers. Her life before, her other names. Her staff too, and their clients, the trauma cleans, the preventative services. Everything Everywhere All At Once concerned itself not just with the inevitabilities of death and taxes but the inescapable of laundry. You can not do it but it still needs done, Quentin Crisp alleged he only washed his plates after fish but he did much of his socialising out the house. The stories here are no less striking.

There are facts passed over as matter of fact, despite or perhaps because of how foundational some of them are. Documentation with legal weight includes certificates, affadavits, marriages in photographs and an unremarked election leaflet. There's so much here that, as with cleaning, it goes through the fabric, past the underling, to the structure, the joists, the soil. Historic adoption practises are mentioned but there's not a reference to the morality patrols, there's a discussion of celebrity or at least infamy but that's in a career that's had its share of glitter. In the reconstructions is a moment of burlesque that feels a tasselled-pastie past a pastiche of 80s action movie expository strip club cliche. Yet there's still a particular glamour to it, a sensibility that airbrushes to celebrate, more panel van than vanished man.

The soundtrack is at places heavy handed, there's enough emotional weight without sound balance tipping the scale. The soundtrack includes Nick Caves version of Cosmic Dancer, and there's definitely something apposite in the gothic and the glam, space and the dinosaur, the quick and the dead. Bits of Sandra's story seem improbable until one takes a moment and realises the extent of survivorship bias. Luck might have had nothing to do with it, but she got through things that others would not have.

This is a film that takes care to draw lines but make sure we see their permeability. The distinction between hoarding and squalor is a technical one but it's important. We see the aftermath (and reconstructions thereof) of several deaths but the only corpse(s) on screen are animal. At times so closely that those of nervous dispostion might wish to do without but by that point we've trudged through corridors of shit in the hope of getting to the outside. Sandra and her staff have dealt with "a lot of shit" "both ways", but they have acquired or retained a humour with it.

For all its sadnesses, and there are plenty, this is still celebratory. Sandra's honesty and openness are part of her process. Let things fester and they are harder to deal with. There's a skip on the drive, if not in the step. Cleanliness and godliness might not keep as closely as they used to but both at heart are about human connection, and Clean makes one with its subject.

As with many documentaries the impact of Covid is visible, production continued across and through the various lockdown measures adopted by Australia's regional governments. The services provided were considered vital and indeed they are clearly a lifeline as well as a way of life. There are films that are more inventive, more formal in their construction, that give more voice to their director than the occasional title card and question from behind the lens. This doesn't need them. There are two elements to a good documentary film, an interesting subject told in an interesting way. In allowing Sandra Pankhurst the space to tell her own story Lachlan Macleod has shown an authorial reserve that gives his subject room to tell her story in cackling detail and compelling depth. Clean made me want to give my own family a hug, but also to wash my hands first.